Quotes of the Day

Amdan Senne didn't know any of the dead, but last Thursday the 23-year-old civil servant from the district of Tak Bai in Thailand's southern Narathiwat province volunteered to act as a coffin-bearer at a funeral for 22 men. They were among 85 killed when what started as a peaceful protest outside the local police station went horribly wrong. Now, three days later, as rifle-toting soldiers stood watch, the shrouded bodies were first laid out under the hot sun on a field next to the 380-year-old ironwood Wadi al-Hussein mosque. Prayers were said. Then, amid the pervasive stink of decay, the bodies were buried in a deep hole. As he watched the diggers fill in the mass grave, Amdan shook his head. "I just can't believe it," he said. Then he threw up.

The story of those who died in Tak Bai began on Monday, Oct. 25, a sultry day with the promise of rain in the air. That morning, about 2,000 Muslim villagers—men, women and children—gathered in a small park across the road from the police station. They had come to demand freedom for six men arrested for allegedly providing arms to Islamic separatist fighters. But the authorities were in no mood to oblige. In the station courtyard stood hundreds of heavily armed police and soldiers brought in to deal with the protest, their weapons drawn. At either end of the road were parked tanks and military trucks. Behind was the Tak Bai river. "It was frightening," recalls one of the protesters, Ai (not her real name), the 38-year-old wife of a rice farmer. "Even if we did want to leave—as the army were telling us to—we felt trapped."

As the day wore on, the police tried repeatedly to negotiate with the demonstrators. They told them the men had been moved to another station and were in good health, and that their case would be decided by the courts. The protesters were not appeased, so at 2:15 p.m. the south's military commander, General Pisarn Wattanawongkeeree, emerged from the station and ordered the crowd to disperse. Shortly after—in what proved to be the military's last attempt at a peaceful solution before taking action—one of Narathiwat's most senior Islamic figures, Abdulrazak Ali, arrived to mediate. "They wouldn't listen to me," says Abdulrazak, a cleric. "There were a few radicals among the protesters, controlling the minds of everyone else." Deputy police commander Vuttichai Hanhaboon, a Buddhist who has spent 10 years in the south, watched the events unfold from his perch on the second-floor balcony of the station. "I looked down on the crowd and thought, 'How many years will it take before these Muslims grow up?' I knew people would die. Why did they not know it and leave, like we asked them to, many times?"

At 3 p.m. an order was given for the military to fire at the crowd with water hoses and tear gas. Many of the men in the group started throwing rocks and bricks at the soldiers. The shooting started soon after. Eyewitnesses TIME talked to say that though most soldiers were shooting into the air, some were aiming at the crowd. A chest-high bullet hole in a concrete post in the park seems to indicate that this might have been the case. The Nation newspaper in Bangkok printed a photograph of a soldier aiming at the crowd with his automatic weapon horizontal to the ground, shell casings spurting out from the magazine. Ai says she saw two men killed in front of her and immediately began to run, like the rest of the crowd, to the river, where they took shelter behind the embankment. Some began swimming out to boats, which had come close to the banks, says Ai, to rescue the demonstrators. Traikwan Kraireuk, Narathiwat's military chief, told TIME the boats were manned by heavily armed insurgents. "It's not true," says Ai, as do other protesters TIME spoke to. "They were just trying to pull people out of the water. And the soldiers shot at them to keep the boats away."

When the shooting stopped around 4 p.m., six protesters were dead and 17 injured. The women and children were led away, and the men—some 1,300 in all—ordered to strip off their shirts. Then they were handcuffed behind their backs and told to lie flat on the ground. Thai TV footage of the event shows soldiers kicking and beating the men. Several of the women told TIME that the men were forced to lie on the ground for more than an hour. No one offered them water. "It's [the Muslim fasting month of] Ramadan," says Vuttichai. "They wouldn't have accepted it anyway." The TV coverage did not show what happened next. Soldiers began loading the men into trucks. Many of the men could not climb up themselves, so they were tossed in, and instructed to lie flat. Then soldiers started stacking the mostly inert bodies one on top of the other, four and five deep. Those who lifted their heads were hit with rifle butts.

Narathiwat military chief Traikwan was inside the station and claims not to have known what was unfolding outside. "I was not aware," he says. "I did not know my soldiers piled up those captured. This may have been a mistake, but you must understand we had limited trucks and there were a lot of men arrested. Also, if they were normal people—and not fasting or on drugs, as I suspect many of them were—they would probably not have died." The men were taken to the military base at Pattani 150 km away. By the time the convoy arrived about six hours later, 78 of the men in the trucks had suffocated to death.

Inside one of the trucks, Azman Roemae, a 22-year-old house painter, lay on the floor trying to breathe. On top of him were five other men. "The pressure was indescribable," he later recalled to TIME. "I have never felt such pain in my life. I thought for certain that I would die." In another truck, Yee, a 25-year-old rubber tapper, was stacked on top of the pile. "We kept whispering to each other, offering words of encouragement and asking each other to move a little to make it more comfortable." Yee knew people were dying beneath him: "You could hear the sound of their breath leave them, the sound of death. We told the soldiers people were dying and asked them for help, but they told us to shut up and walked on top of us." When the convoy finally arrived at Pattani, four were dead in Yee's truck, and three in Azman's. In another truck traveled Azu Haru, 30, a motorbike-taxi driver. Twelve died in his vehicle, which carried, he estimates, 70 people. "When we got to the base," says Azu, "the soldiers found many dead and quickly took them away." Dr. Pornthip Rojanansunnan, a prominent Thai medical examiner who has a reputation for independence, led the team that performed the autopsies in Pattani and says the chief causes of death were asphyxiation and dehydration. "Their faces looked so green," she told TIME.

On Saturday, five days after his ordeal had begun, Azu was released with 1,172 fellow prisoners. A fleet of buses took them to the town of Narathiwat, just 30 km from Tak Bai. The journey back from Pattani this time took not six hours but only two. Muslims lined the highway and cheered as the convoy passed. Some wept with relief. In Narathiwat there was a profound outpouring of emotion as the men were reunited with their families. Azman, who had been arrested on his way to work near the police station and did not participate in the protest, says he just wants to return to his "simple life." "I will try very hard to forget this," he says.

Some who live in the south insist that there are men who have disappeared, whose names do not appear on the arrest list released by the army, nor among the dead, and who have not returned home. For example, eight Muslim employees of a construction company owned by a Buddhist businessman attended the protest; two were killed but the remaining six are missing. "They are not on the list and they were not identified among the dead," says the businessman, who asked to stay anonymous. "Where are they? These are real men with real families. These were not drug takers or bad men, as the government says. They were normal people exercising a democratic right. I am a Buddhist and I will say this: there is no justice for Muslims in this country." From Ai's village, 35 men were arrested, three are dead and seven have disappeared, Ai says. "Many women are missing their husbands or sons."

The Tak Bai tragedy is just one of many deadly episodes that have erupted all year throughout Thailand's Muslim-majority southern provinces. In effect, the south is in the throes of an uprising. Inspired by the ideology of global jihad, once-dormant Islamic separatists have reawakened, setting off bombs and assassinating anyone from soldiers and officials to teachers and monks. There have been deaths on both sides. In April, the authorities gunned down more than 100 Muslims who had apparently launched suicide attacks on military and police posts, armed only with machetes and knives. Now, with Tak Bai, the death toll has risen to some 430 lives since the start of this year.

In the south, the Thai government is pursuing, as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told TIME in a recent interview, a dual policy of "an iron fist and a velvet glove." It has pledged nearly a billion dollars in development aid to the area and tried to involve local communities in decision making, but it has also declared martial law and beefed up troop numbers there. Both strategies are clearly visible in the region. Billboards display the smiling face of Thaksin, standing in front of a tropical beach scene, promising the south's 6 million Muslims "Peace, Unity and Development." Next to the billboards, heavily armed police and soldiers man highway checkpoints, stopping vehicles and body-searching every Muslim male. Yet neither fist nor glove has stopped the deaths. "This is a very dangerous time," says a local Muslim leader, who does not want to be named. "Tak Bai tells us that we are all at risk. These were not insurgents, they were innocent people exercising a democratic right to protest. It tells all of us that any Muslim can be killed."

Muslim anger over what happened at Tak Bai means the violence is likely to escalate. Last Thursday, police defused a fertilizer bomb planted near a school in Narathiwat, and in the evening a bomb exploded in a nightclub in the border town of Sungai Kolok, killing two people, including a Malaysian tourist, and injuring 20. The following day, two separate morning bomb blasts in Yala province injured 18, most of them policemen. Thai Muslim leaders like the moderate Narathiwat cleric Abdulrazak Ali say the Tak Bai tragedy could transform an insurgency still largely confined to radicals and disaffected youth into a popular cause. "It will be impossible to control now," says Abdulrazak. "Before, the problem was just young people who were unhappy; now, it's everyone." Nat, a 30-year-old Muslim accountant who lost two relatives at Tak Bai, says she, like many in the south, knows members of the insurgency. "They are in every town and village," she says. "I know them but until now I did not support them. They had their own reasons for fighting. Now I have a reason too."

In a rare expression of public criticism, two of Thailand's ASEAN partners—Muslim neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia—have voiced concern over what happened at Tak Bai. There were demonstrations of around 500 people in front of the Thai embassies in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, and Malaysia's former Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, urged the Thai government to consider autonomy for the south. "This is like the Palestinian issue," Mahathir was quoted saying in the Utusan Malaysia newspaper. "If settled early, there will be no problems. But the situation will get difficult if it is left to the command of the local army."

The U.S. has urged the Thai government to launch an investigation and "fully examine the circumstances of these deaths." Thaksin initially ordered an internal military probe. In a televised speech on Friday night, however, he announced an independent inquiry to be led by Pichet Soontornpipit, former parliamentary ombudsman. The inquiry, Thaksin said, would include legal and Islamic experts. "The people are entitled to the truth," said Thaksin, "and the government must not hide anything as it has no hidden agenda." Thaksin also expressed regret for the loss of life, and acknowledged that the local authorities erred in how they transported the detainees. But he said that "many weapons were found at the scene" (eyewitnesses and even one of the military commanders at the rally who spoke to TIME say the protesters were unarmed). And he stressed that security forces followed procedure, and that their response was appropriate given that they were facing a hostile crowd influenced, he says, by organizers linked to militants. "This is not about religion at all, [but] a matter of law and order," said Thaksin, insisting that his government was not anti-Muslim. "If I do not maintain law and order and the territorial integrity of the country, who will perform this duty?"

The Prime Minister's speech may have gone over well with his domestic audience, which approves of his tough approach to issues of national security. A war on drugs last year resulted in the deaths of some 2,200 people accused by the authorities of being drug dealers, many reported to have been gunned down in the streets by police. Public opinion polls at the time registered overwhelming approval for the government's actions. "It reflects [Thai society's] desire for decisive leadership," says Chaiwat Satha-anand, a Thai Muslim and political-science professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok. "If I were a politician, I would take that into account in my decision making." But Chiawat continues: "As a leader, you should be concerned with what kind of society you are creating when you resort to violence. He's playing into the hands of the extremists."

For his part, Traikwan Kraireuk, the Narathiwat military chief, is unapologetic about what transpired at Tak Bai. His handling of the protest was "not heavy-handed," he told TIME. He added: "I used the velvet glove. If I used the iron fist, everyone would be dead."

• Andrew Perrin | Tak Bai
• In a day of horror, scores of Thai Muslims in the country's restive south die while in military custody, sparking outrage at home and abroad