A top security adviser to the government said yesterday that an underground shadowy movement that has been building its ranks for almost a decade was behind the recent spate of violence in the country’s restive south. General Kitti Rattanchaya said the violence had little to do with the drug trade and was the work of a growing but shadowy movement that wanted a separate Islamic state. He said Islamic separatists had been building their ranks secretly by ’inciting people and training militias at religious schools’ in the south.
’They are now reaching the sixth of seven steps towards establishing an independent Muslim state,’ he said. ’The sixth stage is the armed fight and the undeclared war,’ he said, adding that the final stage was a revolution and the formation of an Islamic state. Gen Kitti did not name the movement, but some believe he may have been referring to one that goes by the name of Pusaka, pronounced as Pusa-koh. The Thai authorities first noticed it more than a year ago in documents found when they raided the home of a teacher, Ustadj Masae Usae, who is thought to be living underground in Malaysia. ’The military believes that is the name of the movement,’ a political science professor at Pattani’s Prince of Songkhla University, Prof Chidchanok Rahimullah, told The Straits Times. ’They say Masae Usae is the head of the movement. But personally, I don’t believe he has the charisma to inspire so many,’ said the professor, who met the teacher some years ago. The movement ’preys on young people who don’t have jobs, don’t have education, can’t get into universities and get into drugs’.
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