After years of peace, the separatist threat is rising again. Ahmad Benno, a local co-ordinator for the Thai Rak Thai party of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, points to the line of peaks as he drives along a twisting road through troubled Narathiwat province. "Fifteen years ago these hills were full of separatists. Now they are empty, but there is no doubt that the separatists are once more on the rise. There was no separatist feeling before the army arrived in January. People here are loyal Thais, a Thai flag flies from every house but they feel persecuted now and there is a lot of growing anger." At a roadside coffee shop, customers in checked sarongs list a litany of complaints including false arrests, the disappearance of a prominent Muslim lawyer defending suspected members of terror group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), and the hand of major political parties in violence that exploded in January. The two main complaints are harassment by security forces — police and army drafted in by the Bangkok administration — and Thailand's military engagement in Iraq where it has sent a 400-strong contingent. "There are many problems but only one clear answer and that is a self-administered area which is still part of Thailand, but can satisfy the very different religious and cultural needs of people living here," said Ahmad. The fear of large-scale attacks has escalated after a raid on a quarry last week saw masked gunmen escape with a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate — a fertiliser used in the Bali bombings — as well as dynamite and detonator caps.
| Found this story at Channel News Asia: police are looking for two Indonesians suspected of being behind the explosives heist. Intelligence sources told Channel NewsAsia that one of the two is a bomb-maker, said to be related to regional terror suspect Hambali, who was arrested in central Thailand last year. They also believe that the two, together with two other Thai-Muslims from Narathivas province, have fled across the border into northern Malaysia Other newspapers say it could be a relative of Hambali named Mukta, Thai police are denying any outside involvment. I wonder if it could be our old JI friends from Malaysia, Noordin Muhammad Top and Azahari Husin? They have been out of site for a while, this sounds like their style. |
| The outside involvement would tend to counterbalance the bitching and moaning by the locals in this article. I suspect that the Bad Guys moved in and set up, and now people are trying to find reasons for it. The fact that they set up had nothing to do with actual conditions, only the fact that there were Muslims there, so the populace could be divided into "us" and "them." |
The raid came just days after the first strike against a civilian target — a bomb blast at a bustling tourist strip in Sungai Golok on the Malaysian border, which injured 28 people including eight visiting Malaysians. Politicial analysts and government ministers are divided about who is responsible for the violence — some point to gangsters while others say Islamic militants are to blame. A flood of funds from Wahhabi fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia is also sparking fears that the south could become more influenced by JI and global terror outfit al-Qaeda.
| That little fact further buttresses my opinion. Somebody in Riyadh is buying revolution. |
The region's spiritual leaders are reluctant to say who the culprits are, but agree the government's heavyhanded response is feeding a vicious circle of anger and militancy.
| And will do so, regardless of what the gummint actually does, to include nothing... |
"I don't want to talk about who is behind the violence," Narathiwat Muslim Council president Abdulrahman Abdulsamut said on the sidelines of a crisis meeting of local and national officials. "The Government has heard all our complaints before but nothing ever changes and nothing will change this time and everybody knows it," said another Muslim politician. "We don't like seeing the re-emergence of the main separatist groups or these new ones we don't even know anything about but if the people don't play politics then politics will play the people," said a village headman. In a frank admission, Thailand's deputy premier Chaturon Chaisang acknowledged on Friday that killings, torture and kidnappings of residents in southern Thailand by government agents had fuelled the violence. |