Thailand’s troubled southern provinces exploded into violence yesterday when hundreds of Muslim youths attacked 15 police and military posts in an apparent attempt to seize weapons.
The security forces had been tipped off about the pre-dawn assaults and responded with overwhelming force, killing at least 107 of the attackers, who were mostly armed only with machetes, although a few had guns.
Wednesday was the worst day of violence in a steadily escalating four-month campaign of unrest in the Muslim-dominated Yala, Pattani, Songkhla and Narathiwat provinces of the predominantly Buddhist country. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, which also left five members of the security forces dead.
The Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, branded the perpetrators criminal bandits whom he vowed to crush by force. But opposition politicians and local community leaders believe the disorder is being driven by disaffection with the government’s heavy-handed and haphazard policies towards the region, Islamist terrorists, and turf wars between the police and army.
The coordinated raids on the police bases, village defence posts and district offices began at around 5am.
Local television showed one corpse dressed in a green tunic adorned with orange Arabic writing and the letters JI, a possible reference to Jemaah Islamiyah, the Islamist group with links to al-Qaeda.
Thailand’s army chief, General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra — the Prime Minister’s brother — said that, in contrast to a similar attack on January 4 when four soldiers were killed, the security forces were ready.
”Our intelligence operations have been beefed up a lot with the help of local people,” he said.
The militants’ machetes and clubs were no match for the security forces’ weapons. Television pictures showed rows of corpses lying on the roads outside the attackers’ intended targets. Most were aged 15 to 20, one army commander said, although the oldest was thought to be almost 60.
The deputy prime minister, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, said many appeared to have taken drugs. ”Judging from their dead bodies, they had taken narcotics,” he said. ”Their smell suggested the use of drug-laced cough-drops.”
Some of the attackers with guns managed to fight back. Film of blood-soaked soldiers being evacuated in pick-up trucks was shown repeatedly on local television stations.
The violence peaked at a mosque just outside Pattani town where some 30 of the raiders had sought refuge. Local commanders said they tried to negotiate a solution to the stand-off but the young men refused to surrender, so soldiers used tear gas and rocket-propelled grenades to quell the resistance.
About a dozen of the attackers were captured but the authorities declined to discuss their identity or aims.
Thaksin insisted they were merely members of criminal gangs. ”We will uproot them, depriving them of a chance to allude to issues of separatism and religion,” he said. ”In the end, they were all bandits.”
But other politicians and analysts expressed concern at the number of casualties.
Ong-Ard Klampaiboon, a spokesperson for the opposition Democrat party, said: ”The government believes that if they kill some of them then the others will be afraid and give up. But it’s clear that some of these people are linked to some kind of terrorism, but which group or organisation is not yet known.”
Many analysts believe Thaksin needs to explain the necessity for such violence and develop a more gentle strategy for the Muslim south, the scene of simmering separatism for more than 20 years.
”This is very shocking,” said Bukhoree Yeema, a political scientist in the southern province of Songkhla. ”If the government does not produce a clear-cut explanation, there will be massive repercussions from the Muslim community.” – Guardian Unlimited Â