Endless Woe

The teachers are late for school again. It happens almost every morning at Ban Bukoh village in Thailand’s troubled Pattani province, but the kids are getting used to it. The girls busy themselves by sweeping the corridor outside the government school’s single row of tiny classrooms. The boys crib last-minute homework from each other. Then the men with guns arrive—six of them in a pickup truck, two more on a motorbike, all toting M-16 assault rifles. It is the job of these government militiamen to protect two cars and five motorbikes carrying a dozen teachers. Their convoy speeds into this sleepy village with the well-rehearsed urgency of a presidential motorcade.

The teachers coax the children into ragged lines in the schoolyard for a solemn morning assembly. A week before, an arson attack by Muslim insurgents had razed the old school building; some pupils wept when they saw the charred remains of their classrooms. “I don’t have to ask how you feel,” announces Mayakoh Cheyara, 47, the school principal. “I can see just by looking at your faces. But we all have to be strong.” An older boy leads a short prayer in Arabic—all Ban Bukoh’s 200 pupils are Muslims—and the national anthem is played. “Thais love peace, but aren’t afraid to fight,” the children sing as the Thai flag is raised between fire-scorched trees. The words can’t mean much—some of the children are fresh out of kindergarten. But even the youngest among them must be dimly aware that a conflict is raging in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, and that its battle lines run right through their schoolyard.

The torching at Ban Bukoh was one of more than 100 arson attacks on the region’s state schools this year, against 37 in 2006, with nearly 80 teachers and school officials killed. Many were murdered with calculated savagery. In December, a school director and a teacher, aged 59 and 52, were gunned down a few hundred meters from their school in Yala; the four assailants then doused the bodies with gasoline and set them alight. In January, a kindergarten teacher died after eight months in a coma; she had been dragged from her class in Narathiwat by a Muslim mob and beaten until her skull shattered. And more than 300 government schools in Narathiwat were temporarily closed after insurgents killed three teachers last month. Two were women, shot dead in the school library by two gunmen while a hundred horrified children looked on.

The brutal campaign against schools and their staff is the latest manifestation of the violence in the south. Last September a military junta overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, accusing him of corruption and abuse of power—allegations Thaksin denies. Today, the junta faces many challenges: how to bring Thaksin, now in exile but still popular among millions of Thais, back to Bangkok for trial; when to hold elections and restore democracy; and how to keep the economy ticking. But the most intractable problem is the civil war in the south. Since January 2004, when a dormant, homegrown rebel movement ostensibly bent on establishing a separate Islamic state exploded back to life, more than 2,300 people have died, the vast majority civilians. The latest attack took place on Tuesday when two bombs went off in quick succession in Yala town, killing one and injuring at least 20.

The military is stretched thin and taking a pounding. There are about 20,000 troops deployed in a conflict area half the size of Israel, and they—like their beleaguered American counterparts in Iraq—are outmaneuvered by a ruthless and elusive enemy that shelters amid a Muslim population largely hostile to Thai security forces. Two roadside bombings in May alone killed a total of 22 soldiers; their well-drilled killers executed some of the wounded survivors by shooting them in the head or strangling them. Last month, junta leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin publicly admitted that the fighting in the south had reached crisis point, and told Bloomberg: “The insurgent groups are trying to expand their network and operations; [they are] now at their peak.”

For the militants, razing classrooms and slaughtering teachers is a justified strategy. Besides their anger—and that of many ordinary Thai Muslims—at what they perceive to be the marginalization of the south (the region is among Thailand’s poorest), the insurgents have long despised government schools, whether Buddhist or Muslim. The rebels see them as representative of a Thai state they believe suppresses the culture, language and religion of Malay Muslims, who make up the majority of people in the southern provinces of this otherwise overwhelmingly Buddhist nation. Resistance to Bangkok’s assimilation policies—banning Muslim headscarves, closing schools not conforming to the national curriculum, preventing civil servants from attending Friday prayers—has simmered and boiled ever since Thailand, then known as Siam, annexed the Pattani sultanate a century ago. In the 1960s, the separatist Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front, or B.R.N.) was formed by a religious teacher after the state tried to force Islamic boarding schools to adopt the national curriculum. B.R.N. and other insurgent groups were neutralized by government amnesties by the 1990s, but their cause has been taken up by a new breed of militant, groomed by religious leaders and hardened by the military solution Thaksin pushed in the south. (The most vivid symbol of Thaksin’s iron-fisted approach was the October 2004 Tak Bai incident, when, during and after a mass protest, 85 Muslims were either shot or suffocated to death in army trucks—compounding Muslim hatred of Bangkok.)

Many southerners had hoped that the violence might subside with last September’s coup—General Sonthi is a Muslim, and he and Interim Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont have pledged a conciliatory policy involving negotiation, more autonomy and greater economic aid. But since the junta seized power, the average kill rate has more than doubled to about four deaths a day, and the generals, like Thaksin, have been forced to send in more security forces. While no armed group has claimed responsibility for the conflict, nor stated any aims or demands, the militants’ strategy seems clear enough: render the region too violent for Bangkok to govern, then seize control, village by village.

Terrorizing teachers is central to driving minority Buddhists from the region—a “de facto ethnic cleansing,” according to Zachary Abuza, an American academic who specializes in militant Islam in Southeast Asia and who is writing a book on the conflict in the Thai south. “Teachers are very vulnerable, and targeting schools is a very effective tactic,” says Abuza. “If you can’t send your kids there with any degree of safety, you’re going to leave.” Terrorizing state schools also forces more parents to send their children to private Islamic schools, where “hundreds of young militants have been recruited and, in some cases, given military training” by teachers, reported the Brussels-based International Crisis Group in March.

To crush opposition within their own communities, the militants are killing just as many Muslims, including village chiefs, religious leaders, and anyone suspected of spying for the police or military. When it comes to teachers, however, the victims are nearly all Buddhists. As one of Ban Bukoh’s two Buddhist teachers, Prapa Boonaeb, 57, who runs the kindergarten, feels marked for death. “You don’t know when they’ll pull the trigger,” says Prapa, a short-haired woman with a brisk but cheerful manner. “We try to keep a constant lookout, but it’s hard because our attention is usually on the children.” A year ago, she recalls, a teacher in Narathiwat province was shot in his classroom, in front of his fourth-grade pupils; his killers were two youths in school uniforms. Even Ban Bukoh’s annual sports day has been scrapped—such gatherings are simply too risky now, she says. A bomb exploded in a playground in Yala province last month, injuring two youth soccer teams. Prapa doesn’t know who the militants are, but feels they’re always watching. “We’re in the spotlight,” she says. “They’re in the dark.”

While Prapa herds her children into class, Principal Mayakoh hunches over a two-way radio issued by the local education department. Before long, it crackles to life: a Buddhist official has been wounded by four gunmen about a mile away. Mayakoh is a short, gray-haired man who looks worried even when he’s smiling. But he says he’s hopeful. Ban Bukoh’s people make a modest living tapping rubber and growing bananas, rice and coconuts, yet parents have already raised 5,400 baht (about $160)—the equivalent of a monthly salary in these parts—to build a temporary classroom. Others have donated wood and roofing, which now lies ready in the schoolyard, or have offered to labor for free. “The parents are very supportive,” says Mayakoh. “Some gave 100 baht, some gave 1,000. It lifts my heart.”

The next morning, his optimism is shattered. Overnight, leaflets are found outside the school. “Warning!” one reads. “Muslim brothers and sisters of Pattani: The Malay people of Pattani are currently at war with the Siamese infidel occupiers. Therefore, we must unite.” Without claiming responsibility for the arson attack, the leaflet explains that schools are targeted because they are “symbols of the Siamese infidel occupier.” It continues: “This is a warning to our brothers and sisters: do not assist the occupier, or cooperate in terms of labor or goods in kind. To help them with labor, money or goods in kind is haram [forbidden].” It is signed by Pejuang Kemerdekaan Pattani, which translates as “Liberation Fighters of Pattani.”

The insurgents seem to regard no one as a noncombatant—women, children, the elderly and monks have all been killed. Also, murder alone no longer satisfies the militants: they routinely mutilate their victims’ corpses or burn them beyond recognition, a deliberate blow to grieving families. In May a Buddhist fruit picker became the 29th victim to be decapitated; his head was left outside a Yala school to scare teachers and children. At another Yala village, insurgents shot dead and set alight a Buddhist health official, then detonated a 10-kg bomb buried beneath the road. The blast injured 12 people, including TIME photographer Philip Blenkinsop, four other journalists and three emergency workers.

To try to fight back, the junta has introduced a measure that it believes will help tackle the crisis. Late last year, Ban Bukoh’s state school became one of the first to try out a new curriculum of Islamic and Malay studies. It has now been implemented at 300 elementary and secondary schools across the region. The government hopes the scheme will win back students from the private Islamic schools and counter the claims of insurgents that state schools refuse to accommodate the religion and culture of Malay Muslims.

But education alone is not enough of a counterstrategy. The junta has dispatched an extra 1,700 rangers to the south, to be followed by another 30 companies by year’s end. Created by the Royal Thai Army in the 1970s to fight communist insurgents in northeast Thailand, the rangers are a poorly paid, poorly trained paramilitary outfit with a trigger-happy reputation. One reason the insurgents are killing Buddhist civilians is to provoke security personnel—themselves predominantly Buddhist—into heavy-handed reprisals that will further alienate the Muslims. The rangers seem to be falling for that tactic. They are the suspected culprits in two shooting attacks on Islamic schools in March, which killed four students and injured eight. For months now, rangers—who dress entirely in black and are called “ninjas” by some locals—have been guarding Pakareusong School, also in Pattani province. It is empty: parents fear to send their children to school while such notorious soldiers are encamped there. Indeed, the rangers’ alleged abuses have already sparked many protests. The latest was a five-day rally at the Pattani central mosque by some 1,000 Muslims who accused rangers of murdering four Yala women. The government also relies upon Buddhists in remote communities to form militias to protect themselves. These village-defense volunteers tend to be armed, ill-trained and scared—a sometimes lethal combination. On April 9, militiamen opened fire on a pickup truck carrying Muslim mourners back from a funeral, killing four students, including a 12-year-old schoolboy.

A military adviser to Prime Minister Surayud recently urged soldiers in the south to exercise “restraint.” But this is the very quality lacking in the two paramilitary groups—rangers and mainly Buddhist militias—upon which the junta increasingly depends. “What is required are specialized troops trained in counterinsurgency,” says Joseph Liow of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. “That, and vastly improved intelligence, is what will turn the tide, not more boots on the ground.” But the militants’ cell-like structure, coupled with rivalry between a slew of military and police agencies, continues to hobble chances of improving intelligence gathering. So does a tight-lipped Muslim population which, already terrorized by the militants in its midst, distrusts or despises the Thai security forces.

Ensuring justice for past state abuses is “the single most effective way to rebuild trust,” says Francesca Lawe-Davies, a security analyst with the International Crisis Group. But justice, like actionable intelligence, is rare. Last year Surayud publicly apologized for the Tak Bai affair, yet nobody has been prosecuted, never mind punished. Indeed, soldiers and police serving in the south remain immune from prosecution under a Thaksin-era emergency decree.

The Thai government is also pursuing talks with exiled members of older separatist groups such as B.R.N., hoping they might rein in the new generation of militants. Despite receiving, Surayud said, “positive feedback,” it’s unclear what influence the old guard has over the new. And time is running out. For Thailand’s majority Buddhists, sectarian atrocities make Surayud’s peace initiatives smack of appeasement—political suicide for an unpopular military-backed government. A newspaper columnist captured the unforgiving public mood by condemning any attempt “to shake hands with brutal terrorists.”

While the junta fiddles, the schools burn—dozens more have been torched since the Ban Bukoh attack. “It was so lovely here before,” says kindergarten teacher Prapa sadly. “I’d head home at 6:30 or 7 p.m. Sometimes the teachers played volleyball and the villagers would come and watch.” Now the school is shuttered and padlocked by 4 p.m. Before the men with guns arrive to take the teachers home, the children line up in the schoolyard for a reprise of the national anthem. “Thais love peace, but aren’t afraid to fight,” they sing as the flag is slowly lowered. “They will never let anyone threaten their independence. They will sacrifice every drop of blood for the nation.” Then the children hurry home without delay.