May 1, 2009



Insurgents defy Thai military surge
By Brian McCartan

CHIANG MAI - Insurgents have stepped up the tempo and coordination of attacks in Thailand's three violence-prone southernmost provinces, killing 12 and injuring 38 over a nine-day period this month. The attacks came just before the anniversary of what some consider a military massacre of local Muslims and represented a sharp counterpoint to the Thai army's claim that its surge tactics are working.

The first wave of violence took place in Yala province on April 20, beginning with an attack on a local teashop by gunmen who wounded four people. In the following three hours, between 8pm and 11pm, seven more attacks took place across five of the province's eight districts, involving drive-by shootings, raids on military outposts, arson attacks and ambushes of military patrols. Four civilians and one paramilitary ranger were injured. On the



same night, two military outposts came under attack in the Rueso district of neighboring Narathiwat province, resulting in one injured civilian.

Insurgents continued their attacks in Yala on April 22 with an ambush triggered by a roadside bomb in Bannang Sata district. Three border patrol policemen were wounded, two of whom later died. The following day, three paramilitary rangers were injured by a roadside bomb in Krongpinang district of Yala province. A more determined attack took place at a police station of the Raman district in the same province, wounding eight police officers and one civilian, two of the victims critically.

In Pattani province, two drive-by shootings resulted in the shooting of one ranger officer. A local government office was also burned down.

On April 24, a five-kilogram bomb hidden in a motorcycle injured 15, including a 6-year-old boy, in Narathiwat's Rusoe district. The explosion occurred just hours after several hundred local people pledged their support for the government and vowed not to take part in the insurgency.

More coordinated violence took place in Narathiwat early on April 27. During a one-hour period, 11 attacks were made across five districts. Electrical transformer poles were damaged or destroyed by bombs, plunging two districts into darkness. A school and house were burned down, cell-phone transmission towers were burned, and six bombs were planted but failed to detonate.

The latest attacks took place on Monday, when five violent incidents resulted in nine deaths in Yala province. The victims included a family of five who were gunned down in their home, only a 13-year-old girl surviving the assault. A government official was shot and killed in Pattani province and a civilian was injured when a police station was shot up in Narathiwat province, bringing the total for the night to 10 killed and three wounded.

The violence came on the eve of the fifth anniversary of a security force assault on the historic Krue Se mosque in Pattani and underscored the insurgents' still strong operational capabilities. The 2005 siege on the mosque ended in the deaths of 28 militants who had taken shelter inside the sacred structure, which was heavily damaged in the assault, and raised local ire towards the military. Other clashes that day between security forces and Muslim youths, mostly armed with knives and machetes, resulted in the deaths of 107 people. Since then, Krue Se has become a symbol of the government's perceived heavy-handedness in putting down the insurgency in the region.

That sentiment has been heightened by the lack of charges laid against any of the officers or soldiers involved in the incident, now pushed under the carpet by five successive Thai governments. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) Asia-Pacific Director Richard Normand said this week that reaction "appears to contradict the findings of high-level independent investigations, including by the National Reconciliation Commission, that the Thai security forces used disproportionate force and that the case should be formally pursued through organs of the justice system".

The National Reconciliation Commission was set up by the Thaksin Shinawatra government in March 2005 in a bid to find solutions to the southern problem. The ICJ joined the Lawyers Council of Thailand, the Cross Cultural Foundation, the Muslim Attorneys' Center and the Working Group on Justice for Peace in requesting the attorney general to explain why none of the officers or soldiers involved in the incident were held responsible.

The Thai army and other security forces have come in for repeated criticism by local and international human rights groups for alleged human rights abuse committed in its counter-insurgency operations. The rights groups claim that Thai security forces act within a culture of impunity granted to them by martial law instituted in 2004 and an emergency decree declared by the Thaksin government in 2005 that is still in place.

Culture of impunity
Those legal measures give security forces the right to detain suspects for up to 37 days without a warrant and also protect security personnel from prosecution. Several incidents of alleged torture, disappearances and extra-judicial killings while in detention have been levied against the security forces. Human rights groups say little has been done to either stop the practices or hold perpetrators responsible. Local residents and human rights groups also complain of troops tramping through houses during searches, theft of property and frequent detentions of mostly young males.

One well-placed army official claims that this view ignores army efforts to use the judicial system and a new emphasis on human rights and justice instituted by army commander General Anupong Paochinda. Anupong makes a point, he says, of telling officers during his frequent visits to conflict areas in the south to avoid human-rights violations. As evidence, he cited the ongoing trial of soldiers involved in the killing of a local imam while he was held in detention at an army camp in Narathiwat. The trial of at least one young officer and several other soldiers is being held with Anupong's consent and in a civilian court, the official said.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has said that he would like to make counter-insurgency operations in the south less military-focused. He has floated the idea of lifting martial law and the emergency decree as steps toward improving the human-rights situation and sending a signal to the local population that his government is serious about pursuing justice. Abhisit established a special cabinet-level committee to consider options for improving the situation in the south soon after coming to power late last year.

The premier's more conciliatory tone, however, has been somewhat blunted by army statements that it will remain in control of operations in the region, his defense of the military against recent accusations of torture and his probable political debt to the military for his rise to political power. On extending the emergency decree for another three months on April 17, Abhisit claimed the measures were necessary and had proven effective in curbing violence.

The following day, deputy interior minister Thaworn Senneam announced that the government would spend more than 50 billion baht (US$1.4 billion) on infrastructure and livelihood projects in the region. The funds, which are an initiative of the special cabinet committee, will be disbursed from 2010 to 2012 in Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat and four insurgency-affected districts of Songkhla province. Under the project, each village will be given 228,000 baht for development projects. In addition, 100,000 families will be selected to take part in an economic self-sufficiency program, which includes a 6,000 baht grant. A portion of the budget will also be used to establish an Islamic court to handle disputes between local Muslims.

The army claims that its counter-insurgency measures have been successful in stabilizing the region. Internal Security Operations Command reported on Wednesday a sharp drop in violence over the six months to March compared with the same period in 2007 and 2008. During a one-day visit to the region on April 23, Anupong said the situation had dramatically improved as a result of increased cooperation between residents and security personnel. Army and police sources claim that trust between the people and security forces has recently increased and as a result they are receiving better information leading to militant arrests and seizures of weapons and explosives caches.

Analysts and military experts, however, have noted that the number of violent incidents have been growing since a falloff last year. Statistics from Deep South Watch, an academic think tank at the Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani that monitors the insurgency, indicate that attacks are on the rise again this year, with numbers climbing to over 100 in March. That's still much lower than when the army's surge tactics came into force in June 2007, when there was an average of 200 violent incidents per month. The monitoring group says incidents against security forces and people working with the security forces have increased, while attacks against civilians have dropped.

Terror tactics
The use by insurgents of beheading as a terror tactic, as well as arson attacks on schools and other state structures are also on the rise this year. A military source who spoke with Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity claims that those terror tactics are an indication of the military's recent success and the insurgents' growing desperation. More than 3,400 people have died and some 5,600 injured since the insurgency re-ignited in 2004.

One indication that the military's counter-insurgency program is still struggling was the announcement in March of the deployment of 4,000 security personnel in addition to the 60,000 already based in the region. If the military has gained the upper hand, it would not be necessary to bring in yet more troops, some analysts argue. Defense spending on the southern insurgency has reached about 109 billion baht per year, according to Deep South Watch.

The spike in recent attacks and the coordinated nature of this month's assaults could signal that insurgents have restructured their operations to better deal with the army's surge tactics and are now prepared to fight back. The English-language Bangkok Post cited a Thai security official on April 6 saying that the Barasi Revolusi Nasional (BRN), one of several insurgent groups active in the area, had recruited fighters this year and was planning to send about 150 young fighters to launch a new series of attacks this month.

One Thai military source disagrees, saying that the recent attacks were an attempt by the insurgents to attract public attention and did not indicate an improvement in their military capabilities or indicate the insurgency was resurgent. Some security analysts and military experts contend that the recent incidents were intended as a test for newly trained insurgent recruits. They base that assessment on the fact that many of the attacks entailed firing from a distance and bombing isolated targets as opposed to assaults on outposts and bomb-triggered roadside ambushes.

There have been repeated and still unsubstantiated claims that insurgents have been trained by foreign militants and received weapons purchased from foreign countries, including Libya. Army and police sources, however, told this correspondent that so far there are no concrete links to foreign Islamic militant groups or weapons smuggling networks. The insurgency, although sometimes couched in militant literature written with global jihadist terms, is still a local affair with local aims, they say.

Security officers had previously said surge tactics had limited insurgents' freedom of movement and crimped their ability to undertake operations across districts or provinces. However, an ISOC report released on Wednesday noted that the most common form of attack over the past six months have been drive-by shootings, usually using motorcycles. The number of recent attacks and their coordinated nature reconfirms that the insurgents are not an ad hoc movement, but have some centralized control, even if only for specific operations.

With the security situation largely unchanged since 2004, no insurgent leaders claiming responsibility for the violence, and only suspect statistics to gauge progress, the media has suffered news fatigue in covering the conflict. The Thai public has also lost interest, due in part to the larger and increasingly violent political drama taking place in the streets of Bangkok. Until Bangkok's political problems are resolved, the south will receive only scant government attention, and as the past two weeks of attacks have shown, the violence will rage on.

Brian McCartan is a Chiang Mai-based freelance journalist. He may be reached at brianpm@comcast.net.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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There are more people being killed in Southern Thailand than there is is Palestine or maybe even Iraq...Where is the World Press coverage?...Where are the movie stars and Bono telling the story? Where are the UN complaints?...Where are the arrests and convictions of the wrong doers on both sides?

I suggest to you that Thailand wants to sweep this under the rug in fear of further halting of tourism and foreign investment dollars...