Thai detention camps feed
insurgency By Marwaan
Macan-Markar
YALA, Thailand - A group of
anxious parents gather outside the whitewashed
walls of the police-training center in this town
in the deep south of the country, hoping for word
about their sons, detained on suspicion of being
involved with the insurgency that for the past two
years has torn through Thailand's Muslim-dominated
southernmost provinces.
Behind the walls
of innocuous-looking buildings lies a disturbing
reality, a legal black hole that is the key
instrument employed by the Thai government to
fight back against the festering insurgency. For
weeks, Ismael Siraco, 47, visited the Yala center
daily hoping to secure the release of his son,
Sabri. Sabri was
called
into a local police station on March 28 and was
later whisked away to a so-called training center.
Sabri's detention highlights the often
seemingly arbitrary charges Thai security
personnel bring against young Muslim men in the
insurgency-plagued area.
"Sabri was first
charged with criminal association," said Ismael, a
farmer from the Sungai Padi area in adjacent
Narathiwat province, which has been hit
particularly hard by violence. "Then they charged
him for something else, murdering a border
policeman. Then later, when I asked why they are
keeping him, they said it was for killing a
civilian."
Sabri, who was one of a group
of 19 ethnic-Malay Thai Muslims kept in captivity
indefinitely without access to legal counsel,
denied the charges when he spoke to Inter Press
Service soon after his release. "I don't know why
I was arrested," he said.
According to
Sabri, his three weeks of incarceration included
time in solitary confinement in a room where the
lights were always on. He endured long stretches
of interrogation by plainclothes officers, who he
contends seemed predetermined to link him to the
insurgency.
"They questioned me from 9
till 12 in the morning and then for five hours in
the afternoon," said Sabri, who looked nervous as
he spoke, fingering his thin mustache. "There was
no physical abuse but their words were strong.
They kept saying I was involved in a plan to
murder a policeman."
Sabri's spell in
custody without formal charges, which on the
surface violates habeas corpus rights
outlined in the Thai constitution, is one of many
despairing accounts told by ethnic-Malay Thai
Muslims, who form the majority in predominantly
Buddhist Thailand's southernmost provinces.
The policy of detaining Muslim militant
suspects in police custody and in army camps
without filing formal charges has been in place
since last year in a government bid to
"re-educate" Muslims they suspect of involvement
in the shadowy low-intensity insurgency that has
claimed more than 1,200 lives since January 2004.
The mistrust and anger such detentions
bring to the local population are laid bare by the
parents and relatives of the detainees, who gather
outside the police center under the gaze of
heavily armed soldiers in scenes reminiscent of
Latin American countries that were accused of
waging "dirty wars" and causing state-sponsored
"disappearances" in the 1980s.
A Thai
military intelligence officer, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, said there were about 20
such camps in the south, in Bangkok and in the
central province of Lop Buri. "We arrest them to
change their minds," he said. "Some are charged if
they are linked to attacks and some are sent
home."
The number of Muslim males detained
in such camps remains an open question, though
human-rights activists estimate it could be as
high as 900. Most were detained under the
provisions of a harsh emergency decree that the
government imposed last July - in addition to
martial law enforced in many areas of the three
southern provinces since early 2004.
Families in nearby villages amid rubber
plantations and beside paddy fields are stalked by
the fear that their sons, brothers or husbands
could get "disappeared". In one village, in the
Yaha subdistrict of Yala province, the parents of
a 24-year-old man recalled how their son was
forced to get into a vehicle when he emerged from
a tea shop and has not been heard from since. A
40-year-old man in a nearby house was also
recently taken away at 2am without explanation.
The Young Muslim Association of Thailand
(YMAT), which has been monitoring the
deteriorating human-rights situation in the area,
has a list of 21 names of Malay-Muslim males who
they contend have been disappeared since January
2004. "Under the emergency decree, the army has
more power to search homes and schools," said
Ananchai Thaipratan, a medical doctor and member
of YMAT. "This power can place people in a
terrible state."
General Sonthi
Boonyaratglin, Thailand's army chief, has
confirmed that security forces had compiled
"blacklists" of suspected militants, confirming
earlier reports of the controversial practice made
by local and international human-rights groups.
The English-language daily The Nation claimed to
have seen a list that included as many as 300
different names.
Activists said the lists
were reminiscent of Thailand's controversial "war
on drugs" campaign in 2003, which resulted in an
orgy of vigilante-style killings of alleged drug
suspects. More than 2,500 people died under
mysterious circumstances, many of whom had
allegedly been placed on police blacklists for
links to narcotics networks.
The present
round of violence in the south, which pits a
30,000-strong Thai military force against an
amorphous group of Malay-Muslim militants using
hit-and-run tactics, represents the latest phase
of a decades-long separatist conflict.
Thai Muslim grievances stem from a long
history of institutionalized discrimination, which
they contend has undermined their culture,
language and religion and starved them of economic
opportunities. The three southern provinces, which
border Malaysia, were once part of the Muslim
kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed by Buddhist
Siam in 1902.
Now, southern-based analysts
contend the likelihood of the conflict's
escalating is almost certain because of the
government's policy of "using force to solve the
problem", said Piya Kittavorn, a political
scientist at Prince of Songkhla University in
Pattani. "It is driving local people to support
the separatists."
