Author: John R. Bradley
Publication: The Straits Times
Date: May 27, 2004
Hidden a few kilometres 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 South-east Asian region).
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, Dr Ismail Lutfi, is himself a graduate of a hardline Wahhabi
institution, Riyadh's Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University.
Dr 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 schools) - which offer religious education, a regular
curriculum and training in Arabic and the local Yawi dialect - are meanwhile
now recognised 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 organising 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. Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Thamarak Isarangura
has said the Thai government believes there are military training sites
in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt where Thai Muslim separatists are trained
to execute terror attacks back at home.
Mr 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 Organisation (IIRO) remains the largest donor to Islamic
causes in southern Thailand. According to The Nation newspaper, during
the last 10 years hardly any educational or religious project has been
untouched by the IIRO, which is part of the wahhabi-inspired Muslim World
League. After Sept 11, 2001, the United States Treasury froze IIRO funds
in the US because of its alleged links to Al-Qaeda.
Why did it take Bangkok so long
to confront the pondok threat, when Jakarta, Manila, Singapore and Kuala
Lumpur have long recognised Saudi-based, wahhabi charities funnelling funds
to regional terror organisations as a major security threat?
It's clear to me, after spending
the earlier part of this month travelling through all of the Muslim-majority
provinces of southern Thailand, that the situation there is much worse
than Bangkok is willing to admit publicly, even as plans for talks between
the government and a Muslim separatist umbrella group blamed for violence
take shape. 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.20
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 Taleban explosives experts
in February 2001. Add to this analogy the fact that many Thai Muslims who
fought with the Taleban against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s have
since returned to become teachers in the local Islamic schools.
Why is such information not being
publicised?
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 South-east Asia's war on terror and becomes
Bangkok's biggest domestic security challenge since it saw off a 15-year,
pro-Beijing communist insurgency in the early 1980s.
It is also a powder keg, which threatens
to blow up in everyone's faces. Thai Muslim complaints of discrimination
in jobs and education, along with the economic neglect of the south, have
provided fodder for various separatist movements since the provinces -
once part of the Muslim kingdom of Pattani - were annexed by Thailand in
1902. Their quest for an autonomous homeland has been rekindled partly
because of the Iraq war and Israel's violent suppression of the Palestinian
intifada, but locals say that new visa restrictions on Muslims, introduced
after Sept 11, 2001, have also had a radicalising effect.
Protesters have emptied bottles
of Pepsi into streets as part of a new boycott of American and Israeli
goods, and 20,000 Muslims demonstrated peacefully against the Iraq war
in Pattani last year.
Local resentments, which radicals
from outside are trying to exploit by linking them to a wider Islamic struggle,
have become more intense. There is the alleged underlying hand in the recent
violence of local military and police officials, each vying with the other
(and local separatists, who frequently double as criminals) for control
of arms- and drug-smuggling rings. And there are almost continuous reports
of false arrests and torture.
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 terrorist group Jemaah
Islamiah (JI), which seeks to establish a pan-South-east Asian Islamic
state from southern Thailand through Malaysia and Singapore and across
Indonesia into the southern Philippines. Numerous regional leaders from
JI, Al-Qaeda and the Free Aceh Movement are known to have spent time in
southern Thailand since the attacks in New York on Sept 11, 2001.
Neighbouring 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. Independent estimates
already put JI membership in southern Thailand as high as 10,000 and the
Thai military says it is hunting down at least 5,000 armed separatists.
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. If beating violence means,
as the current cliche has it, winning hearts and minds, then the reverse
must also be true - and one shudders to think in that context of what the
consequences may be of Dr Lutfi and his Middle East professors teaching
the Arab-obsessed Thai Muslim students of Yala Islamic College hardcore
wahhabi doctrine.
