Quotes of the Day
He is old—around 70—and frail, relying on a walking stick. But the imam's voice is strong, and the some 50 men, women and boys crammed into a dingy room sit enraptured as he talks for two hours, waving his hands for emphasis and making eye contact with his listeners. The subject matter is familiar: verses of the Koran spliced with denunciations of the war the U.S. and its allies are waging against Islam; the suffering of Muslims worldwide; the sacred duty to struggle against those who would deny Muslims the chance to worship in peace. The preacher's voice—he requested anonymity—rises as he issues a final, passionate appeal, a call for jihad against a cruel government that, he says, is oppressing the faithful. "Will you join hands with me to fight? Fight the army that tortures and kills our people? The army that has caused the disappearance of many Muslims?" The crowd cries out in assent, the younger men standing together, holding hands and shouting "Allahuakbar!" (God is great!) again and again.
A scene like this, witnessed recently by a TIME reporter, would not be unusual in Indonesia, which, since the Bali atrocity two years ago this week, has been periodically rocked by bombings instigated and executed by Islamic extremists. But this assembly took place in Sungai Golok, a small town deep in the Thai south, a poor region that borders Malaysia and which is home to Thailand's 6 million-strong Muslim minority. All year, the south has been wracked by a wave of violence that has already claimed more than 350 lives. Hardly a week seems to pass without a bombing or an assassination, with soldiers, policemen, monks, teachers, even a judge targeted. Last week, five security officials were killed and nearly a dozen injured in separate incidents, including a bomb attack on a truck carrying Thai soldiers. The government once blamed the unrest on assorted criminal gangs. But in the face of mounting casualties, it acknowledged by midyear that the south was in the grip of an Islamic insurgency. What's only emerging now, however, is that the militants are fired by the global jihad against nonbelievers and egged on by radical clerics preaching death to infidels. "This is a domestic problem with the fashion of [an Islamic] brotherhood," Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told TIME in an interview last week. "Some religious teachers are recruiting students to stage violence. This has gained momentum since 9/11."
Violence is not a new phenomenon in the three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. In the 1970s and '80s, the region was buffeted by bouts of unrest, but those then taking up arms had independence as their goal—not jihad. By the 1990s the handful of guerrilla bands fighting for a separate state had been largely marginalized by the central government's conciliatory approach. Bangkok pumped development funds into the south, started governing through local leaders, including Muslims, and pardoned a host of insurgents. Relative calm returned, until this year. Now, say experts, what used to be a nationalist agenda pursued by essentially secular groups has been hijacked by Islamic radicalism. "In the post-9/11 world, there is no such thing anymore as a local Muslim struggle," says Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror and who is assembling a database on extremist Islamic groups in Southeast Asia. "Be it al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates, some part of the international Islamic militant movement will move in with logistical help, training and, above all, money."
Thai authorities say they suspect but cannot positively prove foreign involvement in the violence in the south. Clearly, however, the insurgency is showing the fervor of jihadist groups elsewhere, most notably a readiness to die for the cause. The most potent evidence surfaced on April 28, when 108 Thai Muslims were killed by security forces in what appeared to be coordinated suicide attacks on military and police posts throughout the south (17 others were captured). Mostly young men in their 20s, the attackers almost to a man carried only knives and machetes and shouted "Allahuakbar!" as they approached their targets—ensuring that the heavily armed defenders had plenty of time to mow them down.
Thai security officials say interrogations of those apprehended reveal that most of their leaders are young ustaz, or Islamic teachers, who spent their formative years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, many of them returning to Thailand as recently as a few years ago. This generation imbibed the heady, radical ideas swirling through the madrasahs after the mujahedin's success against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And many brought the idea of jihad back home with them. "We're not saying all these men are terrorists, of course," says General Pisarn Wattanawongkeeree, commander of the roughly 8,000 troops charged with keeping peace in the south. "But there is no doubt that the basis for this new insurgency are the ustaz. This is something that has been in the making for a long time."
Moderate religious teachers acknowledge that some of their fellow ustaz are pushing their students to martyrdom. But they say it is almost impossible to prevent. "I have 300 students," says Syed Daud, a genial 55-year-old ustaz who wears a traditional white cloth turban and runs a school in the countryside near the town of Yala. "But how can you stop five of them being lured away by people who promise they'll go to heaven or won't be hurt by bullets?"
The story of Abdullah Akoh provides a chilling window into just how young men are "lured away." A 31-year-old ustaz, Abdullah is being held in a military hospital, recovering from bullet wounds received when shooting dead a soldier in July. He says that as a boy he was told tales of atrocities committed by security forces against Muslims and so needed little convincing that the south should secede. Abdullah says he was recruited by a traveling preacher called Ustaz Soh. "The organization is always looking for people and has members all over, seeing who has the potential to be an insurgent," he told TIME. Abdullah spent four years preparing for a mission. Sometimes his training consisted of paramilitary drills in remote jungle locations, always with other young men from different parts of the south. But most often it involved chanting prayers over and over, frequently tens of thousands of times a day, he says. These exercises, Ustaz Soh told Abdullah, would protect him from bullets.
But perhaps because he was older and less impressionable, when he was finally ordered into action on April 28, Abdullah balked. He says he refused because it was suicidal to attack "soldiers with M-16s when we only had knives. Ustaz Soh was very angry with me, and three weeks later he came back and ordered me to attack on my own. He said the leaders had decided that attacks would now use guns and bombs, and gave me a 9-mm pistol. When I asked for a driver, he told me a boy from my own village would drive the motorcycle, the first time I knew that he was part of the organization too." Having studied his target's movements for a week, Abdullah says he rode up behind two soldiers on a motorbike and shot the pillion rider in the back, killing him. The other soldier fired back, hitting Abdullah three times.
It's not just the sermons of radical clerics that brainwash young Thai Muslims. On many of the youths killed on April 28, a 65-page booklet was found. TIME has seen a copy. Handwritten in Malay, the language of Thai Muslims, but using Arabic, not Roman, script, most of the pamphlet consists of repeated exhortations to the "Warriors of Martyrdom." A sample: "Sacrifice your flesh to the last drop of blood ... blood that will trickle down the warriors' bodies and flood the soil in red, reflecting a red radiance across the sky at dawn and dusk, the East and West calling on warriors to declare jihad." Also noteworthy is the paucity of references to the liberation of the south. Farish Noor, a Malaysian expert on Islam who recently spent several weeks in the region, says "the language used is the same with international jihad. It looks like the manuscript has been transplanted into [southern] society. In fact, it looks like they don't care about autonomy."
For Thaksin, the south is the problem that won't go away. Since he came to power nearly four years ago, Thaksin, in the mold of other Asian leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, has stressed economic growth as the key policy objective of his government. The economy is still likely to grow nicely in 2004—Thaksin told TIME he thought a rate of 6.5% was achievable—but it will not reach the level of 8% he predicted at the beginning of the year. In his interview with TIME, Thaksin blamed the reduced forecast on unrest in the south along with SARS, bird flu and rising oil prices. Yet even if the other problems disappeared, the south would continue to demand his attention. Though Thai authorities have imposed martial law in the south, pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid, and tried to involve local communities in decision making, the area is still not fully under control. And in an economy where tourism remains an important driver, the prospect of unrest and the presence of Islamic militants are hardly happy ones.
Thaksin is plainly worried about the south. Last week he reshuffled his Cabinet for the ninth time in three years, replacing, among others, ministers and key personnel in charge of the south. In the latest reshuffle, Thaksin appointed a new Defense Minister, General Sanphan Boonyanan, and a new military chief for the south, General Sirichai Thanyasari. Thaksin also sidelined his Deputy Prime Minister, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who had previously overseen the region. Local newspapers say the removal of Chavalit and the naming of Sanphan and Sirichai, two relative unknowns, suggests the Prime Minister now intends to adopt a more hands-on role to sorting out the south.
He will face a tough task. While security forces have rounded up scores of suspects in recent months, no ringleader has yet been captured. "We have all the names," Thaksin told TIME, "[but] we cannot find them." That may be because the main figures are not based in Thailand. Ever since militants attacked a Thai army camp in January, killing four soldiers and disappearing with more than 400 automatic weapons, officials have become increasingly convinced that leaders of the insurgency are hiding in Malaysia, given the laxity of frontier checkpoints. "It's not easy looking for them because they are in and out [of Thailand]," said Thaksin. While the two governments have beefed up joint security efforts along the 500-km border, Kuala Lumpur has yet to locate a single person on Bangkok's most-wanted list. "I wish [the Malaysians] could arrest the key people—that would be very helpful," said Thaksin. For their part, Malaysian officials say they are closely monitoring the border to track down suspected militants. "There's no question that we are doing everything in our power to catch these guys," says a top official in Kuala Lumpur. "And if we do find them, they'll be arrested and interrogated like anyone else." When Thaksin hosts Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi this week, the issue of cross-border infiltration is likely to be high on their agenda.
In the meantime, Thaksin is pursuing a policy of "an iron fist and a velvet glove" in the south—stern military action combined with more development aid. "Recruitment [by the militants] is effective because there is so much poverty," he said. "That is why poverty eradication is a major activity that we have to do." So far, however, the dual approach has failed to stop the bloodshed. Nidir Waba, one of the most senior and moderate Muslim leaders in the south, says that despite some improvements, the hard line taken by the military together with memories of the April 28 massacre create a deep distrust. "There is no sincerity," says Nidir. "There is a big gap between what is promised and what's implemented. If the government does live up to what it has promised, the violence and tension will be lessened." But so long as the ideology of global jihad continues to gain recruits in the south, neither iron nor velvet will soon bring peace to the region. "There are thousands of others like me out there," Abdullah Akoh the ustaz told TIME. "Almost every day someone gets shot or a bomb goes off and the police and army can't catch them. It's only going to get bigger and bigger." Pray that he's wrong.
- Simon Elegant | Pattani
- Muslims have been fighting for decades for a separate state in Thailand's south. Now, for many, the goal is no longer independence but jihad