Killings in Southern Thailand on the Rise

[CrazyExpat]

PAKA LUE SONG, THAILAND — The Thai soldiers patrolling this hamlet racked by insurgent violence measure their progress modestly: two years ago, villagers closed their shutters and refused to greet them. Now most residents peer out of their wood-frame houses and offer strained smiles.

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“The local people have started to open their hearts,” said Capt. Niran Chaisalih, the leader of a government paramilitary force garrisoned at the village school.

Paka Lue Song, only a 15-minute drive from the provincial capital of Pattani, is ground zero for Thailand’s “surge” of troops into its troubled southern provinces, where ethnic Malay Muslims are battling for autonomy from Thailand’s Buddhist majority.

The number of Thai security forces, including the army, the police and full-time militiamen, has doubled here over the past two years to about 60,000 personnel, said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a leading expert on the insurgency and the associate dean at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani.

The huge increase in security forces initially helped bring down the overall number of violent incidents as well as the death toll, which fell by 40 percent last year.

But more recently analysts refer to another surge: the number of killings has risen sharply in recent months. More than 317 people have been killed so far this year, compared with 284 in the same period last year. The dead include civilians, soldiers and insurgents.

“The militants have become more efficient,” said Supaporn Panatnachee, a researcher at Deep South Watch, an organization that compiles reports of casualties from a police radio scanner and local news accounts. Since 2004, when the insurgency flared up after a period of relative dormancy, militants have learned to kill with more precision, often attacking villagers with ambushes, Ms. Supaporn said.

The surge in troops is palpable across the three southern provinces, which are only a few hours’ drive from Thailand’s main tourist beaches. There is now the equivalent of one soldier or police officer for every seven households. Humvees patrol the main roads, and police and military checkpoints screen motorists every few kilometers.

Sa-nguan Indrarak, the president of a federation of schoolteachers in the south, questions whether the army’s presence has been worth the 109 billion baht, or $3.2 billion, that the government has spent in the south over the past five years. (Teachers, obvious symbols of the Thai state, have been prime targets in the insurgency, with 95 killed since 2004.)

Troops should leave and the government should train local security forces, who have a better understanding of the terrain, Mr. Sa-nguan argues. Soldiers are resented in part because they behave inappropriately around both mosques and Buddhist temples, drinking and dancing and flirting, he said.

“Thai Buddhists and Thai Muslims have been living together in the same society for a long time,” Mr. Sa-nguan said. “But since the military came in, they just destroyed the local culture.”

There have been so many killings in the three southern provinces — some 3,500 since 2004 — that the government began distributing a glossy brochure last year guiding victims’ families through the process of applying for government compensation.

The insurgency has been distinct from other rebel movements in the region because the perpetrators remain shadowy, ill-defined groups that do not claim responsibility for the violence. Experts believe the aim of the groups, among them the Pattani Islamic Mujahadeen Movement (or GMIP by its Malay acronym) and the National Revolution Front-Coordinate (BRN-C), is to cleanse the area of Buddhists, discredit the Thai government and put into place strict Islamic laws.

But their exact goals and motives are unclear. Although the groups appear to have communicated with and received financing from foreign organizations, most experts discount significant connections with other militant movements, such as Al Qaeda and the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah. The movement in southern Thailand, they say, appears to be a localized struggle over territory and control overlaid with historical resentment over the domination of the Thai state.

For the rest of the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01iht-thai.html?_r=1

[nyoen]

i'm so sadly when i;ve read this article. i hope that goverment will be continuing to create Thailand more peaceful...