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2 village officials killed in southern Thailand
Suspected Muslim militants killed two village officials in Thailand's south, police said on Wednesday, the second anniversary of the start of an insurgency in which more than 1,000 people have been killed.In the sort of incident now commonplace in the provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, a motorcycle gunman shot dead 51-year-old Maromae Masae, a Muslim deputy village chief, as he ate breakfast at a roadside tea-shop. "The gunman posed as a customer, then shot the victim with an 11-mm pistol and got away on the motorcycle his friend was riding," a police officer told reporters at the scene in Sungai Padi, a Narathiwat village 1,200 km (700 miles) south of Bangkok. On Tuesday evening, a gunman using an AK-47 automatic rifle shot dead village-headman Hama Masae, also 51. The gunman lay in wait outside the victim's house and then escaped on a motorbike, scattering spikes behind him to deter pursuit, police said. In what was an independent Muslim sultanate until annexed 100 years ago, 80 percent of people in the far south are Muslim, ethnic Malay and do not speak Thai as a first language, presenting a major problem for mainly Buddhist security forces. Since a Jan. 4, 2004, raid on a military camp marked the start of a new separatist uprising, Bangkok has flooded the region with 30,000 troops and police with martial law powers. It has also tried more unconventional schemes, such as an origami air-drop of millions of paper birds, or free English soccer on cable TV -- although the military and softly-softly approaches have met similar degrees of failure. However, Deputy Prime Minister Chidchai Vanasatidya, who is responsible for day-to-day security in the south, said this week most of those responsible for the unrest had been caught and the government had "fixed 40 percent of the problem". For once, analysts do not wholly disagree. "The government has made some fairly significant strides in the last few months, particularly on the intelligence side," said Anthony Davis of Jane's Intelligence Review. "They've got a much clearer picture of what's going on." Of particular note, Davis said, was a big drop in the number of roadside bombs triggered by mobile phone in November after the government switched off the signal of pre-paid phone users who had not registered their numbers. That said, there is also a risk that leaders of a weakening and hemmed-in insurgency might turn for help to international Islamic militant networks, such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda -- a move they so far appear to have been loathe to do. "Part-and-parcel of being pushed onto the defensive could be a willingness to countenance approaches from outside -- and that would put a whole new complexion on their capabilities," Davis said. Rights group Amnesty International used the anniversary to accuse Bangkok of having "blacklists" of young Muslim men as well as "arbitrary detention, torture and excessive lethal force" in suppressing the insurgency. In one of the darkest moments of the past two years, 78 Muslim men died in military custody in October 2004 after hundreds were rounded up and "stacked like bricks", according to one survivor, in army trucks after a protest. "Clearly the Thai government is facing a great challenge in dealing with the violence, but it has responsibilities towards its citizens and needs to ensure justice is done," Amnesty said in a statement. Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-01-04 |
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