Muslim women, children shield
marine killers By Richard S
Ehrlich
BANGKOK - Suspected Islamist
insurgents avoided capture after torturing to
death two Thai marines by beating and stabbing the
bound-and-gagged victims behind a human shield of
defiant Muslim women and children, horrifying the
government and plunging southern Thailand into a
fresh security crisis.
Amid the world's
most violent Islamist insurgency outside Iraq,
angry and confused security forces hunted the
elusive killers, described as three or four young
men who ran away, leaving the marines' bloodied
bodies in Tanyong Limo village.
"They were
brutally beaten to death with machetes and sticks,
while their hands and legs were tied up, and they
were gagged
and blindfolded,"
Lieutenant General Kwanchart Klaharn, commander of
the Fourth Army and director of the Southern
Border Provinces Peace-building Command, told
reporters.
The bodies were locked inside a
building near a mosque, prompting security forces
to break down a door to gain access before
transporting them to a hospital morgue, he said.
The brutality of the killings - coupled
with the security forces' failed attempt to
negotiate a peaceful resolution to the hostage
crisis and the inability of the armed marines to
defend themselves - was urgently being examined by
politicians, peace activists, army generals and
the Thai media.
"We will absolutely not
let those two die for nothing. The law is the
law," an agitated Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra told journalists after the killings
Wednesday during a 19-hour stalemate between
troops and villagers in violence-torn Narathiwat
province.
"If I could, I would drop napalm
bombs all over that village," a distraught Captain
Traikwan Krairiksh was quoted in the Bangkok Post
as saying after he viewed the bodies of his former
subordinates in a pool of blood. "But the fact is,
I can never do that. We are soldiers. We must
follow the law. We can only take revenge by using
the law."
Throughout the stand-off, scores
of shouting Muslim women dressed in traditional
headscarves stood with children, blocking troops
from gaining access to the hostages, and erecting
banners that blamed the authorities, including one
in Thai that read: "You are in fact the
terrorists."
Apparently hoping for a
peaceful solution, troops did not attempt a forced
rescue. The two experienced marines, armed with a
US-supplied M-16 assault rifle and two pistols,
were initially captured on Tuesday night when they
stopped their vehicle near the village.
Locals blamed them for the drive-by
shooting death of two men dining at a nearby tea
shop earlier in the night, but authorities later
explained that the marines were pursuing the
unidentified killers and were simply in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
More than 1,000
people on all sides have died in southern Thailand
since January 4, 2004 when the smoldering
rebellion flared in a so-called "night of the
fires" attack on security forces, including
synchronized arson assaults on 21 schools and a
massive raid on a military base that netted the
rebels hundreds of guns and heavy weapons.
Today, about 100 years after Thailand
annexed the mostly ethnic Malay Muslim region,
"mujahideen" holy warriors yearn for a
separate state ruled by Islamic sharia law in a
lush, tropical region where Islamists are waging
similar insurgencies in the Philippines, Indonesia
and elsewhere.
No one is sure who leads
the increasingly sophisticated, disciplined and
successful Muslim fighters in southern Thailand.
The government blames indigenous rebel groups,
allied with local Islamic schools, that are
inspired by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by
Osama bin Laden's call to force non-believers from
Muslim territories.
The ongoing violence
threatens to inflame strained relations between
Buddhist-majority Thailand and Muslim-majority
Malaysia, because Bangkok accuses Kuala Lumpur of
not doing enough to stop suspected insurgents
criss-crossing the porous border.
In July,
the government clamped the south under a "state of
emergency", in part using Article 17 - granting
impunity to security forces so they cannot be
prosecuted for killings or other acts while
deployed. In August, when asked at a news
conference if the decree was "a license to kill",
Thaksin held up a toy sign marked with an X and
sounded a toy's electronic beep to indicate the
question was "not constructive".
Asked if
international terrorists were involved in the
south, the tense prime minister again held up his
X sign and sounded his son's Japanese toy, a move
that infuriated the media but which Thaksin
defended as a stress-reliever to deal with "heavy"
questions during the first of what he called the
"PM meets the press" conferences.
Scores
of Thai Muslim men are believed to have undergone
guerrilla training or religious study in
Afghanistan before the Taliban's collapse in 2001,
and many returned to southern Thailand shunning
the region's popular Sunni Islam - demanding
instead the austere, retro-justice of Islam's
Wahhabi sect, pushed by Saudi Arabia and Osama bin
Laden.
Recent leaflets and word-of-mouth
warnings in the south have called for all markets
to shut on Fridays, Islam's traditional day of
rest, or violators will be beheaded or have their
ears chopped off. As a result, many businesses
throughout the south have shut during the past
several Fridays, either in fear or in sympathy.
A dozen people, mostly Buddhists, have
been beheaded in seemingly random attacks in the
south in a strategy "copied from the violence in
Iraq", according to Thailand's Interior Minister
Chidchai Vanasathidya.
Richard S
Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San
Francisco, California. He has reported news from
Asia since 1978 and is co-author of Hello My
Big Big Honey!, a non-fiction book of
investigative journalism. He received a master's
degree from Columbia University's Graduate School
of Journalism.
