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2 ASIA HAND Point of no
return for southern Thailand By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - It is now
violently apparent that Thailand's
military-appointed government's policy of
reconciliation toward its three insurgency-hit
majority-Muslim provinces Pattani, Narathiwat and
Yala was never really implemented on the ground.
Instead, southern Thailand's
three-year-old conflict is veering in a dangerous
new direction, where the government is
establishing a
growing number of loosely
regulated local militias, and in response
ethnic-Malay Muslim insurgent groups have
commenced attacks against the economic lifelines
of certain urban districts in an intensified
effort to empty the restive region of ethnic-Thai
and Sino-Thai Buddhists.
Yala province is
emerging as the showcase and test case for the
insurgents' new strategy, which, according to
on-the-ground monitors who regularly communicate
with insurgent leaders from the BRN-Coordinate
group, aims soon to seize total control of the
province, including the central government's
administrative hub and the police's forward
command center in the region. (The BRN-Coordinate
is known to be the political arm of the
traditional BRN - Barisan Revolusi Nasional or
National Revolutionary Front - separatist
organization.)
That strategy has been most
visible in Yala's Betong district, [1] where
recently insurgents and insurgent sympathizers
blocked road access to the area and cut
electricity and mobile-telephone signals for four
straight nights. The blockade, which resulted in
severe food and fuel shortages, was the first
overt economic attack of the conflict. At the same
time, the insurgents have increased the ferocity
of their attacks on the civilian population,
including a series of gruesome beheadings and
burnings of their victims.
These harsh
tactics have caused new waves of displaced
Buddhists from both rural and semi-urban areas
into Yala's main township, where they have
established shelters in a number of Buddhist
temples. The insurgents' aim "is no longer to just
empty villages of Buddhists, but whole districts",
said Sunai Phasuk, Thailand representative of the
US-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch. "Their
strength is rising each day and they are confident
they can win what they are fighting for - a
separate state."
With the controversy
surrounding the military's new draft constitution,
mounting tensions between hardline coup leaders
and their appointed civilian administration led by
Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, and exiled
former premier Thaksin Shinawatra's rear-guard
propaganda offensive aimed at turning
international opinion against the junta, dealing
with the conflict in southern Thailand has fallen
down on Bangkok's agenda.
Surayud still
speaks of reconciliation, including a recent
amnesty offer for insurgents who have not been
involved in any crimes against the state. But the
military's tactics on the ground have hardened in
recent months, attended by a new rash of rights
groups' allegations of mass arrests,
state-sponsored disappearances and torture of
detained militant suspects.
People in
contact with the insurgent groups say they view
Surayud's recent amnesty offer as a cynical
government ploy to identify, arrest and even
extrajudicially kill their members. All of the
loosely aligned separatist groups operating across
the region have given up hope of negotiating an
autonomy settlement until a new government takes
power after democratic elections scheduled for
mid-December, they say.
Communal
tipping point The fear among those
monitoring the conflict is that in the intervening
seven months the restive region could tip toward
full-blown communal violence. And both sides'
tactics are aggressively pushing the conflict in
that direction.
A series of violent
incidents, including a mid-March assault on a
minibus where passengers were removed from the
vehicle and
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