By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Aug 4 2004 (IPS)

A report released this week offers the Thai government a much needed opportunity to mend fences with the country’s Malay- Muslim minority in the violence plagued southern provinces.

The authors of the report, who include a former judge, legal experts and Muslim academics, are accusing Thai troops of using excessive force to confront poorly armed Muslim militants who had taken refuge in a mosque in late April this year.

The report of the government-appointed commission, which was made available on Tuesday, drew attention to one feature of the attack – lobbing eight grenades into the mosque – to amplify military excesses.

This message from the independent panel is going down well with the Muslim minority in this predominantly Buddhist nation.

”The government is on the right track. It will help lessen the tension in the south,” Niti Hassan, president of the Council of Muslim Organisations of Thailand, told IPS.

Muslims needed to hear this message, particularly after many witnessed the attack that took place on Apr. 28, added Arong Suthansana, chairman of the Institute of Islamic World Studies, a Bangkok-based independent research centre.

The government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is also receiving bouquets for offering to compensate the families of the 32 Muslim militants who were killed when the heavily armed Thai security forces stormed the Krue Se mosque in the southern province of Pattanti.

”Compensating the families will show that the government is concerned about what happened,” Ismail Ali, director of the college of Islamic studies at the Prince of Songkhla University, Pattani, said in an interview.

The killings at the mosque were part of a bloody showdown that occurred on the morning of that April day, when scores of young Muslim men, armed mostly with knives, machetes and some guns raided 10 police stations and security checkpoints in the southern provinces of Yala, Songkhla and Pattani.

The Muslim assailants took a heavy beating, with 107 attackers being killed, as opposed to the five members of the government’s forces who died that day.

The carnage that day was the worst since violence erupted in the country’s southern provinces on Jan. 4 and has continued unabated.

During this period, assailants have continued attacking policemen, soldiers, Buddhist monks, teachers, and government officials, resulting in over 250 deaths.

The attackers have also torched schools and bombed restaurants and government buildings.

And as Thailand marks seven months since the violence began – when attackers stormed a military camp in the south on Jan. 4 and made off with an estimated 400 M-16 rifles – Bangkok is still searching for answers as to who is behind it.

Such an air of desperation was reflected over the weekend, when the army division in charge of security in the predominantly Muslim-Malay provinces announced that it was offering monetary rewards and free trips to Mecca for families who revealed information about the missing weapons.

However some Muslims are interpreting that gesture as another example of the government’s inability to grasp the culture of the Malay-Muslims. ”The government should not have offered money, because Muslims know what the religion has said about paying ones way to go to Mecca,” Arong of the Islamic research centre explained in an interview.

That slip will be hard to ignore, since Malay-Muslims say that Bangkok’s lack of sensitivity to their culture, which is distinct from the Thai-Buddhist culture that the majority of the country’s 63 million people identify with, is at the heart of the violence.

The Malay-Muslims account for 2.3 million of Thailand’s population and live in the five southern provinces, four of which share a border with Malaysia.

Thailand also has pockets of other Muslim communities scattered across the country.

Another move by Bangkok is also helping to harden feelings Muslims have towards state officials. The government announced plans in July that it wants to close 21 Islamic boarding schools it suspects of being linked to the attacks against the state.

Last week, Abdulrohni Kahama, secretary-general of Islamic boarding schools in the southern provinces, told the press that he would defy the government’s order to close the schools till proper evidence to back the charges were made.

He also warned Bangkok that a heavy-handed approach to force the schools to shut would only inflame the already tense environment in the south.

”There is a lot of fear among the Muslims here and there is a lack of trust between the people and the authorities,” academic Ali, said.

During the past seven months, the government has pointed fingers at Muslim separatist groups in the south and other Muslim extremists for spearheading the attacks, the most recent of which was a roadside bomb that exploded on Tuesday, injuring three soldiers.

The charge stems from a mix of sketchy evidence intelligence officials have gathered and the region’s history. In the early 1970s, Muslim rebels launched a separatist struggle to restore the once independent Muslim kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed by Bangkok in 1902.

Despite bringing that rebellion under control in the 1980s, Thailand’s south has experienced regular bursts of violence during the 1990s, with the average attacks since 1993 being between 40 to 70 a year.

The scale of violence witnessed since January has marked a turn for the worse, though. And to quell it, Bangkok needs to win the trust of the Muslims, editorials here have commented.

”There are many urgent, non-military issues which need to be addressed,” the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper commented recently. ”First and foremost is the need to win the trust of southern Muslims in the government and its offices.”

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