Author: Richard S Ehrlich
Publication: Asia Times Online
Date: September 24, 2005
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GI24Ae01.html
Suspected Islamist insurgents avoided capture
after torturing to death two Thai marines by beating and stabbing the bound-and-gagged
victims behind a human shield of defiant Muslim women and children, horrifying
the government and plunging southern Thailand into a fresh security crisis.
Amid the world's most violent Islamist insurgency
outside Iraq, angry and confused security forces hunted the elusive killers,
described as three or four young men who ran away, leaving the marines' bloodied
bodies in Tanyong Limo village.
"They were brutally beaten to death with
machetes and sticks, while their hands and legs were tied up, and they were
gagged and blindfolded," Lieutenant General Kwanchart Klaharn, commander
of the Fourth Army and director of the Southern Border Provinces Peace-building
Command, told reporters.
The bodies were locked inside a building near
a mosque, prompting security forces to break down a door to gain access before
transporting them to a hospital morgue, he said.
The brutality of the killings - coupled with
the security forces' failed attempt to negotiate a peaceful resolution to
the hostage crisis and the inability of the armed marines to defend themselves
- was urgently being examined by politicians, peace activists, army generals
and the Thai media.
"We will absolutely not let those two
die for nothing. The law is the law," an agitated Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra told journalists after the killings Wednesday during a 19-hour
stalemate between troops and villagers in violence-torn Narathiwat province.
"If I could, I would drop napalm bombs
all over that village," a distraught Captain Traikwan Krairiksh was quoted
in the Bangkok Post as saying after he viewed the bodies of his former subordinates
in a pool of blood. "But the fact is, I can never do that. We are soldiers.
We must follow the law. We can only take revenge by using the law."
Throughout the stand-off, scores of shouting
Muslim women dressed in traditional headscarves stood with children, blocking
troops from gaining access to the hostages, and erecting banners that blamed
the authorities, including one in Thai that read: "You are in fact the
terrorists."
Apparently hoping for a peaceful solution,
troops did not attempt a forced rescue. The two experienced marines, armed
with a US-supplied M-16 assault rifle and two pistols, were initially captured
on Tuesday night when they stopped their vehicle near the village.
Locals blamed them for the drive-by shooting
death of two men dining at a nearby tea shop earlier in the night, but authorities
later explained that the marines were pursuing the unidentified killers and
were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
More than 1,000 people on all sides have died
in southern Thailand since January 4, 2004 when the smoldering rebellion flared
in a so-called "night of the fires" attack on security forces, including
synchronized arson assaults on 21 schools and a massive raid on a military
base that netted the rebels hundreds of guns and heavy weapons.
Today, about 100 years after Thailand annexed
the mostly ethnic Malay Muslim region, "mujahideen" holy warriors
yearn for a separate state ruled by Islamic sharia law in a lush, tropical
region where Islamists are waging similar insurgencies in the Philippines,
Indonesia and elsewhere.
No one is sure who leads the increasingly
sophisticated, disciplined and successful Muslim fighters in southern Thailand.
The government blames indigenous rebel groups, allied with local Islamic schools,
that are inspired by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by Osama bin Laden's
call to force non-believers from Muslim territories.
The ongoing violence threatens to inflame
strained relations between Buddhist-majority Thailand and Muslim-majority
Malaysia, because Bangkok accuses Kuala Lumpur of not doing enough to stop
suspected insurgents criss-crossing the porous border.
In July, the government clamped the south
under a "state of emergency", in part using Article 17 - granting
impunity to security forces so they cannot be prosecuted for killings or other
acts while deployed. In August, when asked at a news conference if the decree
was "a license to kill", Thaksin held up a toy sign marked with
an X and sounded a toy's electronic beep to indicate the question was "not
constructive".
Asked if international terrorists were involved
in the south, the tense prime minister again held up his X sign and sounded
his son's Japanese toy, a move that infuriated the media but which Thaksin
defended as a stress-reliever to deal with "heavy" questions during
the first of what he called the "PM meets the press" conferences.
Scores of Thai Muslim men are believed to
have undergone guerrilla training or religious study in Afghanistan before
the Taliban's collapse in 2001, and many returned to southern Thailand shunning
the region's popular Sunni Islam - demanding instead the austere, retro-justice
of Islam's Wahhabi sect, pushed by Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden.
Recent leaflets and word-of-mouth warnings
in the south have called for all markets to shut on Fridays, Islam's traditional
day of rest, or violators will be beheaded or have their ears chopped off.
As a result, many businesses throughout the south have shut during the past
several Fridays, either in fear or in sympathy.
A dozen people, mostly Buddhists, have been
beheaded in seemingly random attacks in the south in a strategy "copied
from the violence in Iraq", according to Thailand's Interior Minister
Chidchai Vanasathidya.
Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist
from San Francisco, California. He has reported news from Asia since 1978
and is co-author of Hello My Big Big Honey!, a non-fiction book of investigative
journalism. He received a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate
School of Journalism.
