Posted on 05/14/2004 11:46:05 PM PDT by Destro
May. 13, 2004 9:53
What would Buddha say?
By ERIK SCHECHTER
Thai soldiers on patrol in Chang Hai Temple, Pattani Province. The secessionists received training from Syria. (AP)
Flanked by a security detail, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra stopped in the southern Thai village of Krong Pinang on May 6 to knead sweet roti bread with the locals. He also made the requisite tour of a mosque and an Islamic school and even tried his hand at tapping rubber on a plantation, reported Singapore's Strait Times.
It was damage control, Thai style.
Just a week earlier, Thai security forces had been tipped off about a plan by Muslim rebels to attack police and army posts in a coordinated, early-morning raid. Lying in wait, the police shot to death more than 100 insurgents, many of them machete-wielding teenagers riding in on brand-new motorcycles.
Some of the surviving Muslim guerrillas retreated to the red bricked, 16th-century Kreu-Se Mosque, in the southern Pattani, but the holy site provided no sanctuary. The Thais finished them off with rocket-propelled grenades.
The doomed attack was a replay of a more successful operation in January, in which rebels made off with 300 rifles. But the Thai defense minister called this latest one "a suicide operation," claiming that young insurgents had been "brainwashed by a mastermind."
Responding to demands from the UN, Thailand agreed to appoint a commission of inquiry, staffed with Muslims, to investigate whether or not the authorities had used excessive force. The police commander in the south, Lt.-Gen. Proong Bunphandung, was likewise transferred to Bangkok. But the good faith shown by this Buddhist democracy has made little impact: Another policeman was murdered, last Friday, in the Narathiwat province.
TO BE fair, the insurgents have a historical gripe. While only four percent of Thailand's 63 million people are Muslim, most of them are ethnic Malays living in five southern provinces. These lands once belonged to a single Muslim state, Pattani, which was a vassal to successive Siamese kingdoms in the north.
And Pattani has never kneeled without a fight.
In the 1630s, the sultanate refused to pay tribute to the powerful kingdom of Ayutthaya, provoking a series of failed invasions. The Malay Muslim statelet eventually knuckled under, but in 1757, when Ayutthaya was laid to waste by the Burmese, Pattani took the opportunity to declare independence.
It was a brief victory. King Rama I, founder of a new Siamese dynasty, soon took Pattani and in 1909 the sultanate was formally annexed to the Buddhist country.
During the Second World War, the Muslim region tried again to win its sovereignty. Thailand had allied with Japan, so the Pattani rebels sided with the British. However, after the war, the British forgot their promises of independence to the ethnic Malay Muslims, thus planting the seeds for modern secessionist movements.
In 1968, Tenku Bira Kotanila, a Muslim Indian intellectual, created the formidable Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO). For the next two decades, PULO was the dominant separatist group in the south - thanks, in part, to Syrian military training and funding from the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS).
Ironically, the status of Muslims in Thailand was already improving by that point.
THE WORST discrimination occurred during the fascist reign of Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram. According to Raymond Scupin, an anthropologist at Lindenwood University, "The Thai government tried to forcibly assimilate the Malay Muslims through education, political repression, ethnic Thai nationalism based on notions of a 'Thai race'... and Buddhist education."
Muslims were banned from using Arab names and wearing the Malay sarong; Bangkok even regulated how Muslim women were supposed to carry their baskets.
But a year after Songkhram was removed from power, the Thai government passed the Patronage Act of 1945, which gave official status to Islam. A religious functionary, the Shaikh al-Islam would advise the king on local Muslim issues, and the ulama, or scholars, would be employees of the Interior Ministry.
Andrew Tan, a security analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, notes that in 1977, the government used development programs to fight poverty in the south.
"The Thais have spent a great deal of time and effort on dealing with 'root causes' and to a large degree have been successful," says Tan.
Indeed, by the mid-1980s, the rebellion in the south was simmering down as the local population lost faith in PULO's violent methods. Scupin says that "the Muslims in the south began to mobilize in new political organizations calling for more dialogue and negotiations with the Thai government."
The PULO rallied with smaller Muslim factions under the banner of the United Front for the Independence of Pattani (or just Bersatu, "United" in Malay), yet its fortune did not change in the 1990s. Its headquarters in Mecca was raided by Saudi authorities. Its ranks were depleted by a government amnesty program.
For much of Thailand's history, the military has hijacked national politics, but in October 1997, the government passed its 16th constitution, ushering in a number of democratic reforms. In terms of political rights, the New York-based Freedom House now rates Thailand a decent 2.5 on a scale of one to seven, considering it as free as India and Peru.
Muslims share equally in that democracy. In proportion to its overall population, Thailand's Muslims have eight senators and 22 representatives in the National Assembly. The last government had a Muslim foreign minister, and Wan Muhamad Noor Matha - called a "collaborator" by the radical PULO - is currently one of five deputy prime ministers.
Curiously, the dozens of foreign media reports that allege anti-Muslim discrimination never specify what forms it takes. By contrast, one informed observer contended that at the very worst, Bangkok could be accused of religious insensitivity. For instance, it offered college scholarships from money raised in the national lottery and, through conventional interest-paying banks, a debt-release program for farmers - neither of which could be accepted by a devout Muslim.
But such complaints do not fuel a revolution.
In fact, the Thais had thought they had finally put an end to their Muslim rebellion in the south a few years ago. In January 1998, the Malaysian authorities arrested four top PULO commanders and handed them over to Thailand, a blow which prompted massive defections among Muslim guerrillas.
In 2000, a Thai military chief confidently declared in The Nation, an English-language daily based in Bangkok, "Twenty years ago, there were about 1,000 armed pro-separatists. Today, the number is about 100..."
TO BE sure, Thailand still has many problems that can be exploited by the rebels.
Human Rights Watch analyst Brad Adams notes that "Thai elections are extremely corrupt" and that the Thaksin government has been backsliding on democracy, especially with its shoot-to-kill policy that has "killed 2,500 suspected drug-dealers."
This carte blanche attitude to law enforcement especially affects Thai-Malay Muslims since, according to the CIA, southern Thailand is a major conduit for the heroin trade. But drug smugglers are not the only ones targeted by out-of-control police officers.
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has reported that a prominent Muslim human rights lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaijit, has disappeared since March. Believed to have been kidnapped and murdered by the police, Somchai was a critic of "excessive and unnecessary violence in law enforcement."
Official brutality is the separatist movement's ace in the hole because it alienates the local Muslim population, undoing years of conciliation. Speaking to The Nation in April, one ex-senior PULO commander who had taken advantage of an amnesty, explained that police treatment of the locals was the reason he had first taken up arms.
"The police were quite abusive, slapping and kicking people at will before asking any questions," said 54-year-old Yusouf Longpi. "Nobody was willing to stand up to them."
Ultimately, though, it is radical Islamic education that will produce a new generation of rebels.
Muslims tend to view Thai state schools with suspicion, believing that the secular curriculum is a subtle way of diluting the ethnic Malay identity. As a result, children are sent to hundreds of private Islamic schools, known as pondoks, which teach in Arabic and the local Yawi dialect.
These schools depend on Middle Eastern donors, who also offer scholarships to Thais to study abroad. Thus, in the 1980s, Iran managed to convert thousands of Thai-Malays to Shi'ite Islam.
Now, it is the Saudis' turn to export their beliefs.
Over the past 15 years, southern Thailand has become a breeding ground for Wahhabism. Deriving its name from the 18th-century puritan Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, this doctrine, according Georgetown University scholar John Esposito, sees "the world in white and black categories - Muslim and non-Muslim, belief and unbelief, the realm of Islam and that of warfare."
For many in southern Thailand, Wahhabism simply means adopting more conservative Islamic traditions, such as wearing the Arab veil and long gown. But there are also Wahhabis like Ismail Lufti, the fiery anti-Western rector of Yalla Islamic College. Lufti and his 8,000 followers see Thai Buddhists in the north as morally bankrupt because of the drinking, sex tourism, and rampant prostitution in Bangkok - an attitude that does not lend itself to national reconciliation.
The radicalization of the southern provinces is helped along by global media outlets, such as al-Jazeera, that link local Muslims with traumatic events in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
And so, moderate Thai Muslims are now derided as "water buffaloes," eager to please the West. Muslim intellectuals with little or no personal experience of the Arab-Israeli conflict have also taken to translating such anti-Semitic works as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's The International Jew.
"In the 1970s, there was none of this stuff in southern Thailand," says Scupin. "Now, it is filled with it."
Given these factors, as well as the region's history as an independent sultanate, no amount of democratic legislation and development programs instituted by Bangkok will put a complete end to fighting in the Muslim south.
Another al-Qaida outlet?
Osama T-shirts sell in southern Thailand, but few Muslims there really buy into al-Qaida. In fact, a top bin Laden operative captured last year by Thai intelligence admitted that southern separatists had rebuffed his attempts at building a terrorist alliance.
Commonly known as "Hambali," Riduan Isamuddin is the 40-year-old, bespectacled Indonesian operations chief for Jemaah Islamiya (JI), a Southeast Asian terrorist network with links to al-Qaida. He has been connected to the Bali bombing, in October 2002, that killed over 200 people and had planned to attack American-owned hotels and airliners in Bangkok.
The elusive Hambali was hiding out in the old capital of Ayutthaya, 65 km north of Bangkok, when, in August, he was captured by military intelligence and police officers. The Thais then handed him over to the CIA.
At least one of the machete-wielding teenagers in April's disastrous attack wore a green shirt emblazoned with the letters "JI." But aside from Hambali, who had trained under bin Laden in the 1990s, the JI and al-Qaida do not share the same members.
"It is a completely independent organization that has had some of its operations funded by al-Qaida, but is not directed or controlled from outside," says Sidney Jones, the Indonesia Project Director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
The two groups do, however, share an anti-Western, jihadist ideology - which is precisely why the Thai-Malay Muslim separatists rejected Hambali's offer of cooperation. And so far, no Western hotels or embassies have been targeted by the Pattani United Liberation Organization.
"The separatists want to emphasize their local, territorial, ethnic grievances instead," notes Andrew Tan, a security analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
For a decade, the Jemaah Islamiyah has been running a training camp under the auspices of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines. Much better organized than the Thai Muslim groups, MILF's ties with JI go back to meetings in Afghanistan.
At best, Thailand is what Zachary Abuza calls "a nation of convenience" for al-Qaida.
In Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, the Simmons College political scientist writes that the country is flooded with illegal arms thanks to conflicts in neighboring states. Thailand is also an international banking and transport center with much of the national economy "underground, unregulated, and untaxed."
So why then are Osama T-shirts selling in southern Thailand?
For the same reason Che Guevara is in vogue.
"Osama bin Laden is seen as standing up to America," says Jones, "and anyone who does that is going to be popular."
bmp
The expansion of Muslim-driven violence can lead one to only one conclusion - The Muslims have declared war on the non-Islamic parts of the world.
Clearly, there is only one response to this escalation - the complete and total elimination of Islam. This "religion" is incapable of co-existing peacefully with any other and invites a devastatingly catastrophic response that demands its total elimination.
It is time to ignore the PC factor and begin the wholesale destruction of Islamic icons (mosques, "holy" cities, "holy" sites and the like) the bring about the end of this religion of Satan. Islam has made the attempt to force the rest of the world to become Muslim or die at least once before and they seem to follow a once-per-thousand-years cycle. If we don't completely wipe out every vestige of this oppressive "religion" and just quell the current round of violence, they will repeat the attempt in another 500 - 1000 years.
End it now. Eradicate Islam.
The Buddha would say "Meditate, and then kick their ass!"
At least the Buddha does not tell the Thais to turns the other cheek, a gesture that would be totally wasted on those radical muslim wannabe misfits.
All Muslims believe the whole world must submit to them at some point --- I think some ego-maniacs like bin Laden have decided it's going to happen in their life-time, maybe that gives them some special place in allah's afterlife.
The muslims are engaged in the drug trade, it seems, and the Muslim drug dealers don't like the police cracking down
Way to go! The mosque is their bunker, armory, indoctrination center.
I don't think that the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek would necessarily apply in this instance.
"police shot to death more than 100 insurgents, many of them machete-wielding teenagers riding in on brand-new motorcycles."
Well, that puts to rest the crap about "poverty" creating terrorism.
I can think of a couple of cities in Iraq where we could use the Thai army methods.
OK, another Kosovo thread bites the dust. On this one I am seeing calls for genocide, graphics depicting all of Islam as being akin to Nazism, and other crap. You'll lose each and every one of your beloved Kosovo threads as long as it continues. If you want it to vanish from FR as a topic, keep it up.
WATCH IT! The Lead Monitor might delete you for thinking thus. This website needs to be Muslim friendly.
It's like the other cheek was slapped and then some. there is the concept of "the just war".
Too bad the Brits can't loan them the Gurkhas!
Perhaps if he had been alive in a different time, we would have a much more robust policy coming from the Vatican.
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