Quotes of the Day

There's something striking about Ma-ae, but it takes a while to work out what it is. It's not his looks: he's a lanky teenager who, like most Thai youths, wears blue jeans and a T shirt. Nor is it his religion: he's Muslim, like almost everybody else in Thailand's three southernmost provinces. What's striking about him is this: in a part of the country where a separatist insurgency has claimed more than 1,800 lives since it flared anew three years ago, and where ordinary people are gagged by fear and secrecy, Ma-ae talks. He talks about growing up in a remote, militant-held village that has become a virtual no-go zone for Thai security forces. He talks about how insurgents are recruited, initiated and dispatched to commit mayhem and murder. And he talks about his father, a government official and?claim the men who gunned him down?a military informer. He says he knows the names of the killers (they're his neighbors) but dares not confront them. "If I did," he says, "they'd kill me too."

Ma-ae (not his real name) is not the only one talking. In an interview with TIME, a high-ranking insurgent leader confirms what the teenager suggests: a new generation of militants is tightening its grip on the south, employing increasingly brutal methods that threaten to wreck an uncommon mood of conciliation in Bangkok. The leader, who calls himself Hassam and commands 250 fighters, claims there is now at least one militant cell in 80% of southern villages. His and Ma-ae's rare testimony help to illuminate a shadowy insurgency remarkable for its secrecy, resilience and bloodiness.

Since the military coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on Sept. 19, Thailand has been in limbo. At first, public support for the coup was strong: the generals had removed an administration widely viewed as corrupt and divisive, and vowed to quickly restore democracy. Now that support is waning. Martial law is still in place, a date has yet to be set for fresh elections, and no formal corruption charges have so far been brought against Thaksin. But interim Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont has moved more swiftly in the south. He has departed radically from Thaksin's iron-fisted?and ultimately self-defeating?attempts to crush the rebellion. He has personally apologized for the government's past heavy-handedness, including the notorious Tak Bai incident in which 85 Thai Muslim protesters died, and has acknowledged Islam's special place in a corner of this predominantly Buddhist nation. His government has also revived the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center, a peace and development agency credited with keeping a lid on the violence until Thaksin dismantled it in 2002; kick-started the investigation into the 2004 abduction of a prominent Muslim human-rights lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaijit, who is still missing; and last week announced the formation of a special economic zone to boost development in the impoverished region.

But will these initiatives be enough to douse the southern fires, which have burned sporadically since Thailand annexed the independent Pattani sultanate a century ago? Ma-ae and Hassam suggest otherwise. In modern times, the insurgency has been driven by groups such as the Pattani United Liberation Organization (P.U.L.O.) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front, or B.R.N.), set up in the 1960s. The new militants are more ruthless and, while their youthful ranks overlap with P.U.L.O. and B.R.N., they refuse to publicly align themselves with any insurgent outfit. Their leaders are unknown. In the local Malay dialect, the new militants are simply referred to as juwae, or "fighters"?that is, when anyone dares refer to them at all. Most worryingly, the juwae are apparently not interested in talking peace, despite Bangkok's post-Thaksin eagerness to do so. Surayud's fresh approach has had no impact on the daily diet of bomb blasts, shoot-outs and beheadings. "The government has sent some encouraging signals, but it will need to go much further if it hopes to stem the killings," says Francesca Lawe-Davies, a Southeast Asia analyst with the International Crisis Group. "It will need to address the underlying grievances that attract people into armed movements."

Ma-ae is no militant; his father convinced him never to join the fighting. But Ma-ae's village, hidden amid fruit trees and rubber plantations near Thailand's border with Malaysia, is what the Thai military terms a "red zone" of insurgent activity. Soldiers patrolling the area were recently injured by a bomb rigged in the branches of a tree. "The moment you enter my village, all eyes are upon you," says Ma-ae. His father, a well-known local official, angered militants by negotiating the release of state employees being held hostage by a mob protesting the arrest of a suspected insurgent. Ma-ae believes his father was killed on the orders of the cell's leader, a former Islamic teacher in his 40s who often passes Ma-ae in the street. "He still smiles at me," he says.

Ma-ae's generation is a fertile recruiting ground for the insurgency. Southern Muslims have long felt neglected and marginalized by successive Bangkok governments, a sense reinforced by clumsy attempts to assimilate their Malay-speaking Islamic culture. Many Muslim youths are first groomed for rebellion at tadika, or private weekend schools, where they are taught that the invading Siamese (as Thais were then known) stifled their religion and enslaved their people, a version of Pattani history still banned by the state. History seemed to repeat itself when Thaksin sent thousands of troops south to quell the rebellion, culminating with Tak Bai, which radicalized Ma-ae's generation more than any other incident. Initiations take place at night. Each recruit swears allegiance to his cell on a Koran, then eats a piece of paper bearing 24 vows written in Arabic script, washed down with holy water blessed by the village imam. "After you've drunk it you don't feel fear," says Ma-ae. "You can even withstand the pain of torture without confessing."

Ma-ae, who has "four or five" militant friends, says a juwae's first task is to scatter leaflets, crude photocopies bearing death threats or diatribes against "Siamese infidels." He quickly graduates to vandalism?for example, burning the Thai flags that villagers are ordered by the authorities to display outside their homes?and then to actual militant attacks, acting as a lookout or helping to block roads with felled trees or burning tires. Later, he might plant a bomb in a teashop or other public place, which others will remotely detonate. Later still, he might remotely detonate it himself.

Each militant cell has a high degree of operational autonomy: its leader decides when, where and whom to attack. That assault will likely be brutal. In October a 3-year-old girl died of bullet wounds from a drive-by shooting that killed both her parents, while five Buddhist monks were injured by a bomb planted on their morning alms route; in July a primary school teacher was shot dead in front of his pupils. While Buddhist police and soldiers are still the prime targets, these days the militants are killing just as many Muslim civilians. Anyone who joins the government's Thaksin-era job-creation scheme?like Ma-ae's cousin, shot dead by militants in October?is seen as a possible collaborator. Village chiefs, who are state employees, are routinely murdered. Afterwards, their positions either remain vacant or are often filled by militant sympathizers, forming what a local community worker (who requests anonymity) calls "a shadow government of insurgents."

Ma-ae relates all this in a hotel room, out of public view, fearful of meeting the same fate as his father. Militant leader Hassam is different. A doleful-looking man with an ill-concealed revolver in his anorak, Hassam chooses to meet with TIME in a open-air teashop in the southern city of Yala?a measure of how confident the insurgents have become.

While most new militants are under 30 years old, their commanders are often veterans like Hassam, who has fought with both B.R.N. and P.U.L.O. and is now in his 50s. Like other old-school insurgents, Hassam accepted a government amnesty in the 1990s, but rejoined the insurgency after Thaksin rose to power in 2001. In the past, he explains, militants camped out in remote hills along the Thailand-Malaysia border; now they live among the people. "Our men in the city have to be smarter to avoid arrest," he says. "But here it's easier to track the movements of police and soldiers."

Hassam says he doesn't want an independent Islamic state?just more Muslims in local government and a cutback of troops and police in the area. But while the fighting continues, says Hassam, anyone suspected of feeding information to the police or military?men, women, teenagers like Ma-ae, even Muslim religious leaders?is a legitimate target. "It doesn't matter who you are," he says. "If you spy on us, we'll take you out." In one district, he adds, his brothers-in-arms have vowed to murder 10 Buddhists for every Muslim death. Such tactics unsettle some veteran insurgents. "We didn't kill monks or innocent civilians," insists a retired P.U.L.O. operative in the southern province of Narathiwat who asked not to be named. "If a man in my unit was caught violating these rules, I would have no choice but to execute him." The new militants are "just killing for killing's sake," he says. "These youths are different from us," agrees an active B.R.N. commander in Narathiwat. "They don't understand how their brutality could undermine the work of other groups seeking Pattani's liberation." Hassam is scathing about B.R.N. and P.U.L.O. "They belong to the past," he says.

Could differences between the new and old generations split the insurgency? Conceivably. "There is no dispute between us now, but in the future I'm not sure," says the B.R.N. commander. This raises a key question, says Joseph Liow of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore: "How much control do groups like P.U.L.O. have over the violence on the ground?" Not much, suggests Hassam. "We don't talk to the older generation," he says. The juwae, says the B.R.N. guerrilla, "aren't interested in dialogue with anybody. They just want to fight." Such divisions will complicate government efforts to negotiate a cease-fire encompassing all parties. "There are many groups so it's hard to hold talks and to find quick solutions," Defense Minister General Boonrawd Somtas told reporters last week.

Ma-ae is pessimistic too, but unlike the militants who now rule his village and hundreds like it, he believes more violence will solve nothing. "Part of me wants to avenge my father's death. But another part tells me that, when these men die, God will punish them for what they have done."

• Andrew Marshall | Pattani
• A TIME investigation sheds light on the growing strength and radicalism of the new breed of Islamic militants fighting in southern Thailand