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The Road to Jihad?
...With scores of other sons, brothers and fathers likewise vowing revenge, Thailand's south, home to most of the nation's 6 million Muslim minority, is again a powder keg ready to explode. The south is the country's poorest region and was once wracked by a guerrilla insurgency agitating to set up an independent Islamic state. The militants, who often hid in neighboring Malaysia, were not widely supported, but their cause reflected the resentment and sense of marginalization that many Thai Muslims felt. The movement waned in the 1980s and '90s as the authorities in Bangkok boosted economic aid to the south, gave it some autonomy and pardoned many insurgents. And though there had been a steadily rising tide of killings and attacks on security posts in the south in recent years, most officials and analysts dismissed the unrest as sporadic and low-level, blaming bandits as much as they did separatistsâuntil last week's bloodbath. Now the scale and ferocity of the April 28 violence is forcing Thais to confront the reality that Islamic militancy in the south has escalated into a national crisis. The morning after the killings, "Thais woke up to a new reality," editorialized Bangkok's The Nation newspaper. "What happened... may change Thailand forever." The most profoundâand dangerousâfallout is the potential internationalization of what had previously been a local problem. The image of non-Muslim security personnel firing rocket-propelled grenades and M-16s as they storm the most sacred mosque in Pattani province could serve as a rousing recruitment ad for Islamic radicals worldwide to join the jihad in Thailand. "There's a real danger that militants from Malaysia, Indonesia or the Arab world will now become involved in Thailand's internal conflict," says Anusorn Limmanee, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Any involvement by outside extremists would also raise another grim specter: the possibility that the militants might turn their sights on the millions of foreigners who flock to Thailand's beach resorts, dealing a body blow to the country's chief source of foreign currency, its $7 billion-a-year tourism industry. Ominously, one Islamic separatist group that had been quiet for decades, the Pattani United Liberation Organization (P.U.L.O.), published a warning to foreign tourists on its website within 24 hours of the killings. The message, addressed to "Dear People of the World," said: "Persons who plan to visit Thailand NOW are warned not to travel to Pattani ... Pattani people are not responsible for what happens to you after this warning." The notice pointedly includes the tourist havens of Phuket and Krabi, a few hours' drive away. Already, the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia have advised their citizens to avoid Thailand's south. Posted by: tipper 2004-05-10 |
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