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| Southeast Asia |
| Insurgency boils in southern Thailand |
| 2004-06-21 |
| Asaha Dajing, 19, appeared to be thriving at an Islamic college in Yala, 20 miles north of this remote village. He had just won a $125 creative writing scholarship, big money in these parts. His family was proud. But Asaha had friends his parents didn’t know about: Islamic radicals who were recruiting impressionable young men for a mysterious holy war here in the jungles of southern Thailand. Asaha’s secret life was exposed only by his death. He was killed by police along with 13 other militants April 28 when they staged a suicidal assault on a government office near this village. Most were armed only with machetes. "They used my son because he was young," says his father, rubber farmer Tama Dajing, 49. "He could be fooled very easily. ... I blame myself because I just worked. I went out in the morning and I came home at night, and I didn’t know what was going on." "It’s still a witch’s brew. It’s still incubating," says Paul Quaglia, a former CIA official now working as a security consultant in Bangkok with Pacific Strategies & Assessments. "Regional Islamic terrorists are looking at the area for a possible jihad (holy war). Disgruntled Muslim youth form a potential labor pool" for terrorists. However, there is some evidence that Jemaah Islamiyah, which is on the U.S. terror list, has been active in Thailand. One of the group’s leaders was captured in central Thailand last year, and some of the attackers in a wave of violence April 28 reportedly wore Jemaah Islamiyah T-shirts and in some cases showed knowledge of sophisticated military tactics. The violence has killed nearly 200 people, most of them Muslim, in Thailand this year. It has shaken a country that is 95% Buddhist and best known as a place where foreign tourists carouse in the raucous bars of Bangkok, relax on the white beaches of Phuket or explore the temples and handicraft markets of Chiang Mai. The Thai government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has tried to downplay the violence and has sometimes blamed it on criminal gangs to protect the country’s tourist trade. But the threat from Islamic extremism is becoming harder to ignore: In Thailand’s deep south, the population is 80% Muslim. Militants have burned dozens of secular government schools, murdered Buddhist monks and attacked police posts. "This is a volcanic area," says Panitan Wattanayagorn, a Thai expert on the security situation in the south. "From time to time, you have explosions." The people of southern Thailand are distinct from the rest of the country’s population. Their ethnic background is Malay, not Thai. Their religion is Islam, not Buddhism. Their language is a local dialect called Yawi, indecipherable to most Thais. And the southerners have a history of independence from the government in Bangkok. Until it was annexed in 1902, southern Thailand was part of an independent Malay kingdom with its capital at Pattani. Many southerners have never accepted Thai rule. A violent separatist movement tore through the region in the 1960s and 1970s. The situation had settled by the 1990s, calmed by economic development and political changes that let local Muslims elect their leaders and send them to the national legislature in Bangkok. But trouble continued to simmer. Government officials in the south were notoriously corrupt even by lax Thai standards. The local economy lagged the most prosperous parts of Thailand. A stricter, less tolerant form of Islam — related directly or indirectly to hard-line Saudi Arabian Wahhabism — began to gain influence. A more potent form of Islam appeals to many Thai Muslims resentful of being left behind economically and inflamed by images of Muslims under siege by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza and by the United States in Iraq. Even so, it is not entirely clear what is motivating the current insurgents: a revival of the separatist insurrection; local links with foreign terrorists seeking, as Hambali was, to establish a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate across Southeast Asia; or local power struggles. The government declared martial law in three southern provinces — Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat — on Jan. 5, the day after the armory raid. It has begun joint border patrols with troops from neighboring Malaysia. Tipped off that the insurgents planned a wave of coordinated attacks on 11 police and government posts across the three southern provinces April 28, Thai troops and police were waiting. They gunned down 108 insurgents, including Asaha Dajing, the teenage student. Critics question whether the lethal force was justified against attackers carrying mostly machetes, not firearms. "This is too many dead, absolutely too many," says Ambhorn Meesook, a member of Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission. Five members of the Thai security forces also died. Among the dead that day were 32 militants who had taken refuge in the 426-year-old Kreu-Se mosque in Pattani. They declared over a mosque loudspeaker that they would die there. They did, wiped out in a seven-hour police assault. So many Muslim pilgrims now visit the site that the mosque has become a tourist attraction, surrounded by stalls selling items from Pringles to sarongs. Dozens of Thai Muslims also have been taken away by armed men believed to be police or security forces. Disappearances and mysterious killings have become more common under the increasingly authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Thaksin. A nationwide crackdown on drug dealers last year left nearly 2,300 dead. Many were believed to be victims of extrajudicial killings by police. Authorities appear to be using the same brutal tactics against Muslims they see as troublemakers. Prominent Muslim human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit vanished in Bangkok on March 12 and hasn’t been seen since. Four police officers have been arrested in his disappearance. Around midnight Jan. 26, two pickups pulled into Tohporka, a sleepy village of 200 people in Narathiwat province where stray cats and roosters roam the streets and sheets of recently harvested rubber hang to dry from wooden houses that stand on stilts. The trucks stopped in front of the house being rented by Ibrahim Se, 38, a rubber tapper. Five armed men wearing masks piled out of the trucks, broke down the door and hauled Se away. His wife, Nurida Kamae, 28, ran after them but was warned off by a masked man with a shotgun who taunted her: "Where are you going? Are you going to Bangkok with him?" She hasn’t seen her husband since. She says she has no idea why he might be in trouble. The couple spent all their time working in the rubber forests, saving money to build a house of their own and teaching Islam to the children of the village. Nurida says that she suspects — but can’t prove — that a neighbor may have framed him for reasons she doesn’t want to go into. Some analysts fear that the government’s heavy-handed tactics will backfire. "Over the long term, it’s going to further estrange the Muslim community," security consultant Quaglia says. "They don’t like it when human rights lawyers disappear. It scares them. They could be next." Perhaps the backlash has begun. On May 30, the decapitated body of a 63-year-old Buddhist rubber farmer was found a mile from his home in Narathiwat province. Next to his body was a written warning threatening to kill more "innocent Buddhists" if police arrested more "innocent" Muslims. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 Critics question whether the lethal force was justified against attackers carrying mostly machetes, not firearms Not to be picky, but a machete will get you as dead as any firearm, especially if you let its bearer get too close w/o employing "lethal force". |
| Posted by: Anonymous5089 2004-06-21 6:14:16 PM |
| #1 Next to his body was a written warning threatening to kill more "innocent Buddhists" if police arrested more "innocent" Muslims. The very definition of proportional response in Islam: "arrest us and we'll kill you". |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-06-21 2:21:52 PM |