Waking up to the terror threat in southern Thailand
John R. Bradley, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore
Hidden a few kilometers down a remote country lane in the heart of Thailand's troubled deep south, where a Muslim separatist uprising has so far this year left more than 200 dead, is the brand new, multimillion-dollar new campus of Yala Islamic College.
With more than a dozen Arab teachers from across the Middle East and a seemingly endless flow of funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, the college has become the most obvious manifestation of a non-violent Arab threat to the traditionally moderate and tolerant Islamic traditions of southern Thailand (and the wider Southeast Asian region).
Islamic schools for young Thai Muslims are recognized by the government as breeding grounds for radical separatists.
The violent aspect of that threat was first brought home in the south in 2002, when two dozen Middle Eastern suspects were arrested for forging travel documents, visas and passports for Al-Qaeda operatives.
When you enter the college's reception, you feel like you have suddenly been transported to the Gulf. The 1,500 students there dress in Arab-style clothes and are taught a strict interpretation of syariah law in the Arabic language.
The receptionist introduces himself, in perfect classical Arabic, as a graduate of Al-Azhar University in Cairo. The president, Ismail Lutfi, is himself a graduate of a hardline Wahhabi institution, Riyadh's Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University.
Lutfi, who says he is against violence, has thousands of followers installed in key Islamic posts throughout the south.
The south's largely unregistered pondoks (Islamic boarding schools) -- which offer religious education, a regular curriculum and training in Arabic and the local Yawi dialect -- are meanwhile now recognized by the Thai government as breeding grounds for radical separatists.
A number of the Muslim separatists killed on April 28 -- when more than 100 Muslims were gunned down on their motorcycles by soldiers acting on a tip-off about a planned series of raids on army posts across the south -- taught at or were students in these local Islamic schools.
If the teachers were bent on jihad, then what kind of ideas, you might logically ask, were they feeding to their students before they took the final plunge together into martyrdom?
A Bangkok court has issued an arrest warrant for a Muslim teacher accused of organizing the worst separatist attacks -- proof that Bangkok has finally woken up to the fact that many Muslim Thai teachers who went overseas to Islamic schools must have come under the influence of hardliners.
More than 160 Thai Muslim students are presently enrolled in Islamic institutions in Saudi Arabia and 1,500 are studying in Egypt.
Vairoj Phiphitpakdee, a Muslim member of parliament for Pattani, has said that some Thai Muslims mistakenly believe Islam is just about adopting Arab customs. "They're taken to the Middle East and they're brainwashed," he recently told reporters.
The Saudi Arabia-based International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) remains the largest donor to Islamic causes in southern Thailand.
The Thai Buddhist minority in the south are increasingly besieged, and circulating inflammatory pamphlets that detail alleged local Muslim extremism that poses, in their view, an unprecedented threat both to their religion and the state.
One senior Thai government official in Pattani, clearly shaken by recent events, told me he was aware of the first signs of "ethnic cleansing" (his words) in Narathiwat, one of the south's Muslim-majority provinces. Some Thai Buddhist families have been told to leave under the threat of violence, he added.
This month's attacks on three Buddhist temples in the south certainly have an extremely worrying historic precedent: The two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan demolished by Taliban explosives experts in February 2001. Add to this analogy the fact that many Thai Muslims who fought with the Taliban against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s have since returned to become teachers in the local Islamic schools.
Why is such information not being publicized?
The most obvious answer, often given by "terrorism experts", is that Thailand fears for its tourism industry. But the upsurge in violence is also proving difficult to understand and control because it comes after Bangkok effectively dismantled its intelligence apparatus in the area and scaled down its military presence, thinking it had all but crushed the separatist movement in the late 1990s.
The simple, stark fact, as admitted to me by a retired Thai general last week, is that neither the military nor the police now have a clue what is going on in the south.
In the absence of crucial intelligence information, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has predictably taken refuge in dismissing the separatists bent on jihad as "crazy" and "bad boys" -- as the uprising in southern Thailand opens up a dangerous new front in Southeast Asia's war on terror.
It is also a powder keg, which threatens to blow up in everyone's faces.
After the Muslims killed on April 28 were shown on television wearing green Hamas-style headbands and other clothes with Islamic slogans emblazoned on them, the government at last conceded that, on one level, it was facing a complex separatist threat.
One killed militant had stitched into the back of his jacket the letters "JI" -- an assumed reference to Indonesian-based Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), which allegedly seeks to establish a pan- Southeast Asian Islamic state from southern Thailand through Malaysia and Singapore and across Indonesia into the southern Philippines.
Neighboring countries, many battling their own Islamic insurgencies, should be extremely concerned that calls for revenge over alleged Thai army heavy-handedness in the ongoing crackdown could provide the excuse JI and other regional terrorist networks need to broaden their ties to local Thai separatist groupings.
A spark could unite the violent and non-violent threat, those fighting for dignity in the face of Thai Buddhist chauvinism and those bent on jihad.