Terror in Thailand: 'Ghosts' and
jihadis By Julian Gearing
BANGKOK - Thais are fighting "ghosts" in the
Muslim south. That's how some police and soldiers dub
the elusive perpetrators of a remotely detonated bomb
that recently broke up the revelry of Malaysian tourists
in "girlie bars" in the Yala province border town of
Sungai Golok and the masked raiders who stole a cache of
explosive material that could "blow up a town", as one
official put it. The actions of these "ghosts" have
thrown Thai officials into shock and sent injured
Malaysian tourists hurrying back across the border. The
Thai government is in crisis mode. A campaign of
bombings, shootings, and arms thefts starting in January
and initially called the work of "bandits" is now
largely being blamed on "separatists" and is emerging as
Thailand's most serious security threat since the
communist insurgency in the early 1980s.
In the
wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the
United States, Thailand put itself squarely behind US
President George Bush's "war on terrorism" and has sent
soldiers for humanitarian duty to Iraq. In the guessing
game as to who is behind this terrorist campaign, this
is one of the reasons why what was thought to be a
virtually dead separatist movement might have sputtered
into life. Another reason, claim some Muslims, is the
continuing poor treatment of Muslims and the
disaffection of youth in the south.
But as the
Thai authorities move to make arrests, with some of the
suspects surprisingly proving to be southern members of
parliament and senators, they are still wrestling with
an important question: Who really are these "ghosts" and
what is their agenda?
The Sungai Golok blast
last Saturday was not Bali. That major terrorist attack
on a nightspot on the Indonesian island killed 202
Westerners and Indonesians in October 2002. The March 27
motorcycle-bomb explosion injured 30 people, including
Malaysian tourists and bar girls, dampening the tourist
trade on the border with Malaysia. There were no deaths.
But small though it was, it sparked alarm, as it marks
the first time civilians have been targeted in this
violent campaign in southern Thailand.
Alarm
bells also went off just days later, on Tuesday, when 10
masked armed raiders stole explosive materials including
1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate from a quarrying company
in Yala, enough to make a bomb that could blow up a
town, according to one official. The specter of a
massive bomb on Thai soil prompted an emergency cabinet
meeting in Bangkok, and a further ratcheting-up of
efforts to track down the culprits.
What worries
the Thai authorities is the new level of coordination
and targeting that indicates a change from the banditry
and largely low-key violent incidents of the past. The
"new phase" began in January with a coordinated strike
against a military arms depot, securing some 364 weapons
combined with diversionary attacks setting afire some 20
government schools, and delay tactics including downing
trees as roadblocks and spreading nails on the roads to
slow pursuit. Within three days, six bombs had exploded
or were deactivated near shopping centers and other
public places, resulting in nearly a dozen military and
civilian casualties. Since then the death toll, often in
"assassination-style" killings of mostly police,
soldiers and Buddhist monks, has grown beyond 60.
"Despite early denials by the Thai government,
further attacks and subsequent investigations, it
appears that five southern Muslim-majority provinces of
Thailand are home to an increasingly sophisticated and
coordinated, albeit localized, insurgency," said James T
Kirkhope, research director of the Terrorism Research
Center in Arlington, Virginia, in the United States. He
said Thai officials first characterized the attack on a
military depot and associated diversionary attacks
against government schools as the work of bandits and
robbers in a region described as "depoliticized" but
increasingly under the influence of organized crime and
international black- and gray-market arms merchants.
Now "separatists" is the most common word being
heard. "The arrest in February 2004 of nine suspects
resulted in the seizure of ammunition, a machete, a
Malaysian flag, and some separatist literature reveals
that the threat posed by the captured cell was limited
to a local separatist insurgency," said analyst
Kirkhope.
He is careful not to point a finger at
outside elements until evidence is forthcoming, saying
"this incident ... was clearly lacking significant
international militant Islamic inspiration or support by
al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiya. Nonetheless, since none of
the weapons stolen from the armory in January were
found, Thai authorities must explore the possibilities
that the separatist movement is significantly larger, or
that this small cell had forged an alliance with
criminal, black-market, arms-trafficking elements in the
region," he said.
Kirkhope says "a review of
historical Thai-Muslim antagonisms and recalling the
arrest of Hambali, an Indonesian leader of both al-Qaeda
and Jemaah Islamiya, provides fuel to the belief that a
burgeoning separatist insurgent terrorist campaign with
some limited external support may not be far fetched,"
said Kirkhope. Hambali was handed over to the United
States after his arrest in Thailand last August and is
now being held and interrogated at an undisclosed
location by US forces. At the time of his capture in
Thailand, evidence suggests that he and Jemaah Islamiya
were plotting attacks on the planned October
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bangkok and
strikes against embassies in the capital (see Terror arrest: Cause
for caution, August 26, 2003).
Defense Minister General Chettha Thanajaro
claims the participation of foreign terror groups in the
troubles in southern Thailand cannot be ruled out.
According to media reports, he has vowed to cut the
link, if any, between the spate of violence and
international terrorism. In the blame game, a consensus
appears to be growing that while the men who are
carrying out the attacks may be local southern Muslims,
regional and international hands may also be at work.
Government adviser General Kitti Rattanachaya, a former
Thai army commander in the south, was quoted by the
media in January as saying that Gerakan Mujahideen Islam
Pattani, with links to terrorist Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiya, was
responsible for the recent attacks. Thai Muslim veterans
from the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan
"quietly formed the Mujahideen Pattani", he reportedly
said.
It is no secret that Thai Muslim militants
fought in the 1979-89 anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan
and in the 2001 actions against US forces in
Afghanistan, but they may number literally only a
handful, according to one analyst. Whether any of the
men behind the current unrest in southern Thailand are
"Afghan war veterans" and whether they are linked to the
international Islamic jihad led or inspired by
Washington's "most wanted" terrorist bin Laden is
unclear according to most security analysts specializing
in Islamic militancy.
Anthony Davis, a security
analyst for Jane's Intelligence Review, said the
operations beginning in January underscore two critical
facets of the escalating security crisis in Thailand.
"First, the authorities are facing a far more capable
and more numerous enemy than earlier assessments had
suggested; and second, the government's intelligence
apparatus is in serious disarray." Davis points to the
"poverty of intelligence" hampering the Thai
government's response to the crisis.
That's one
of the reasons the authorities are struggling to get to
grips with campaign. According to Zachary Abuza, a
terrorism specialist with Simmons College in the United
States, he like many other analysts is unsure who is
responsible, though it is clearly not bandits. But he
does have suspicions that those fighting in the south
"are no longer fighting for Pattani liberation against
the imperialist Siamese. They are fighting Islamic
jihad. Their whole language and discourse [have]
changed."
The Muslim community, which makes up
85 percent of the population of the three southern
provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, has more in
common with nearby Malaysia, including religion and
language, than with the majority Buddhist Thais. This is
a legacy of the area's former status as part of a
grouping of Muslim Malay sultanates before Thailand
annexed the provinces in 1902.
This remote
region has been known for black markets, gangs, drug and
arms trafficking, smuggling, and corruption as well as a
separatist movement that was quelled in 1987, but which
re-emerged in 2001. The January 2004 attacks and
subsequent wave of public violence belie the
government's recent strides to bring order to a region
that has historically been culturally, if not
politically, distinct from the Buddhist Thai majority.
Yet up until 2001, separatism and unrest were
all but dead in the south. Hence the surprise and
uncertainty voiced by many Thais, both Muslim and
Buddhist, to the escalation of violence. Local people
appear "confused", as one resident of Yala put it.
Senator Aumar Toryib of Narathiwat says the local people
still don't know who is behind the violence. He calls
for more efforts by the government to involve local
people with the authorities to solve the problem and
"have the most justice to local people".
According to Supat Boontanom, editor of Chao Tai
(Southern People) newspaper in Yala, the bombings are a
warning that the government should tackle the problems
of the south in earnest. "We have warned the government
for three years but nobody seemed to care. There have
been a lot of Indonesians coming to southern Thailand,
as they can enter easily because of our weak laws. They
have tried to be congenial with local people in the deep
south."
She says the government has "not
scratched the area where we really itch. If we want to
take care of our house, we must start at the door. Our
immigration law is still weak. It is not the same as the
law of Malaysia. After that we have to clear [our] house
to make it clean."
But there are fears that the
gulf between Bangkok and the local Muslim community is
still wide. Disaffected youth, many of whom speak little
or no Thai, are easy prey to the growing influence of a
purist form of Islam and what they may view as the
heroic struggle of jihadists such as Osama bin Laden.
General Pallop Pinmanee, deputy chief of the Internal
Security Operations Command, told reporters recently
that there are as many as 70,000 insurgent sympathizers
in the deep south, most of them young people. Although
intelligence reports indicate that active separatists
number about 500, the insurgent organizations providing
them with weapons training seek to expand the number to
3,000, he said.
Analysts say Thai Muslim
solidarity may have been strengthened by September 11
and the Bali bombing, and by the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq. Jihadist sympathies can be found
in the proliferation of bin Laden T-shirts and other
propaganda found on the streets of the five southernmost
provinces of Songkhla, Satun, Yala, Narathiwat and
Pattani. Government policies down south have not helped.
A toughening stand against separatists, the dissolution
of two administrative structures, a joint civilian,
police and military task force and a southern border
liaison center, combined with the extrajudicial killings
of alleged drug traffickers last year, may have
compounded the problem (see Thai war on drugs:
Hollow victory, December 17, 2003).
The recent spate of violence and the attack on
Malaysian tourists in Sungai Golok and the theft of the
explosive materials carry the hallmarks of a separatist
struggle, rather than the big-bang drama of Bali or
Madrid, the calling cards of international jihad.
But as Thailand increasingly plays its role as
ally in the "war on terrorism", there is a compelling
need to get to the roots of the problem in the deep
south before the situation gets more out of hand,
according to security analysts. Local intelligence has
to be improved and there is a need to tap into regional
and global sources. Closer cooperation should be sought
with the intelligence agencies in Malaysia, Indonesia,
Singapore and further afield in Bangladesh, Pakistan and
India.
In parallel, there is a need to reach out
to the Muslims in the south and dramatically improve
relations with this worried community.
Just how
much of an international hand is at play in the violence
may be revealed in the weeks and months ahead. But
whoever these "ghosts" are and whatever their motives,
Thailand looks set for a long haul.
Julian
Gearing has covered conflicts in Asia, including
Afghanistan, India and Iraq, for more than two
decades.
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