Thai militants 'target civilians'

[TotallyOz]

The insurgency in southern Thailand is turning into a brutal armed conflict where the majority of victims are civilians, a leading rights group said.

Separatists intent on establishing an Islamic state are attacking civilians and schools, Human Rights Watch said.

 

The militants believe up to five more years of violence are needed before they are strong enough to negotiate with the government, the group said.

 

Violence in the region has killed almost 2,500 people since 2004.

 

Over the years there has been periodic unrest in the Muslim-majority provinces of Yala, Narathiwat, Songkhla and Pattani, annexed by Thailand a century ago.

 

But in January 2004, a raid on an army depot marked the start of a new level of insurgency.

 

According to the report, entitled "No One is Safe: Insurgent Attacks on Civilians in Thailand's Southern Border Provinces", militants have been orchestrating a "broad campaign of violence and fear".

 

In the period between January 2004 and July 2007, they carried out more than 3,000 attacks on civilians, the group said, compared to about 500 attacks each on police and military units.

 

In that period, 2,463 people were killed, 89% of whom were civilians, the report said.

 

Monks are also being targeted in a bid by the militants to end what they call a Buddhist Thai occupation, the group said.

 

"Separatist militants are intentionally targeting both Buddhist and Muslim civilians in shootings, bombings and machete attacks," said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

 

"Violence against civilians is being used by separatist militants to scare Buddhist Thais away from these provinces, keep ethnic Malay Muslims under control, and discredit the Thai authorities," he said.

 

The report identifies the insurgents as village-based militants called Pattani Freedom Fighters, who have formed a loose network called National Revolution Front-Co-ordinate.

 

Members have told Human Rights Watch representatives that "they are not interested in dialogue with the Thai authorities at present", but that three to five more years of violence are needed before talks can take place.

 

The Thai government has deployed more than 30,000 troops to the region. But they have been accused of rights violations such as extra-judicial killings and arbitrary arrests.

 

Human Rights Watch said it remained unclear what action the government would take "to end state-sanctioned abuses and the culture of impunity in the south".

 

The group called on both the militants and the Thai government to institute concrete measures to protect civilians.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6966629.stm

[Gaybutton]

"they are not interested in dialogue with the Thai authorities at present", but that three to five more years of violence are needed before talks can take place."

 

What wonderful people. They say a thing like that as if other people's lives don't matter at all. They're just numbers. Only what they want for themselves matters. Give me what I want or I'll kill you and anyone else I can get away with killing until I do get what I want. It doesn't matter whether my victims are completely innocent and have absolutely no control over whether I get what I want. I'll just keep killing them. What a mindset. How would you like to see these people actually end up with what they want and they get to be the ones calling the shots? Then, after that, what happens when they want something more?

 

Haven't any of them noticed that the terrorists don't end up with what they want and that this sort of violence doesn't lead to the results they want? They accomplish nothing. They only kill a lot of innocent people. I truly believe that plenty of them couldn't care less about the goals of this terrorism. They just enjoy torturing and killing people.

 

Martin Luther King preached non-violence. He was killed for it, but in the end he got what he wanted. Gandhi preached non-violence and he too was killed for it, but in the end he got what he wanted. I wish these people would come up with a leader who preaches the same philosophy. They might actually end up with what they want.

 

"There are causes for which I would die, but there is no cause for which I would kill." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

 

[Guest Hedda]

Haven't any of them noticed that the terrorists don't end up with what they want and that this sort of violence doesn't lead to the results they want? They accomplish nothing.

 

GB, don't tell that to your fellow Americans, who seem to have created a new nation by violently defeating a foreign army of occupation.

 

Same goes for the Algerians, Israelis, Irish, French, Spanish, Kenyans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Russians, Turks, Iranians, Iraqis, Nepalese, South Africans, Chinese, Angolans, Poles, Lebanese, Afghans, and countless other ex-colonial states, all of whom are the political result of violent campaigns against a foreign or domestic enemy.

 

Violence and force have been the preferred and almost universal human way to resolve political differences through almost all of history. The only thing that has changed is the technology of mass destruction available now.

 

Terrorists are what King George's advisers called rabble like John Adams or Patrick Henry, who came up with the violent notion to "give me liberty or give me death." They didn't use body-bombs in those days, because technology hadn't progressed far enough to accomplish that feat - until the Irish took their turn at the Brits much later.

 

As for history's few successful pacifists, some think that Hitler's blitzkreig was probably more responsible for freeing India from British rule than Gandhi's pacifism. The sun set on the British Raj when London's treasury went bankrupt from fighting Hitler, not when the enlightened people at Whitehall saw the merits of Indian freedom.

 

Some also think that the race riots in places like Watts and Detroit probably got a quicker political response than the

flowery speeches made by Dr. King. Who's to say if radical people like Malcolm X, Angela Davis or Hewey Newton, with his exortation to "burn baby burn" has less of an ultimate political impact than the "I had a dream" speech. Success always has many fathers; failure is the orphan. Did Dr. King's pacifism win the battle for black civil rights or do we just prefer to think that's what really happened.

 

As far as that report on Thailand is concerned, ask the families of those 78 young men who smothered to death piled up like garbage in the back of army trucks at Tak Bai who was practicing terrorim that day. Ask the young women whose men are taken from their homes in the middle of the night and are never seen again, what it's like to experience terror.

 

In reality, "terrorists" are what the people in power these days, intellectual luminaries like George Bush, like to label those who oppose them. It's the "haves" telling the "have-nots" that violence is wrong, even as they bomb them into submssion for not listening. Indeed, violence and terror probably helped establish more nations sitting in the United Nations today than any other force in human history.

 

There's an old saying: " Treason never prospers, for one essential reason. For when treason prospers, none dare call it treason."

 

The same thing goes for terrorism. The reason we like to think that it never succeeds is because the people who triumph with it, men who resort to violence and terror to prevail, call themselves patriots and heroes, never terrorists - and they usually get to write the history books that tell us all about terrorism.

[Guest namjai]

Once again, Hedda, you talk to talk.

[Gaybutton]

some think that . . .

 

When you say "some think . . ." I'm sure you're correct. Some also think otherwise. I'm one of them. The thinking I do tells me, whether you want to call it terrorism or something else, what's going on in the south of Thailand is as wrong as it gets and I doubt that anything anyone wants to say to try to justify it will ever make it right.

[Bob]

We (well, most of us) know what a terrorist is and there is no excuse whatsoever for anybody trying to kill innocent civilians.

Sure, Hedda, the Thai government has made mistakes down there but to even suggest that the what the Thai government forces are doing there is anywhere near equivalent to what the terrorists are doing is baloney. I'd guess that 98% of what the Thai troops are doing is perfectly fine - just trying to protect the citizens, monks, schools, etc. And, based on what I've read (the hundreds of schools burned to the ground, the hundreds of kids, monks, and just plain random and innocent civilians being intentionally killed), the vast bulk of what the separatists are doing is terrorism pure and simple. The next time some "freedom fighter" tries to chop up a monk or a little kid, I can only pray that a thai soldier is present and will blow the guy's brains out first.

[Guest tdperhs]

I have to go with Hedda on this, mostly. When the four American GI's in Iraq murdered a family just to rape a fourteen year old, did anyone call that terrorism? What about My Lai? All of the ingredients were there; but, because they were part of the power system, they were said to have acted irrationally. We never really do get to know much about what actually happens in war unless we were there. I once interviewed a Black veteran of WWII while doing research on a script. He told me he killed far more White American soldiers in England than German soldiers when he hit the continent. "It was easy," he told me. "They were southerners who never expected us to fight back."

Actually, I think it really goes beyond that. I believe that our species has a built in social program that sets off an alarm when there are too many of us in proportion to resources available. Other social species, bees and ants, have it. With technology promising that the next generation will survive routinely until age 140 or better, we currently must lose about 100,000 people a day to keep humans from overwhelming the planet. I do believe that instinct is in place now and the alarm is ringing.

I am not saying that caused all the wars, but I believe many of the wars in the west rose out of that very impulse, including most of the Roman wars, the Norman Conquest of 1066, all of the 20th century Indochina rebellions, WWII in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the overdue breakup of Yugoslavia, Iran/Iraq, and Sudetenland, among others.

To me, terrorist, soldier, insurgent, rebel, patriot and nationalist all mean the same thing. He is the guy who is out to kill the other guy. Whatever rationalization he may employ to justify his action, when the smoke has cleared, the only reality is that he has reduced the population. To the dead man, terrorist, insurgent, rebel, patriot, nationalist or population controller mitigate nothing.

In his writings, Harry Truman stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not bombed so much to shorten the war (that was the cherry on top) but to make the Russians realize he would use it. Terrorist. soldier, insurgent, rebel, patriot, nationalist or population controller. Which would describe HST? My vote is Queen B, or at least the son of one.

[Guest pete1969]

IMO, there is a big difference between soldiers killing insurgents and the same group of insurgents targeting monks and innocent civilians in order to make a political statement. Call me naive or narrow minded or even willfully ignorant, but that is my thinking.

 

Do the majority of the people in those four provinces even want to break away from Thailand, or is this the case of a minority trying to gain power to bend the majority to their will?

 

I have a ladyboy friend from Pattani province who very much wants me to visit her home and assures me her village (Muslim) is peaceful and that she knows of few people in her province who actually would want to no longer be Thai or to not be part of Thailand. Like all other Thais I know, she is very proud to be Thai. She knows I won't accept her invitation to visit as long as the insurgency is taking place, and this makes her sad that she can't share her part of Thailand with me.

 

Pete