Thai insurgency gaining
ground By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Their identities may still be a
mystery, but suspected Malay Muslim militants in
southern Thailand are removing any doubts about
what they have in mind when they come calling.
They want to prove that the Thai government is
losing control of that troubled region, say
analysts.
Tuesday night saw the latest of
well-coordinated bombing and arson sprees that the
assailants have mounted in the provinces of
Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, which lie along the
Malaysian border. By Wednesday afternoon, the Thai
media were reporting that close to 130 places had
been attacked by small bombs and been set on fire.
They included a railway station, karaoke bars and
homes of police and government officials.
These attacks follow a similar wave of
bombs that exploded
across the south in mid-June
and were described at the time as an unprecedented
assault in a conflict that erupted in that
predominantly Malay-Muslim region in January 2004.
Over a three-day period in June, some 70 small
bombs were detonated at police stations, road
checkpoints and government offices.
"Terrorism is not about killing people; it
is about creating insecurity," said Zachary Abuza,
an American academic specializing in terrorism in
Southeast Asia. "These attacks amplify their [the
militants'] capacity to create fear and embarrass
the government."
The targets chosen this
week, in particular the homes of police and
government officials, show that the militants
"have good intelligence", he said. "The government
does not seem to have a grip on the situation. The
violence is getting more out of control."
Such a view is not what the government of
predominantly Buddhist Thailand has been trying to
project as it conjures up scenarios indicating
that it has the situation under control in the
area that is home to the country's largest
minority, the Malay Muslims.
Last month,
Bangkok spoke highly of a harsh emergency decree,
saying it was serving the state well to crack down
on suspected Malay Muslim militants. Officials
went on record saying that the one-year-old
decree, which was extended last month, had enabled
security forces and the police to make headway on
understanding the insurgency, identifying the
assailants, knowing their training structure and
having sufficient intelligence to know when they
would strike.
To support that view,
statistics were reeled out. Between July 2005 and
July 2006, the police in the south had identified
1,264 Malay Muslims suspected of being linked to
the violence, of whom 598 had been arrested, 664
were being sought for questioning and two had been
freed because of a clean record.
This
comes after a revelation in April by General
Sonthi Boonyaratglin, Thailand's army chief, that
officials in the south had been maintaining
"blacklists" of people in the area with possible
ties to the violence. One Thai newspaper that saw
the list said that in one group of 300 names,
there were people who had "been arrested and
killed, many under questionable circumstances".
Three months after the emergency decree
was enforced, giving security forced wide,
unchecked powers, there were as many as 4,000
names on the blacklists compiled for Narathiwat,
Pattani and Yala.
But attacks like the one
this week, and a similar one in June, are punching
holes in the image of being in control that
Bangkok has tried to sustain.
"The
government claims that things are under control
and that the emergency decree has been working
efficiently are in question," Surin Pitsuwan, a
former foreign minister and a member of the
country's Muslim minority, said in an interview.
"The message is that the militants are still
around, that they can move across the region and
that they have popular support. Otherwise, they
cannot carry out such attacks.
Some Thai
analysts, in fact, are pointing to a possible
pattern emerging in the current cycle of violence,
which has left more than 1,300 people dead in the
past two and a half years and which has, as a
predominant feature, still-to-be-identified
assailants and their still-undeclared political
goals.
"There have been three types of
attacks: the first are ones that the militants
have initiated and the second are retaliatory
strikes to certain acts of the government," said
Sunai Phasuk, Thai researcher for Human Rights
Watch, a global rights lobby. ''The third are
retaliatory attacks to undermine government's
claims about the headway it is making against the
militants.''
The violence since 2004 comes
after a relative lull in a region that has seen
conflicts during previous decades when militants
from Malay Muslim rebel groups launched separatist
struggles against the more powerful Thai military.
Muslims make up 80% of the population in the three
southern provinces - once part of the defunct
Muslim kingdom of Pattani that was annexed by
Siam, as Thailand was known in 1902.
Malay
Muslim resentment of Bangkok's policies ranges
from political and cultural issues to economic
ones - the Malays complain of discrimination
against their religion and language and economic
marginalization. But attempts by civil-society
groups and academics to address these issues
through an independent National Reconciliation
Commission have not made headway. They have been
pushed aside for a security solution that drives
the government's approach.
Currently, the
three provinces are under the guard of 30,000
heavily armed troops, in addition to 10,000 police
officers and some 1,000 psychological-warfare
operatives. In addition to manning checkpoints and
surveying the hilly terrain in armored vehicles,
they are infiltrating Muslim villages to detect
signs of militant activity.
"There are
more mobile units on the ground. Some of the
forces are sleeping in the villages," said Panitan
Wattanayagorn, a national-security expert at
Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. "But there is
a need for a new military strategy in the south."
A review of the prevailing security
policies is needed, he conceded, because "they
have not been able to come up with a good strategy
to stop the daily incidents. It is worrying. The
militants have not been deterred by the security
forces."
