Unrest among Thailand's Muslim minority threatens to explode into a bloody uprising as militants linked to Al-Qa'eda foment trouble, reports John Bradley from Bangkok An insurgency by Islamist separatists in southern Thailand who have links to Jummah Islamiya (JI) and Al-Qa'eda has opened a bloody new front in Southeast Asia's war on terror, and has the makings of a full-blown uprising. The unprecedented violence, which escalated last week with the gunning down of more than 100 Islamists as they prepared to attack army posts, has become Bangkok's biggest domestic security challenge since the early 1980s, when the Thais finally saw off a 15-year-long, pro-Beijing communist insurgency. The latest violence can be traced back to an attack on an army camp in January in one of the three southern, Muslim-majority states that border Malaysia. Four soldiers were killed and hundreds of guns were stolen. In March, suspected militants raided a quarry and seized 58 sticks of dynamite, 180 detonators and 1.4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser appropriated to make bombs like that used in the Bali terrorist atrocity in October 2002 carried out by JI. So far, more than 200 people have been killed in a string of such raids, bombings, assassinations and acts of arson and sabotage. And there are now fears that calls for revenge among Thailand's southern Muslim majority for last week's "massacre of the martyrs" could provide the opportunity for outside terrorist networks to broaden and deepen their already significant infiltration of the south. Bangkok initially dismissed the raiders as "bandits and criminals" and steadfastly rejected the theory that "international terrorist groups" were behind the violence. However, it had no choice but finally to acknowledge and confront the reality of a multifaceted separatist threat after the Islamist insurgents who were killed last week were shown on TV clutching machetes, wearing green Hamas-style headbands and Palestinian-like checkered head scarves, and wearing clothes with Islamic slogans emblazoned on them. One even had the letters JI stitched into the back of his jacket. In fact, regional leaders from JI, Al-Qa'eda and the Free Aceh Movement are known to have visited southern Thailand, taking advantage of its lax security and porous borders to recruit volunteers from the disenfranchised local population and organise arms purchases. JI militants sought by Malaysia and Singapore fled to southern Thailand in 2002, and in June last year Thai police broke up a JI cell and foiled a plot to bomb embassies in the country. Three Thai men alleged to be members of JI were arrested in raids on their homes in the south. Arifin Bin Ali, a Singaporean alleged to be a senior member of the terror group, was also arrested in Bangkok. Al-Qa'eda's operational leader in Southeast Asia, Hambali, was no stranger to southern Thailand before he was arrested in February north of the capital. And after the January raid on the army camp, local officials said one of the suspects was believed to be an Indonesian relative of Hambali. According to Eric Teo Chu Cheow, council secretary of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, JI elements met twice in southern Thailand to plan the Bali bomb blasts, and possibly other bomb attacks in Indonesia. Thai Muslims in southern Thailand could have been discreetly plugged into the JI network, he says, and are reportedly entertaining close links to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels and the more deadly Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the southern Philippines notorious for kidnappings, beheadings of captives, ransom and extortion. Independent estimates put JI membership in southern Thailand as high as 10,000, and the military now says that, following the recent violence, it is hunting down at least 5,000 armed separatists. In 1998, the Bangkok government adopted a radical five-year plan for the south, the renewal of which is now stalled in parliament. It included a partial military withdrawal, a crackdown on notoriously corrupt Thai officials (often punished by Bangkok with assignments to the south), and the gradual Islamisation of the area. The plan was drawn up with the guiding principle that security for Thailand would be achieved only if Thai Muslims themselves felt secure. Its authors could not have anticipated the consequences of the US-led war on terror, the Iraq war, the backlash against a regional crackdown on JI, and constant TV images of Israel's violent suppression of the Palestinian Intifada. Surveys have shown that, both among Muslims in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia, the US-led invasion of Iraq, the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and tighter US visa regulations for Muslim visitors have all severely tarnished America's reputation and to some extent had a radicalising effect. During the US-led war on Iraq, the media showed images of protesters in southern Thailand emptying bottles of Pepsi into the street as part of a new boycott of US goods. More specifically, such seemingly "anti-Muslim" global events helped rekindle the historic quest for an autonomous region among southern Thailand's Muslims -- just as Bangkok government was effectively dismantling its intelligence apparatus, and was militarily less engaged in the area than it had been for more than 100 years. Thai Muslim complaints of discrimination in jobs and education had also continued to provide fodder for various separatist movements. Causing resentment, too, are reports of arbitrary arrests and torture, the kidnapping and murder by police officials of a prominent Muslim lawyer defending suspected JI members, and the alleged underlying hand in recent violence of military and police officials vying with each other (and local criminals) for control of the vast arms and drug smuggling rings operating from the area. Until the recent surge in violence the separatists themselves were better known for their criminality than their politics, and were always at one another's throats. Nonetheless, recreating the lost, idealised Muslim homeland of old had remained a key goal of the separatist parties. Lukman B Lima, deputy president of the banned Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), has said that Bangkok "illegally incorporated" the south into Thailand 100 years ago, and continues to rule it with "colonial" repression while "committing crimes against humanity". Buddhist nationalists have fears of their own. Southern Thailand is home to the Yala Islamic College, run by hard-line Wahhabi cleric Ismail Lufti. He has an estimated 8,000 followers installed throughout southern Thailand in key Islamic posts and the college, which like most Islamic institutions in southern Thailand is funded by Saudi money, has about 800 students who are reportedly taught hardcore Wahhabi doctrine. In 2002, the arrest of two-dozen Middle Eastern suspects for forging travel documents, visas and passports for Al-Qa'eda operatives allowed nationalists to play up the threat of "Arab influence". They were given ammunition by the fact that government-run secular schools were being targeted by separatists because they were seen as anti-Islamic. Many Muslim Thai activists went overseas to Islamic schools, where they were also said to have came under influence of hard-line teachers. Some were reported to have joined the jihad war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, and returned to Thailand as "extremists". Except in that small circle of theologically trained believers, the Islamic faith in Thailand, like Buddhism, was seen as being integrated with many beliefs and practices not integral to Islam. But the foreign-returned Muslims insisted, say critics, on what they called a purer form of Islam. But not all the anti-Arab voices were non-Muslims. Vairoj Phiphitpakdee, a Muslim member of Parliament for Pattani, has said some Thai Muslims mistakenly believe that Islam is just about adopting Arab customs. "They're taken to the Middle East, and they're brainwashed," he said.
