Insurgent headache for new Thai
government By Marwaan
Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Violent attacks
mounted earlier this week by suspected insurgents
in Thailand's restive southern provinces offer a
stark warning to the country's next government of
the spiraling conflict that it will soon inherit.
In a remote part of southern Narathiwat
province, on Monday eight soldiers on morning
patrol were killed when a bomb hidden on the road
exploded and hit the truck in which they were
traveling. The attackers also opened fire on the
soldiers and beheaded one of
them, military officials
said.
On Tuesday, suspected insurgents
appeared to target civilians in Yala province,
another of the three southernmost provinces where
Thailand's ethnic Malay-Muslims represent a
majority of the population. Over 35 people were
injured, at least 10 critically, when a bomb
strapped to a motorcycle exploded shortly after
dawn in a busy market in Yala town.
In
response, the interim military government
announced it would extend martial law for at least
another four months in the restive region. The
attacks are the latest in a sustained cycle of
violence, pitting the Thai military and police
against Muslim insurgent groups, which has now
entered its fourth year.
Over 2,800 people
have been killed since an army camp was brutally
attacked by suspected insurgents in January 2004.
A majority of the victims have been Muslims.
Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister when
the violence first erupted, was frequently blamed
by local and foreign critics for fueling the
conflict through harsh measures, including passing
an emergency decree which granted wide powers to
troops to effectively act with impunity.
Thaksin was forced out of power by the
military in September 2006 and the junta-appointed
government at first struck a more conciliatory
note, apologizing to the local population for the
previous government's excesses. However such
gestures made little headway among the Muslims
towards a truce, mainly because the words were not
translated into a more visible hearts-and-minds
campaign.
On January 23, the junta is
expected to hand over power to a new
democratically elected civilian government. If
there is any consolation for the junta during its
controversial 16 months in power, it's that some
of their counterinsurgency strategies appear to
have worked. This week's deadly attack on a troop
carrier was the worst attack since mid-2007, when
a similar attacked killed seven soldiers.
The military government ramped up the
number of troops in the region and presided over
mass arrests and interrogations of suspected
militants. "The military has succeeded in
penetrating the militants' network and has been
able to ensure that the urban areas in the south
are better protected," says Panitan Wattanayagorn,
a national security expert at Bangkok's
Chulalongkorn University. "There have been less
coordinated strikes by the militants and even the
public rallies that the militants had instigated
before have stopped."
Panitan said a
declined rate of killings in the south reflects
the shift. "The death toll has dropped from an
average of three killings per day to 1.8. This is
because of the new military operations that were
introduced last year." Less impressive, however,
has been the military's record of winning the
sympathy of the local Malay-Muslim population.
Reports of abuse and an overall climate of fear
appear similar to the atmosphere that prevailed
when Thaksin was in power.
"The military
has failed on the political front in trying to
secure the support of the people," said Sunai
Phasuk, Thailand researcher for the global rights
lobby Human Rights Watch. "The Muslims don't see
the soldiers as protectors, but as abusers. This
is how it was before the coup also."
In
fact, some Muslims have told local human-rights
monitors that the situation "now is worse than it
was under Thaksin". This charge stems from the
continued arrests and alleged torture of
Malay-Muslim youth under interrogation by the
military to get information on rebel networks.
"There is a lot of tension between the Muslim
community and the army," said one human-rights
activist currently in the south.
Reports
of shadowy Buddhist vigilante groups and death
squads linked to the state have fueled these
fears. Typical was the 2007 attack on a
Malay-Muslim village, where attackers dressed in
dark uniforms arrived in a pickup truck and then
opened fire with assault rifles and flung grenades
at a group of young men seated near a mosque. Five
teenagers were killed in that attack.
Such
violence has only helped to widen the gap between
the local Buddhist and Muslim communities while
the junta has been in power. "The distrust has
increased between the Muslim and the non-Muslim
communities and people feel more vulnerable to
visit areas that they used to before," says
Worawit Baru, professor of Malay studies at the
Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani.
"The solution to this problem has to be a
political one, where civilians are given a role to
shape local politics and for the military to
follow," he said from Pattani province. "It is
hard to solve this problem if it is only seen as
needing a military solution, which was the case
last year."
The violence is rooted in a
conflict going back several decades, after the
three southernmost provinces, which were once part
of the Kingdom of Pattani, were annexed in 1902 by
Siam, as Thailand was then known. Malay-Muslims in
the area have since complained of cultural,
linguistic and economic discrimination by the
heavily centralized, predominantly Buddhist, Thai
administration, which is based over 1,000
kilometers away in Bangkok.
Malay-Muslim
separatist movements first emerged in the 1960s
and remained active into the 1980s, as some,
including the Pattani United Liberation
Organization, or PULO, battled to create an
independent state. But unlike the previous
generation of rebels, who appeared to be more
secular and nationalistic in their mission, the
current Malay-Muslim militancy is marked by more
religious zeal.
Leaflets distributed by
the shadowy rebels convey this tone, with
Malay-Muslim civilians being urged to help cleanse
the area of non-believers - a campaign that some
political and security analysts have likened to
ethnic cleansing of Thai Buddhists in the area.
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