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this article itself is a decent summary of events to date, but doesnt really provide any info that isn’t already known to those keeping an eye on the situation. however, the articles coming the next four days might prove insightful. i was deeply interested in heading to the south during my trip to thailand, but a financial crisis kept me from getting all the way down. you said you were interested in heading there too, right rob? at the very least this person would be a good person to contact for ‘getting around’ info. the articles will be available at http://www.slate.com under the ‘dispatches’ section. or click on the direct link HERE
From: Eliza Griswold
Subject: From Separatism to Global Jihad
Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 8:23 AM PT
Last week in southern Thailand, in a scene that sounds more reminiscent of Iraq, a Muslim mob pulled two Buddhist marines from their unmarked car and beat them to death. Locals accused the marines of being members of a government-backed death squad. It was the latest escalation in a growing insurgency that has killed 900 people over the past year and a half. It is also an indication of the growing desperation of the Muslims of Thailand’s south, who live under virtual occupation by Thai government forces. The strong-arm tactics are those of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has attempted a series of responses to the growing unrest along the Malay Peninsula, where a 100-year-old separatist insurgency that used to be more about ethnic identity has taken on the rhetoric of global jihad.Even Thaksin’s attempts at peace have been problematic. Last winter, he decided to launch a “peace bombing” to assuage the fury of the nation’s mostly Muslim southerners, who were enraged at the implementation of martial law and the growing rate of disappearances, reportedly by Thai Buddhist security forces. So Thaksin asked the Thai people to fold him an enormous flock of origami birds and then dropped more than 100 million paper cranes over the roughly 5,000 square miles along the Malay peninsula that make up Thailand’s deep south. Dropping the birds was intended to be a gesture of peace from the north to the impoverished south. But the Muslim population saw the “peace gesture” differently. “The Islamic understanding of dropping birds is battle,” Dr. Chaiwat Satha-Anand, a political science professor at Bangkok’s Thammasat University told me. He pointed to Sura 105 of the Quran, “The Elephant,” in which God sends down “birds in flocks” upon his enemies to flatten them like blades of grass.
The peace-bombing was just another in the government’s long list of missteps in its struggle to keep the insurgents from joining the global jihad. The worst of those missteps, by any definition, occurred last October at a town called Tak Bai, near the Malaysian border, where government forces smothered 78 young Muslim demonstrators to death in the back of army trucks. This summer, six Buddhists were beheaded. The government is issuing handguns to teachers and flak jackets to Buddhist monks. Bangkok has effectively imposed a press blackout, which is one of the main reasons the escalating conflict and Thaksin’s increasingly martial response are virtually unheard of outside Thailand.
Prime Minister Shinawatra started his career as a cop and went to America to get a master’s degree in criminology at Eastern Kentucky University; he also has a Ph.D. from Sam Houston State in Texas. Returning to Thailand, he sold IBM computers to the police force and eventually made his fortune with lucrative government contracts for mobile phones, pagers, and satellites. A billionaire telecom tycoon known as the Berlusconi of Asia, Thaksin says he likes to think of Thailand as a company rather than a country and of himself as its CEO.
Today, Shin Corp., the group of companies he founded, controls nearly all the mobile telephone service in Thailand. (Formal ownership was transferred to his wife and children when he took office in 2001.) Politically, Thaksin, who is 56, is known for his professed rejection of Western “economic imperialism,” which for him includes U.S. financial aid, even for tsunami victims, and his endorsement of strong-arm tactics for dealing with civil unrest. (To the U.S. State Department’s chagrin, he has been a vocal defender of the oppressive regime in neighboring Burma.)
While Thaksin is frequently dismissed as a traditional Asian autocrat, his actions are polarizing an already volatile conflict in southern Thailand, where the Thai government’s military action is creating ideal potential for jihad. As evidenced last week, the situation has gotten so bad that now even those who have nothing to do with the insurgency are willing to attack government troops. All this plays into the hands of the insurgents.
“For the insurgents, it’s not about getting their own state anymore,” said Dr. Panitan Wattanayagorn, a professor of political science at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. Wattanayagorn, who grew up in southern Thailand, is also one of the country’s leading security analysts. “Now, because of the government’s heavy-handed tactics, a new generation is emerging,” he said. “The insurgents are on the Internet downloading and learning like crazy. This is their turf. They’re much more connected than ever. They’re organized into small cells, using local causes and religious teachers to organize them.” As we spoke, Wattanayagorn flipped through a stack of charts documenting the escalating violence. “The insurgents are looking at kidnapping. They’ve been talking about creating suicide bombers.”
Thailand has also become a hiding place for high-level international terrorists.
In 2002, five leaders of Jemaah Islamiya, a radical group that has been responsible for large-scale bombings in Bali and Jakarta, met in Bangkok; all five were said to be living in Thailand. In 2003, one of Jemaah Islamiya’s senior members who is also member of al-Qaida, a man named Hambali, was arrested in Thailand after he allegedly attempted to recruit jihadists to bomb the Bangkok Marriott. The CIA is said to have operated at least one “salt mine,” or secret interrogation center for al-Qaida suspects, in Thailand.
The links between JI and the local insurgency remain an open question. What is clear is that in the past year or so, the tactics of southern Thailand’s insurgents have grown increasingly sophisticated. Along the Malay Peninsula, there have been more than 1,000 violent attacks, including assassinations, bombings, school burnings (20 in one day), and two large-scale assaults on government security forces. In January 2004, 100 to 150 men attacked an army base, killing four Buddhist soldiers and seizing more than 300 weapons. On April 28, 2004—the anniversary of a Malay separatist rebellion suppressed in 1948—hundreds of self-proclaimed jihadists armed only with knives and totems they believed would render them bulletproof launched coordinated attacks on 11 police checkpoints. Afterward, many of the jihadists gathered in the historic Krue Se mosque nearby and awaited their martyrdom. In all, 105 were killed.
On the bodies of the dead fighters, government forces found a pamphlet called Jihad in Pattani. It contains seven fiery sermons and exhorts the faithful to kill even their own fathers if they’re working for the Thai government. “Remember that all Muslims who have faith in God and the Prophet have the warrior’s blood in their hearts. This blood of our ancestors was shed in fighting for God. Every day and night it pierces your heart and body … to leave the body and dye the land red.” It was an exhortation to a level of violence never before seen in Thailand.
For the next four days, these dispatches will follow this underreported conflict.
This Eliza Grizwold character seems to have been to some pretty interesting spots and pissed off more than her fair share of governments (which is always a good thing).
Good to know there are a few interesting people in the world (who aren’t already at this board of course! :wink: )
This Thai situation is heading to the shitter. Thaksin is fucking it up royally and seems intent on a military solution for pretty much everything. Now it ain’t just the insurgents who are involved – the wider community has shown signs that they are willing to join the fray. This is a prelude to a BIG fuckup.
I mentioned to Rob that I may go down to Narathwat sometime in October. However I don’t know the angle I’m going to approach this from. What I’d like to do first is get an interview with Surin Pittsuwan here in Bangkok. This guy is ex-politician ( I think) he also does some part time teaching at Thamasat University (the #1 uni for political science in Thailand) here in BKK, he’s also a Muslim and a sharp guy. If he’s willing to talk to me I’d use that as a frame work for my exploits down south. What I’m thinking of doing now is jumping back and forth between the Thai and Malay boarder, as of now everything is tentaive, but Kilroy’s initial post put the hook in me, Thanks Kilroy.
Lee-Can you put audio stuff on the board, like as in recorded interviews that could be heard?The situation down south is very fucked up-many local folks in the south want foreign jurnos to come down and the military presence is greater in the south than when there was big trouble along the Thai/Burma boarder in 1997 (there were shit loads of military up there at that time). If a foreigner were to go down south it would have to be done in the most unassuming way possible, it’s totaly feasible. I think the main hassle would be the military/police at raodblocks and other places. For now I gotta wait and see…
A billionaire telecom tycoon known as the Berlusconi of Asia, Thaksin says he likes to think of Thailand as a company rather than a country and of himself as its CEO.
…. that is one great quote. Thanks for posting that Kilroy. Surely the reason there is no press from the region is that it IS strictly controlled…. or is it just that no-one really gives a fuck (usual reason). There was a BBC doco a few months back (or it might have been Chanel 4) They seemed to have no problems with access to the area….
Kapa-It’s not difficult getting to the southern areas or hoping back and forth between Thailand & Malaysia. Granted there are roadblocks and checkpoints but the army are looking out for suspicious indigenous folks. Big nosed, blond haired farangs are not a threat, if anything they may tell you that it’s not wise or safe to go to specific areas of Patinni, Yala or Narathiwat provinces, I can’t see the army forcing people out of those particular places. Foreigners going to those places with journalistic intentions should just try to keep a low profile. The boarder crossing between Thailand and Malaysia sees alot of toursit traffic and if the Thai army started coming down on everybody crossing that boarder, it could hurt tourism. At this point I see the Thai army in the south in a situation similar to the little Dutch boy pluging up holes in the dike (and I don’t mean women in comfortable shoes)….
From: Eliza Griswold
Subject: Fighting With Ghosts
Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 3:40 AM PTThe aftermath of a July 2005 bomb blast in Yala
One of the towns where the insurgency is at its worst is Yala. Since the insurgency began three years ago, more than 100 Buddhist officials, monks, and teachers have been assassinated there, mostly by young men on motorbikes. When I went there with a colleague earlier this year, tiny white lights still hung from the street lamps in honor of the Buddhist New Year, months before, even though the town is overwhelmingly Muslim. A Buddhist noodle shop served lunch under purple umbrellas.
We were trying to find a former insurgent, a member of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional, a separatist group founded in 1960 that focused on reviving the Islamic school system. The BRN had largely disappeared by the end of the 1990s, but now one of its splinter groups is believed to be coordinating much of the conflict. As Anthony Davis, a security analyst based in Thailand for Jane’s Intelligence Review, explained to me, “The Thai environment is unprecedented in so far as it’s an urban guerrilla strategy in a mainly rural context. The insurgent structure, based on cells of four or five men operating largely independently of each other, is clearly confounding the security forces. There are 20,000 military down there, plus another 10,000 police and paramilitary all dressed up with nowhere to go, and this is a problem.”
Leaving town, we passed a government checkpoint fortified with concertina wire, from which someone had strung a garland of origami birds from the peace bombing. Soon, the paved roads gave way to rougher track and a thicket of rubber trees. Each of the trees was hung with a bowl to catch rubber sap, much the same way that maples are sugared. After several hours, we reached a small village. It had grown late, so we slept on the floor of a villager’s home. In the morning, the village turned out to be only a handful of wooden houses on stilts near a river. On the way to the insurgent’s house, we passed half a dozen young women in headscarves climbing into a rubber boat. They were going white-water rafting.
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Outside the former insurgent’s house, bathmat-sized slabs of raw rubber hung from the tree branches. On his front porch, in a wire cage, a baby monkey was being poked at by a group of gleeful children. Inside, the former commander, who, we’d been told, specialized in bomb making and assassinations, was sitting on the floor. He was wearing a sarong, which most men here wear, and a nylon Nike shirt over his thick body; his hair was still wet from the bath. He nodded a bit nervously as we entered and quietly said something to his wife, who disappeared behind a thin divide in the one-room shack. She returned with warm bottles of orange soda. He looked at us closely. “It’s a hard life here,” he said. It seemed important to him that we understand this. He is 44 and works, when he can, as a rubber-tapper. As an insurgent, he had been based in Malaysia. He surrendered five years ago when a friend came over the border and told him it was time to come home. “But I don’t really have anything to live off. In BRN, I got a small salary, everything was taken care of,” he said. He kept glancing to the open door when the occasional truck went by. “How can I feel safe now?” he asked.
He pulled up his basketball shirt to reveal a shiny knuckle-shaped scar on his right shoulder. “I was shot three months ago,” he said. “I don’t know who would do this to me. I don’t have any enemies around here.” He gestured toward the door. Outside, just across the street, the jungle began. “If anybody, it would be the people in the movement. Basically, once you surrender, you lose their trust.”
In the old days, the fight had been about independence, and that was still what was important. “We want our land back.” he said. “We want to take our country back from Siam.” But now the insurgents’ goals were different. Religion had got mixed up in it. “Today, things have changed. Now the conflict has moved to the city. I think that it’s going to get much worse.” In 1995, a new group, the Islamic Mujahideen Movement (GMIP), founded by Nasorae Saesang, a Thai who had fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and trained in Libya, joined the insurgency. “This new generation is going to Afghanistan and Pakistan not for studying but for combat military training,” the former commander said. “There are cells, small units, who all eventually meet under one leader who is not in Thailand. A general order will come from the top—do this or do that—but the lower level carries it out when and how they want to.”
GMIP, like the other insurgent groups, is involved in organized crime, but its agenda is more fiercely Islamist. It is very good at recruiting local out-of-work young men for assassinations. It tends “to go after guys who are already under suspicion by the authorities,” he said. Once the security forces target a young man for questioning, and he realizes he’s now at risk from the state, he’s more vulnerable.
In the past, he said, the BRN received some training and financial support from Indonesia, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestinian groups, among others. “They were all helping us,” he said, adding, “In our generation, we weren’t linked to Jemaah Islamiyah, but I think this generation is linked. … In the past we couldn’t have launched these attacks and we wouldn’t have dared to do anything like it. They are pretty brave, this new generation. But they are being manipulated.”
“The new generation of leadership uses religion as motivation. They turn to events around the world to show how America is treating Muslims, and they use this to motivate people.” He said that, like everyone else, he had watched a shaky bootlegged digital recording of the demonstrations in Tak Bai. (The DVD is illegal, and the government has threatened imprisonment for anyone caught with a copy, but almost everyone has it.) In it, security forces beat men stretched out on the ground, their hands bound behind them. That scene was followed by footage of a mass funeral, the bodies wrapped in the green and white cloth of martyrdom.
“Watching that Tak Bai video made my Islamic-ness burn in my chest,” he said. He passed his untouched bottle of orange soda to his wife. I asked if watching the tape made him want to rejoin the insurgency.
“I can’t answer that,” he said.
That afternoon as we returned to Yala, we passed a yellow government billboard at the edge of town: “The Muslim people should not be involved in any situation causing unrest, and all Muslims wish to see Thai Muslims live in peace.”
As I was writing this in my notebook, we were stopped by a roadblock. A 10-pound bomb—which, in a scene reminiscent of the film The Battle of Algiers, had been carried in a bag by an undercover insurgent posing as a patron—had just exploded at the Buddhist noodle shop down the road. The shop served pork, and most of its customers were teachers from a girls’ secondary school next door. At least 50 people were injured, and the owner—who had been peering into the bag when it was detonated, probably by mobile phone—was dead. The bomb had blown a hole in the roof. A purple umbrella lay in the street. The bombers were never caught.
“Three days ago, it was the supermarket and the flower shop,” a squat shopkeeper standing nearby said. Although she’d lived in Yala for 50 years, like the other Buddhists she now wanted to leave. “We don’t know where to go,” she said. I asked her who she thought was launching these attacks. She glanced at the small group of stunned Buddhists around her. Then she said carefully, “Let’s just say it’s people not like us.”
i noticed that rob posted the second article. the other three are up on slate’s page now, too. click on the word ‘HERE’ near the top of my first post and it will take you to friday’s article. there are tabs (labelled by day of the week) to get to the others. friday’s has a small interview with prime minister thaksin.
Yeah – Just thought I’d post one here each day. It’ll be good to have them on hand in case slate.com moves them in the future.
She sure does get around – would probably make a pretty good bastard too. :twisted:
Dispatches From Southern Thailand
From: Eliza Griswold
Subject: Surviving Tak Bai
Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 6:49 AM PTTak Bai, Oct. 25, 2004
In the village of Ae Wae, about a three-hour drive from Yala, people have grown suspicious of outsiders, an old woman told me as we waited on her porch one afternoon. The sky turned the color of salt, and it started to rain. I’d come to meet a group of young men who had attended the protest at Tak Bai last October. The Thai security forces now make regular visits, the woman said, and recently the soldiers discovered a large cache of rice in the village.
“The army and police thought that the rice was hidden for terrorists. But in fact it was just villagers afraid of civil war.” She went into the house and returned with a tin of butter cookies. “Almost every day, people are killed here.”
The young men we had come to see arrived, soaked, on a handful of motorbikes. We sat down around a cement table and listened to the rain hit the tin roof. One man, a rangy 30-year-old named Rusalam, with yellowing circles under his eyes, was wearing a T-shirt that read, “We love the king.” He had been given the T-shirt during a government re-education course conducted after Tak Bai. They’d taught him how to take care of livestock, he said. The problem was he couldn’t afford any livestock and, anyway, after what was done to him at Tak Bai, he was still too frail to work. I asked him to tell me what happened that day.
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On Oct. 25, he said, at about 9:30 in the morning, he and 18 other men from this village had climbed into pickup trucks and driven to Tak Bai. It was Ramadan, and having little else to do, Rusalam wanted to buy sweets in town to break the day’s fast. “It was raining, so we couldn’t tap rubber that morning,” he said.
But when they reached Tak Bai, around 2,000 people were gathering outside the police station to protest the arrest of six village defense volunteers who were accused of handing their weapons over to Islamic insurgents. So, Rusalam forgot about getting something to eat and joined the protest.
“I only wanted to see all six alive, but we weren’t allowed to see, so no one would leave,” he said. By midday, the army surrounded the protestors and fired water into the crowd. Then the soldiers switched to bullets. Several of the protestors were shot, others fled into a nearby river. Both ends of the sandy road were blocked by tanks. Finally, the soldiers stopped shooting and decided to arrest the young men. They began by separating those with beards (that is, Muslims), from the other protestors. Rusalam was one of the first to be taken, he said, stroking the few hairs on his chin.
Then Rusalam and about a thousand other young men were ordered to take off their T-shirts and to lie on the ground. The soldiers tied their arms behind their backs. “I crawled on the ground to the trucks with my arms tied behind me with my belt,” he said. “I had bruises from the soldiers’ boots on my back. They kicked me too many times to count. I couldn’t walk.” Rusalam was lifted into the empty truck and placed on the bottom of what would become six layers of people. He was first in because of his beard.
“When I moved, a soldier said to me, ‘You want to die? You want to die?’ ” He was beaten in the head with a rifle butt. Other men, according to Human Rights Watch, were urinated on.
On the way to the army barracks, the truck kept stopping, and more men were loaded on top of Rusalam and the others. The drive usually takes about an hour; that afternoon it took almost five. About two hours before they reached the camp, the young man next to Rusalam said he couldn’t breathe and pleaded with the person on top of him to lift his bodyweight up if he could. It was the last thing Rusalam heard him say. When they reached the army camp, the young man was dead.
Several days later, Rusalam returned home to Ae Wae. “When I came back, no one recognized me,” he said. “My face was so swollen and my teeth were broken.” Before Tak Bai, he’d worked as a contractor across the border in Malaysia. Now he can only help his parents flatten raw rubber into mats. “I am really angry, but what can I do?” he said, shifting his long legs beneath him. “I won’t go to another protest. I don’t want to die.”
Later, at a snack bar on the campus of Prince of Songkla University, about an hour’s drive from Rusalam’s village, I met Col. Somkuan Saengpataranet, an army spokesman. Around us, Muslim and Buddhist students sat together at picnic tables, drinking juice and eating plates of fried rice. The university is a center of life for six thousand young southerners, the colonel said, looking around brightly at the tables.
He’d buttoned his black beret under his left epaulet, and a neat little mustache hung above his upper lip. He ordered a fruit plate and explained the apparent act of mass-martyrdom—in which the army killed 105 men last April 28—from the government’s point of view.
“Some religious teachers mixed narcotics with lessons on how to be invincible, so the young people were not afraid to die,” he said, spearing a piece of pineapple. “At the time, we didn’t believe it, but then we saw the book Jihad in Pattani,” he said. “The wrong Quran.” The latter phrase is considered offensive by Muslims, because it both demonizes the Quran and legitimizes the sensational pamphlet, but the colonel, who was trained in Kentucky at Fort Knox, probably had no idea of this. He seemed a kind and approachable man with a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing.
“At Tak Bai, the commander tried to solve [the conflict] peacefully,” he said, looking pained. “He had the families of the arrested men come out, an imam—he tried so many ways to explain it to the people.”
“The very sad story is that people died from weakness and from fasting during Ramadan when we tried to transport them in trucks,” he said. This excuse has enraged the local population, because it implies their religion is somehow to blame. They are also furious that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has never apologized for Tak Bai. The colonel went on, “I myself felt sad. No one should kill any people. I believe that.” He said, “We’ve never transported people like that before. I don’t know why we did it.”
The colonel looked at the table nearby where two bored-looking soldiers with M-16s were picking at their own plate of pineapple. “In Buddhist teaching, there is a relationship between cause and result,” he said. “So, we have to think again about who caused it, who brought those people here. We shouldn’t blame only the soldiers. We have to think about who is behind the scenes.
“The aim of the insurgency is to send propaganda around the world that the Muslim people are suffering.” In response, he went on, the army has begun its own propaganda campaign. “Right now we’re waging a hearts-and-minds campaign in the villages. We try to teach the people to protect themselves, to fish and grow vegetables.”
The white paper fruit plate was empty, and it was time to go. He rose, as did his two bodyguards at the next table. Walking into the darkness, he fastened the Velcro on his flak jacket and said, “The people here love soldiers.”
Do you guys think that Rhamadan will increase the level of violence in the south, or for that matter in any other areas in the world where Muslim fanatics operate? The whole idea of a suicide bomber giving up his life during Rhamadan may give him bonus points for getting closer to god, or some such thing, just an idea, I’d be curious to know what you guys think….also to the best of my knowledge there haven’t been any suicide bombings in the south of Thailand yet, however I could be wrong about that….
From: Eliza Griswold
Subject: At the Monastery
Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 3:24 AM PTOne afternoon outside Yala, about 5 miles from the bombed-out noodle shop, I visited the monastery of Wat Na Tham. In a cave above the monastery, an 81-foot statue of Buddha has been reclining since A.D. 750. Below the cave, the temple looks like a fairground: a series of sparkling roofs glinting with gold-colored nagas, or sacred serpents, which are supposed to guard the temple and its monks.
On the temple’s crumbling steps, a monk sat rolling a cigarette. He had just finished performing funeral rites for a man from the nearby village. The monk, who is 41, was named Pong Sang. He’d taken his vows 18 years ago. Pong Sang had no front teeth, and his face was ashy and looked depressed. There used to be 10 monks living at the temple, he said, but now there were only five. Last January, one of the temple’s monks, 64-year-old Wichai, was murdered while out collecting alms.
Now, the Thai government has attempted to issue flak jackets to the Buddhist monks of the south, but at least one monk has protested, saying that giving such things to monks is a misuse of resources.
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Pong Sang disagreed. He was happy with whatever the government could issue.
“I don’t feel safe anymore,” Pong Sang said, “I try not to go out unless it’s really important.” A member of the grieving family came over and slipped an envelope in the pocket of his saffron jacket. The monks aren’t supposed to touch money, he explained. (The insurgency has devastated the local economy, so fewer devout Buddhists can afford to join the monastery, leaving their families without financial support, and the few monks in residence can’t handle the volume of work on the grounds with so few hands.)
“Wichai was cut with a machete on the neck,” Pong Sang said wearily. “It was the first time a monk had been killed. Somebody just wanted to make conflict between Muslims and Buddhists.” The five monks at the temple still collect alms every morning, but with a jeepload of six soldiers behind them for protection. “We don’t feel strange about collecting alms with soldiers behind us,” Pong Sang said. “Everyone knows what’s going on.”
The bigger issue, he said, was that now no one wanted to join the monastery. “According to Buddhism, everyone should be a monk for a little while, but now, no one can afford it.”
The mourners got into their cars and drove away. Pong Sang gathered his robes and walked to the temple parking lot, where a mother and daughter were selling cold coconuts from a cooler. The mother was in her 70s, the daughter in her 50s. The monk bought a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and sat down at a plywood table.
“I never imagined anyone would want to kill monks,” the younger woman said, reaching deep into the cooler for a cold coconut.
“It’s Muslims,” the older woman said, sitting down at the table. The younger woman bit her lip and nodded. The mother looked at Pong Sang, but he made no comment. “The monks are afraid,” she said. “They hardly talk about it with each other.” What’s more, she said, “It’s really hard to make a living now,” because the violence has scared away tourists.
The monk stopped chewing his gum and turned to me. “Tell more Americans to come to the temple,” he said. “It’s a great tourist attraction.” Several months later, in a series of coordinated attacks, the insurgents plunged the city of Yala into a blackout. It was a frightening statement about their growing influence.
Ten years ago, before Prime Minister Thaksin came to power, people who lived along the Malay Peninsula were governed by a much more effective system: a coalition of the military, the police, and religious leaders, under whom close communication was effective in addressing many of the social problems that now contribute to the insurgency. But Thaksin dismantled this system without apparent forethought. Suddenly, a gap in language and culture divided the Malay Muslim people from the mostly Buddhist security forces who were sent to the south to monitor the population. The insurgency, which had virtually vanished by the end of the 1990s, suddenly resurfaced with a spate of killings, at first mostly of former government informants, and then a series of disappearances, which human rights advocates and security analysts say were at the hands of paramilitaries working with the government. As the insurgency intensified, Thaksin instituted martial law. As a result, the violence worsened, and the Buddhist security forces were suspected of increasingly serious human rights violations, including torture. The escalation of tit-for-tat attacks by insurgents and security forces culminated last year in the apparent murder of Somchai Neelaphaijit, a lawyer from Bangkok who had accused the police of torturing suspected insurgents and then disappeared while in the custody of Thai security forces.
When Somchai vanished, many of the Malay Muslims—professors, human-rights workers, community leaders—who had been hoping to work for political change within the system either dropped out of public life or joined the insurgents. Professors burned their books about Malay history fearing that if the volumes were discovered, the government would consider them criminals.
This summer, Prime Minister Thaksin issued an emergency decree, which granted him sweeping powers, extending even beyond martial law, to override freedom of the press. The U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights has voiced concern about the new law. The most disturbing aspect is the growing rate of disappearances and extrajudicial killings believed to be perpetrated by government-linked death squads, despite vehement government denials.
“The insurgency is growing worse as a reaction to Thai missteps. It might not even exist if it weren’t for government blunders,” Sidney Jones, the South East Asia director of International Crisis Group said. “Thanks to Thaksin’s policies, this sense of alienation among Muslims in the south is growing in quantum leaps.” Zachary Abuza, a terrorism analyst at the United States Institute for Peace, said, “I don’t think Thaksin understands how volatile the situation is. The single most important factor that makes people support suicide terrorism is the degree to which they feel Islam is under attack. Al-Qaida and other groups don’t create civil wars—they use these conflicts to feed that myth. What Thaksin is doing is creating a poster child for jihad.”
Jimbo – not sure if there is any correlation between ramadan and suicide bombings though I read somewhere that in Thailand, violence escalates on Fridays which is the day they visit the mosque and I suppose hear fiery sermons?
So I guess it may be within the realms of possibility.
Keep us updated on your plans for the south.
Fridays and Saturdays were usually always the busiest days for me. Fridays for muslim related jobs and Saturdays for jewish interest stuff (Shabbat) and late saturday/early Sundays for the occasional attack on christian sites (churches in Iraq/Sudan/Northern Ireland). I also remember thinking that Tuesdays were unusually busy sometimes,but I can’t remember exactly why.
Most of the attacks in Iraq were before midday, mostly due to the heat or just after the beginning or end of the particular religious service. It’s all about the numbers, the concentration of bodies for whatever political or paramilitary purpose.
I could write tonnes of stuff about this, but it’s Sunday here and I have to work….Rob:
You generally see an increase due to the belief that if you are going to Martyr yourself, then if you do it on the holiest time of the year, you are a very good Martyr.
I still believe that the theory that they get the 90 virgins, but nobody has told them that they are 70 year old Catholic nuns with yardsticks in hand!
I used to have a guy that worked for me (and he was a great guy) who would not observe the fast over Ramadan. I joked with him about it one day and he looked at me and said with dead seriousness, “no, over Ramadan, I am a Christian!”
Have to go. I am declaring a Jihad on the fly in this room that keeps making gun runs on me!
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