Muslim insurgency stokes fear in southern Thailand
International Herald Tribune ^ | February 25, 2007 | Seth Mydans
iht.com
Some are already calling it war, a brutal Muslim separatist insurgency in southern Thailand that has taken as many as 2,000 lives in three years, with almost- daily bombings, drive-by shootings, arson and beheadings.
It is a conflict the government admits it is losing. [...]
A new policy of conciliation pursued by Thailand's junta since it took power in a coup five months ago has been met by increased violence, including a barrage of 28 coordinated bombings in the south that killed or injured about 60 people a week ago. [...]
"Buddhist monks have been hacked to death, clubbed to death, bombed and burned to death," said Sunai Phasuk, a political analyst with the Human Rights Watch monitoring group. "This has never happened before. This is a new aspect of violence in the south."
Some remote areas in the south have become, in effect, no-go zones for the police or military, according to Francesca Lawe-Davies, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.
"It appears in the last year or so that insurgent groups are actually starting to control territory in a more conventional sense," she said.
Some Buddhist and Muslim villages have begun sealing themselves off from one another. People say that old friendships and patterns of cooperation are being undermined by mistrust.
In a report published last month, Zachary Abuza, the author of "Militant Islam in Southeast Asia," said that entire Buddhist communities have fled in a "de facto ethnic cleansing."
Human Rights Watch counted more than 6,000 violent incidents over the past three years. It said that more than 60 teachers and 10 students had been killed and 110 schools — the most visible signs of central government authority in many places — had been set ablaze.
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