Quotes of the Day
The old woman we encounter in an isolated village in Narathiwat province visibly shakes with terror at the approach of outsiders. A week before, her husband had been wounded by an unknown gunman, and government soldiers now stand guard in the shadowy rubber plantations surrounding their simple tin-roofed home. If the soldiers had not been there when TIME's reporters approached, the old woman later vows, she would have taken her husband's rifle and "I would have shot you myself." Tourist brochures call Thailand the Land of Smiles. But in villages across its troubled Muslim-majority south, strangers are now greeted with suspicion and anxiety. The only smiles are brief ones of relief, when those strangers finally take their leave.
These are testing times for Thailand. The government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is battling a faltering economy, rising consumer prices and persistent allegations of corruption. Thaksin, whose popularity was once bulletproof, is slipping in the polls. But the country's biggest headache is its embattled south, where most people are Muslim. Once part of the kingdom of Pattani, the southern provinces were annexed by Thailand in 1902. Militant separatist groups surfaced in the 1960s, riding the resentment that many Muslims felt at being marginalized. In recent years, however, the region had been relatively peaceful. Then, in January 2004, unidentified gunmen raided an army base in Narathiwat, killing four soldiers before fleeing with more than 300 assault rifles and other weapons. Ever since, the south has been wracked by bombings, drive-by shootings, beheadings and arson attacks, which have claimed hundreds of lives—military and civilian, Muslim and Buddhist.
There was no letup in the violence last week: over a 48-hour period, at least 10 people were killed—the highest toll in six months. Today, the south looks and feels like a war zone. Schools and government offices are ringed with razor wire. At night, military helicopters fly fast and low over the rubber plantations, their lights off to foil militant attacks. Meanwhile, edgy, heavily armed militiamen patrol the more remote villages. Country roads are deserted. Charity workers who once raced to emergencies 24 hours a day now hunker down until daylight to collect corpses. Ice cream sellers no longer wear their customary sky blue uniforms for fear of being mistaken for policemen or soldiers, and shot.
Thaksin blames the escalating violence in the south on a small group of insurgents inspired by distorted Islamic teachings, combined with underworld battles over drug smuggling and other illegal activities, and his government has fought back by dispatching thousands of soldiers and armed police to the region. The authorities intend to get even tougher. On July 15, a day after two policemen were killed and 23 people injured in a mass attack by suspected Muslim militants with guns and bombs in the provincial capital Yala, the Cabinet approved a special decree that designates the southernmost provinces—Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat—as "severe emergency zones." Security forces can now, among other powers, search and arrest without warrants, and can detain suspects for up to 30 days without laying any charges. The decree also grants immunity to police and soldiers who may have committed abuses—a provision that the U.N. Human Rights Committee has condemned.
Thaksin has defended the emergency powers as "necessary evils" to restore law and order. "Many people have been too quick to make a judgment without reading the decree," he said during a live TV broadcast last week. The Prime Minister's fiercest critic is Anand Panyarachun, himself a former PM who now heads the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), a government-appointed body that has recommended, among other proposals, a ban on civilians carrying firearms and the establishment of a national justice committee to investigate violent cases. During the same TV program in which Thaksin appeared, Anand said: "The local community sees this decree as a license to kill."
Other critics—including journalists, lawyers, human-rights activists and U.N. officials—claim that heavy-handed measures will only exacerbate fear and mistrust of the security forces, which already stand accused by the NRC and human-rights activists of arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances. Two bloody events last year further alienated the Muslim majority in the south: the April 28 killing by security forces of 108 Muslim extremists—31 of them at the ancient Krue Se mosque—after they had attacked police posts; and 85 deaths, mostly by suffocation while in military custody, after an October protest outside the border town of Tak Bai. Even the revered constitutional monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej has, Thaksin publicly admitted, expressed concern about the decree.
What happens in faraway Bangkok means little in the south, where the overwhelming majority of Muslims and Buddhists alike yearn for peace. Police and military checkpoints—some decorated with potted plants to make them appear less hostile—are starting to feel permanent. Life is changing. Evening festivities, such as the Saturday-night fair in Narathiwat town, no longer take place, compounding the fear and isolation felt by many southerners. "It's a shame, but people just don't go out at night anymore," says a Muslim teacher in Narathiwat who, like many people who once talked openly to journalists, now requests anonymity.
Apart from the brisk trade in firearms—9-mm pistols change hands for roughly $1,500 apiece—business has been crippled. The crisis has disrupted not just agricultural industries such as rubber tapping (militants have spread leaflets threatening to cut the ears off anyone who does not heed their order to abjure work on Islamic holy days), but has also devastated tourism, despite a government campaign to promote the troubled region's deserted attractions with the slogan: go south, get lucky! These days, nobody's going south. The Thai Education Ministry reports that more than 3,700 teachers, from a profession regularly targeted by militants, want to leave the region. Hundreds have already fled.
The sense of panic is exacerbated by a lack of transparency. Thai journalists are worried that the decree—which originally included a clause censoring news—could be abused to limit their freedoms. Information is already hard enough to wring from the authorities, says Supat Boonthanom, editor of the respected Yala newspaper Chao Tai. During the July 14 attack in her hometown, she tuned into the army-run radio station Tai Santisuk ("Peaceful South"). "The announcer said there had been an explosion and then he just played music," says Supat. "I felt angry. Why couldn't he tell us what was going on?" In the absence of hard facts, rumors multiply—and so does fear. There is constant talk among city-dwelling southerners of another Yala-scale assault, this time on Narathiwat or Pattani.
Buddhists and Muslims both feel under siege, but in different ways. "The more police and soldiers, the better," says a Narathiwat rubber tapper, 48, who would only allow herself to be identified by the nickname "Ngoh." "It makes us feel safer." She lives in Tung Kha, a Buddhist village surrounded by Muslim ones and guarded by troops and a 30-strong village militia. Ngoh, a 48-year-old mother of two, is scared to venture into the plantations each morning. "But if I don't go, I'll starve to death," she says. "We live on a tightrope."
Ngoh describes her Muslim neighbors as "good people," and despairs at the rift between Muslims and Buddhists. A recent gathering of villagers from both religions across the district quickly turned into a bitter debate over security. "Muslims said they wanted the police and soldiers to leave," she recalls. "Buddhists said, 'If they leave, who will guarantee our safety?' The Muslims were silent because they know they can't." She believes the decree will change nothing: "Innocent people still won't get enough protection."
Many Muslims are disturbed by the presence of the security forces. "I suppose they think it makes us feel safer," says the Muslim teacher from Narathiwat, referring to troops who patrol the narrow lanes of his neighborhood in mammoth armored humvees. Police are equally unwelcome, says Sergeant Major Samrid Krongthong, 59, whose men are equipped with assault rifles, grenade launchers, and necklaces of Buddhist charms. Like many police and soldiers now stationed in the south, Samrid hails from outside the region. He finds the local Malay dialect incomprehensible and the residents uncooperative. "Good villagers want relations with the police, but they're scared," says Samrid. "People who talk to the police may be killed by militants." Whatever extra powers are granted by the new decree, the police must still take care not to inflame tensions with the local communities, he warns.
Even though nearly all of Thailand's 6 million Muslims live in the south, popular support for a separate state is not strong. The region's high voter turnout of more than 70% in the February general election suggests that few southerners want independence, NRC chairman Anand noted last week. Yet this is no cause for complacency, with unidentified militants growing more sophisticated in the planning and execution of their attacks, and perhaps drawing inspiration—if not yet direct support—from the global jihadi movement. A "conspiracy of silence" surrounds the militants, says Zachary Abuza, a terrorism expert with the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. "No group has taken credit for any attack, tried to discredit their rivals, or stated their platform," he observes.
"I've been in a hundred battles, but this is the only place I've had to fight ghosts," says policeman Samrid, a veteran of Thailand's anti-communist campaigns of the 1970s. The decree will not make the enemy any clearer. "We don't know who they are," he says. "So how can we win?" Meanwhile, wanted posters multiply at police and train stations and other public places. The Thai word for "dead"—that is, shot by security forces—has been scrawled over some mugshots, but most suspects are still at large despite the promise of hefty rewards. A $250,000 bounty is being offered for fugitive Sapaeng Basoe, the Muslim principal of Yala's Thammawittaya Foundation School. Four of the school's teachers are currently on trial for treason, charged with masterminding attacks, which they deny.
An ideological war now rages within the south's Muslim communities. Militants disseminate their radical creed through leaflets hand-scattered at night in villages or stuck to lamp-posts in towns and cities. One found recently outside a mosque in Pattani's Yarang district excoriates the NRC and "Siamese infidels" who corrupt young Muslims with drugs and money. It warns the "people of Pattani state" to reject all efforts of reconciliation by non-Muslims. "A dog is still a dog, even if it befriends a goat," it says. "People read the leaflets and then destroy them," says a Muslim aid worker in Yala. "Nobody wants to be caught with one in their house or at a checkpoint." The militants threaten death to anyone who destroys their leaflets.
On July 22 two Muslim men were arrested on suspicion of shooting dead an Islamic teacher in Pattani more than seven months ago. But such arrests are conspicuously rare. Inadequate intelligence gathering is largely to blame. Angered by state repression and fearful of militant reprisals, Muslims are unwilling to volunteer information to military and civilian authorities, who in turn are reluctant to share it with one another. So far, no weapons caches or bomb factories have been found. "The intelligence record is dismal," says Abuza.
This poor investigative record also bolsters a popular belief among Muslims that the security forces are responsible for unsolved murders. Last week the parents of a young Muslim called Ilmin Nuruladil filed suit against five soldiers in Yala provincial court for allegedly shooting their son after apparently confusing him with a militant. The soldiers claim they fired in self-defense. (A preliminary hearing is set for Aug. 29.)
Under the new decree, soldiers could theoretically escape such lawsuits in the future, claim rights activists. That alarms Awae, the nickname of a Muslim who lives in a multifaith community in the provincial capital Pattani. Last month three Muslims there were shot dead during evening prayers, possibly by security forces, the neighbors believe. A once peaceful community is now on edge. "If we see a stranger, we're careful about what we say," says Awae. "We live in fear."
- Andrew Marshall | Yala
- Tensions simmer in the country's south as both Muslims and Buddhists lead troubled lives, afraid of being caught between insurgents and the security forces