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Wave of violence shakes
Thailand
By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - Violent attacks in the Muslim-majority
south of Thailand have some observers worried - not for
the first time - that the government of Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra is in denial about the scope of the
terrorist threat in the area.
Just one day after
attackers killed four Thai soldiers, set fire to schools
and police checkposts and stole weapons near the
Malaysian border, explosions killed at least three
police in the south on Monday. The violence occurred
despite massive security in the troublesome region, and
martial law has been declared in three provinces. Yet
some authorities continued to insist that the attacks
were the work of "robbers", and not Islamist insurgents.
"It is too early to tell" who the culprits were,
the government's spokesman, Jakrapob Penkair, said in an
interview on Monday. "These people should be called
robbers" who had "no ideological" motivation, Jakrapob
insisted, in reference to Sunday's daring assault on a
Thai army camp at Narathiwat Ratchanakarin that killed
four soldiers.
Whoever staged the Narathiwat
assaults displayed synchronized guerrilla techniques
enabling them to seize more than 100 US-supplied M-16
assault rifles, burn down about 20 schools and also
destroy several police posts, according to reports from
Narathiwat.
The assailants drove a pickup truck
into army camp and opened fire, killing four warrant
officers guarding a weapons stockpile. The attackers
fled, scattering spikes on the road to deflate pursuers'
tires, and blocked the route with felled trees
containing booby traps amid the branches, according to
Thai news reports.
Assailants also splashed
gasoline onto about 20 schools and ignited the buildings
- a tactic favored by Muslim separatists during the past
decade amid complaints that minority ethnic and Islamic
subjects were not given priority by Buddhist-majority
Thailand's education system.
While Thai troops
scoured the region in search of the Narathiwat raiders,
on Monday in Pattani city, about 160 kilometers to the
north, "a fresh round of bombings" killed at least three
policemen and injured several others, Jakrapob said.
Pattani is about 870 kilometers south of Bangkok.
"A bomb exploded in a guard booth" killing one
police officer and injuring three other policemen,
Jakrapob said. About an hour later, another bomb
exploded in a police station in the city's park,
severely injuring another policeman. "Police found more
bombs planted near a department store" but while trying
to defuse it, "we lost two more policemen", he said.
Thai officials appeared flabbergasted by the
bloodiness and success of the attacks, and said corrupt
officials may have played a role. "It is inconceivable
that a civilian could have sneaked inside the camp and
sent information to the bandits," said Deputy Prime
Minister General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh. "The attack was
well planned," Chavalit told reporters.
"We
never thought it [the attacks] would be so fast, so
intense," 4th Army commander Lieutenant General Pongsak
Ekbannasingh was quoted as saying.
In May, the
illegal Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO)
boasted that Thai security forces were "falling like
leaves" because Muslims were fighting to free southern
Thailand from Bangkok's rule.
In an editorial on
Monday, the English-language Bangkok-based Nation
newspaper predicted: "In the coming months, there will
be growing violence against army positions as well as
civilians in the predominately Muslim south. Our leaders
must stop describing the perpetrators as amateur bandits
who just want to steal weapons and then sell them
illegally," it warned. "Following the recent truck-bomb
attack on Lima Camp in Karbala, Iraq, in which two Thai
soldiers were among the 19 coalition members killed, our
government must be more vigilant about possible
terrorist attacks inside the kingdom," The Nation said.
More than 420 Thai troops are currently in Iraq,
and US President George W Bush recently upgraded
Thailand to "major non-NATO ally" status. Thailand also
sent forces to Afghanistan to support the US-led
occupation there. Some observers view Bangkok's support
of the US-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as
reigniting long-simmering Muslim grievances in southern
Thailand.
"On the one hand, Thaksin admitted ...
there are still a handful of uprisings in the form of
liberation movements [in southern Thailand], but said
that they are not powerful enough to be considered as a
threat to his territorial ambitions," wrote PULO deputy
president Lukman B Lima in a rare dispatch from exile in
Sweden. "If his conglomerates and himself are so
powerful in practicing 'might is right' - which is the
law of the jungle - then why are his serving security
men falling like leaves?" Lukman said in remarks
published in The Nation in May.
Bangkok
"illegally incorporated" the far south into Thailand 100
years ago and now rules it with "colonial" repression
while "committing crimes against humanity in the area",
Lukman said.
Bangkok denies all allegations of
intentional mistreatment of Thailand's Muslims and
insists that separatist guerrillas are "bandits"
enriching themselves while spewing religious and
political rhetoric.
About 90 percent of
Thailand's 63 million citizens are Buddhist. Most of
Thailand's 4 percent Muslim population live in the
south, in and around Pattani province. About 80 percent
of these Muslims are of ethnic Malay descent, inspiring
PULO to demand a so-called Malay Kingdom of Pattani, or
Greater Pattani. It would include the southern Thai
provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani, Satun and part
of Songkhla - a region Thailand annexed in 1902.
For more than 500 years, Muslim ethnic Malays
have battled Thai security forces in hit-and-run
skirmishes to end what they perceive as Thailand's
"racist" Buddhist domination. Thai Buddhists crushed
southern Muslim uprisings in 1564 and 1776, but the area
remains relatively poor, alienated and misunderstood by
Bangkok's government and military officials.
Today, PULO is believed to possess a couple of
hundred fighters scattered on both sides of the
Thai-Malaysian border.
In June, the US hailed
the arrest in Thailand of three suspected Muslim
terrorists who allegedly conspired to explode car bombs
at embassies and tourist sites in Bangkok. The trio were
suspected of belonging to Southeast Asia's Islamic
militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed for the October
2002 bombing in Bali that killed 202 people. After they
were arrested in June in Narathiwat city, the three men
pleaded innocent and their trial is under way.
"I was informed that about 30 trained terrorists
had crossed the border" from Malaysia into southern
Thailand, Thaksin told journalists in April. "The [Thai]
military units, they did not seem to take proper
precautions," the prime minister said at the time.
(Copyright 2004 Richard S Ehrlich.)
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