Thailand needs time to bring peace to south

Thailand needs time to bring peace to south

Paul Holmes, Reuters/Pattani, Thailand

Thailand may need at least 10 years to bring full peace to the mainly Muslim south, where nearly 300 people have been killed in a burst of violence since January, Defense Minister Chetta Thanajaro said on Friday.

The government plans to sink US$300 million over the next three years into social and economic development in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, where 80 percent of the people are ethnic Malay Muslims.

But Chetta said the problems, which date back centuries, were so deeply rooted they would take a decade or longer to resolve.

"If we really want to see a sustainable solution and a very stable region, I would say it would take at least 10 years," Chetta told Reuters in the provincial town of Pattani.

"Even that may be too quick," he added.

Pattani witnessed the worst of the violence on April 28, when troops and police shot dead 32 suspected militants holed up in an historic mosque after they attacked a police station.

In all, security forces killed 106 people in 11 incidents on the same day across the three provinces, where the ethnic Malay majority feel remote from the Buddhist administration 1,100 km away to the north in Bangkok.

The violence erupted without warning on Jan. 4 when gunmen stormed an army camp and killed four soldiers before making off with about 400 assault rifles.

Almost daily attacks since then have targeted police, government officials, schools, teachers and even three Buddhist monks. Much of the area is under martial law, with 10,000 police and soldiers manning roadblocks and security posts.

Chetta and other government ministers said they are at a loss to pinpoint the precise roots or motives of the violence, citing a complex mix of history, corruption, crime, drugs, religion and separatism that racked the region in the 1970s and 1980s.

They say, however, the instigators appear to have used a network of unregulated Islamic schools funded by Saudi and other Middle Eastern money as recruiting grounds for embittered Muslim youths. Chetta put their number at several hundred.

He said the little intelligence available suggested secret initiation ceremonies involving oaths of blind allegiance sworn on the Koran used to brainwash recruits, although there was no evidence of links to al-Qaeda or its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jamaah Islamiyah.

"We want to know what's in their minds," he said.

In an attempt to win hearts and minds, Chetta toured the area this week with Thailand's Islamic spiritual leader, 90-year-old Sawas Sumalyasak.

One influential Muslim scholar they met, Ismail Lutfi, welcomed the government's approach and said trouble had been brewing for years.

"All these problems have piled up into a great big rubbish heap and some ill-willed people have come along and lit a fire under it which is getting more severe," he said.

Lutfi, a Saudi-educated traditionalist, is rector of the Yala Islamic College, which was built with funds from the Islamic Development Bank and has 1,300 students.