Published: August 31, 2009
Courtesy Of The New York Times
PAKA LUE SONG, THAILAND — The Thai soldiers patrolling this hamlet racked by insurgent violence measure their progress modestly: two years ago, villagers closed their shutters and refused to greet them. Now most residents peer out of their wood-frame houses and offer strained smiles.
Yahya Mara, right, 23, a Muslim conscripted into the Thai army, serves as an interpreter in operations in villages racked by insurgent violence.
Second Lt. Pongpayap Petwisai, a 27-year-old army doctor, giving medicine to a woman in Cha Mao, Thailand. "What we are trying to do is get people on our side," Dr. Pongpayap said.
“The local people have started to open their hearts,” said Capt. Niran Chaisalih, the leader of a government paramilitary force garrisoned at the village school.
Paka Lue Song, only a 15-minute drive from the provincial capital of Pattani, is ground zero for Thailand’s “surge” of troops into its troubled southern provinces, where ethnic Malay Muslims are battling for autonomy from Thailand’s Buddhist majority.
The number of Thai security forces, including the army, the police and full-time militiamen, has doubled here over the past two years to about 60,000 personnel, said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a leading expert on the insurgency and the associate dean at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani.
The huge increase in security forces initially helped bring down the overall number of violent incidents as well as the death toll, which fell by 40 percent last year.
But more recently analysts refer to another surge: the number of killings has risen sharply in recent months. More than 317 people have been killed so far this year, compared with 284 in the same period last year. The dead include civilians, soldiers and insurgents.
“The militants have become more efficient,” said Supaporn Panatnachee, a researcher at Deep South Watch, an organization that compiles reports of casualties from a police radio scanner and local news accounts. Since 2004, when the insurgency flared up after a period of relative dormancy, militants have learned to kill with more precision, often attacking villagers with ambushes, Ms. Supaporn said.
The surge in troops is palpable across the three southern provinces, which are only a few hours’ drive from Thailand’s main tourist beaches. There is now the equivalent of one soldier or police officer for every seven households. Humvees patrol the main roads, and police and military checkpoints screen motorists every few kilometers.
Sa-nguan Indrarak, the president of a federation of schoolteachers in the south, questions whether the army’s presence has been worth the 109 billion baht, or $3.2 billion, that the government has spent in the south over the past five years. (Teachers, obvious symbols of the Thai state, have been prime targets in the insurgency, with 95 killed since 2004.)
Troops should leave and the government should train local security forces, who have a better understanding of the terrain, Mr. Sa-nguan argues. Soldiers are resented in part because they behave inappropriately around both mosques and Buddhist temples, drinking and dancing and flirting, he said.
“Thai Buddhists and Thai Muslims have been living together in the same society for a long time,” Mr. Sa-nguan said. “But since the military came in, they just destroyed the local culture.”
There have been so many killings in the three southern provinces — some 3,500 since 2004 — that the government began distributing a glossy brochure last year guiding victims’ families through the process of applying for government compensation.
The insurgency has been distinct from other rebel movements in the region because the perpetrators remain shadowy, ill-defined groups that do not claim responsibility for the violence. Experts believe the aim of the groups, among them the Pattani Islamic Mujahadeen Movement (or GMIP by its Malay acronym) and the National Revolution Front-Coordinate (BRN-C), is to cleanse the area of Buddhists, discredit the Thai government and put into place strict Islamic laws.
But their exact goals and motives are unclear. Although the groups appear to have communicated with and received financing from foreign organizations, most experts discount significant connections with other militant movements, such as Al Qaeda and the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah. The movement in southern Thailand, they say, appears to be a localized struggle over territory and control overlaid with historical resentment over the domination of the Thai state.
Malay Muslims make up about 80 percent of the 1.7 million people living in the three provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, where many people speak only a local dialect of Malay, not Thai. Residents of the Thai provinces often travel to neighboring Malaysia for work.
Muslim villagers say they are angry at the army for detaining their brethren without charge, sometimes for more than a month. Dr. Srisompob, the insurgency expert, says there is a perception that the military is abusing its emergency powers.
The army has initiated a rash of hearts-and-minds projects in villages under the slogan “Understanding, Accessing, Developing.”
In Paka Lue Song, a village considered dangerous enough that local journalists refuse to enter it, army medics are not only trying to win over villagers’ hearts but are treating them, too: Second Lt. Pongpayap Petwisai, a 27-year-old army doctor, walks through the village with a stethoscope around his neck prescribing medication for eye infections, dispensing balms for aching muscles and monitoring blood pressure.
Dr. Pongpayap wears body armor but is unarmed. His medics wield M-16 assault rifles, and his assistant carries medical equipment and a Colt .45 handgun in the pockets of his bulletproof vest.
As they prepared to walk through the village on a recent morning, a soldier raised the antenna of a radio to hear a dispatcher dispassionately issue a bulletin: a police officer had been ambushed in Yala Province.
The soldiers proceeded on their walkabout, handing out vitamin C to children.
“What we are trying to do is get people on our side,” said Dr. Pongpayap, who was partly inspired to become an army doctor by the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.”
The surge of troops is the latest of numerous initiatives to quell the violence that instills widespread fear among both Muslims and Buddhists in the rubber plantations and jungle hamlets.
The ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a military coup in 2006 raised hopes that the generals who took over, including several very senior Muslim officials based in Bangkok, would be more conciliatory than Mr. Thaksin, who had blamed the violence on bandits and oversaw a hard-line policy toward the area. But despite an unprecedented apology for past misdeeds by a military-installed prime minister, the killings continued at the same rate — 775 in 2007.
More recently, the government has stepped up its program of providing weapons to local militias and “village guards,” especially in Buddhist enclaves. These village volunteers now number about 71,000, according to Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, who monitors the insurgency for the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization.
An alarming number of ordinary people carry handguns, she said, raising concerns about vigilante killings and weapons falling into the wrong hands. The airport at Narathiwat has a counter specifically for passengers to deposit their handguns before boarding aircraft.
Dr. Pongpayap said he often receives a chilly reception when he tours villages. Graffiti appeared outside one village the day after he visited. “Don’t come back here,” it said. “If you shoot one of us we will shoot two of you.”
Those who cooperate with the military are prime targets for insurgents. In Paka Lue Song, Dr. Pongpayap examined the injured hand of Gade Yusoh, a 57-year-old rubber tapper who soldiers said had been helpful to them.
Gunmen suspected of being insurgents fired into Mr. Gade’s house one evening three months ago while he was watching television. The bullet ripped through nerves, disfiguring his arm.
“I’m not afraid,” Mr. Gade said. His nervous laugh suggested otherwise.
About 55 percent of those killed in the last five years were Muslim, according to data compiled by Ms. Supaporn of Deep South Watch. Muslims who are in a position of authority and cooperate with the Thai government top the list of victims.
During two days of touring with Dr. Pongpayap, villagers were polite while receiving medical treatment. But when this reporter toured a neighboring village without the army medical team, local officials poured scorn on the initiative.
“They just want a photo opportunity,” said Baemud, a sub-district governor who wanted to be identified only by his nickname for fear of retribution by the army. The soldiers do not understand Muslim culture, they flirt with local girls, periodically round up teenagers as insurgency suspects and force villagers into unnecessary village beautification projects at inconvenient times, Baemud said.
“We want the military to leave and not be involved in our lives,” he said.
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