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Southeast Asia | |||
Thailand announces peace talks with southern Muslim rebels | |||
2016-09-02 | |||
Thailand’s military government has announced peace talks can go ahead with Muslim separatists in the far south of the country but insisted they observe a ceasefire.
A decades-old insurgency in the deep south of predominately Buddhist Thailand flared in 2004 and more than 6,500 people have been killed since then, according to the independent monitoring group Deep South Watch. Talks between the government and insurgents began in 2013 when Yingluck Shinawatra was prime minister of a civilian government but have stalled since the military threw her out of office in 2014. The Thai defence minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, said negotiations would restart on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. General Aksara Kerdphol, the Thai government’s lead negotiator, said the rebels had to show good faith by ending violence. “I have been instructed to tell the groups that there must be a peaceful situation on the ground before we are willing to sign any document,” he said. Malaysia’s Bernama state news agency said Thai officials would meet representatives of the Mara Pattani “separatist umbrella group”. Bangkok-based analyst Anthony Davis, at security consulting firm IHS-Jane’s, said a ceasefire was unlikely as the main group behind the violence, Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), had been left out of the talks.
The three ethnic-Malay majority provinces were part of a Malay sultanate before being annexed by Thailand more than a century ago.
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Posted by:Steve White |