Who is behind the violence in southern Thailand? (Overview)
(AsiaNews/SCMP) Behind the upsurge in violence in Thailand's troubled south there are faceless groups and interests that are hard to pin down. For some observers, the attacks are the work of Islamic rebels acting in cooperation with criminal elements, smugglers, drug traffickers, corrupt politicians foreign jihadists and separatists. Thai secret services and Western security analysts believe that at least three militant groups operate in Thailand's south, plotting attacks and training Muslim combatants in order to set up a sultanate in the three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.
Attacks may be co-ordinated, but there appear to be no unified command structure, partly because of personal rivalries between the militant leaders, some of whom live in Malaysia.
The most feared group is the National Revolutionary Front Co-ordinate, an outgrowth of a decades-old separatist network that uses Islamic schools to recruit and indoctrinate ethnic Malay Muslims who form the majority in this corner of Thailand.
The other players are the Pattani Islamic Mujahideen Movement, founded by Afghan war veterans in the mid-1990s, and the remnants of the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), a group that faded in the late 1980s.
Militants are broadly in favour of reviving an Islamic sultanate that ruled the area for centuries until annexation by Thailand in 1906.
Despite reports of foreign infiltration and links to rebels in Aceh, intelligence sources say the insurgency is home-grown and driven by a separatist ideology.
In the absence of any claims of responsibility for the attacks that plague the south, conspiracy theories flourish.
Among Muslims, there is a tendency to deny that Muslim militants could be to blame. Instead, they see the hidden hand of Thai politicians and criminal rackets.
For their part, Thai authorities view the violence as terrorism and blame local people of Indonesian and Malaysian origin.
Perhaps the biggest question is whether militants will eventually come forward with political demands and put a face to the separatist movement.
What is certain though is that Thailand is facing a shadowy force that is digging in for a long fight and shows no willingness to negotiate a way out.
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22/04/2006
