RIGHTS-THAILAND: Detention Camps Feed Insurgency

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

YALA, Apr 26 2006 (IPS) - Every day, a group of anxious parents gather outside the whitewashed walls of the police-training centre in Yala town, hoping for word of their sons, detained on suspicion of being involved with the insurgency that has torn Thailand’s Muslim-dominated southern provinces that border Malaysia.

Every day, a group of anxious parents gather outside the whitewashed walls of the police-training centre in this town, hoping for word of their sons, detained on suspicion of being involved with the insurgency that has torn Thailand’s Muslim-dominated southern provinces that border Malaysia.

Behind the walls of innocuous-looking buildings like these, in the three provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, lie a disturbing reality, a legal black hole that is the key instrument used by the Thai government to crush the festering insurgency.

For over three weeks, Ismael Siraco, 47, visited the Yala centre daily hoping to obtain the release of his arrested son Sabri and staring in desperation at the manicured gardens, empty soccer field and a pond where lotuses bloom.

Finally, Apr. 22 proved to be the lucky day for Ismael, a farmer from the Sungai Padi area, some two hours away by road, in Narathiwat. He was informed by officials at the training centre on that Saturday that Sabri would be released.

It brought to an end the days of uncertainty that had governed his life ever since his son was asked to report to a police station in this southern city on Mar. 28 and then whisked away to the training centre.

Sabri, who was one of a group of 19 Malay-Muslim men kept in captivity indefinitely with no access to legal help, denied the charges when he spoke to IPS soon after his release. ”I don’t know why I was arrested,” he said. ”One of my friends was also arrested and freed later.”

His three weeks of incarceration included being kept in solitary confinement in a room where the lights were never turned off. There were long stretches of interrogation by officers in plain clothes determined to link him to the insurgency.

”They questioned me from nine till 12 in the morning and then for five hours in the afternoon,” said Sabri, who looked nervous as he spoke, fingering his thin moustache at times. ”There was no physical abuse but their words were strong. They kept saying I was involved in a plan to murder a policeman.”

Sabri’s spell in custody without formal charges is only one of many similar accounts that is being talked about in despairing tones among the Malay-Muslims, who form the majority in predominantly Buddhist Thailand’s southern provinces.

The policy of holding boys and men in custody in police and army camps has been in place since last year in a bid, says Bangkok, to ”re-educate” Muslims suspected of being involved in an over two-year long bout of insurgency that has claimed over 1,200 lives.

But what it does to the local population is visible in the eyes of parents and relatives who gather outside the police centre under the gaze of heavily armed soldiers in a scene familiar in countries known to run ”dirty wars” and cause ”disappearances.”

A Thai military intelligence officer, who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, said there were about 20 such camps in the south, in Bangkok and in the central province of Lop Buri. ”We arrest them to change their minds,” he said. ”Some are charged if they are linked to attacks and some are sent home.”

How many Muslim males have filled such camps remains an open question, though human rights activists say that the number could be as high as 900. Most were detained under the provisions of a harsh emergency decree that the Thai government imposed in July last year- which came on top of martial law that had been in force in the three southern provinces since January 2004.

Families in the nearby villages located amidst rubber plantations and beside paddy fields are stalked by the fear that their sons, brothers or husbands could get ‘disappeared’.

In one village, in the Yaha sub-district, the parents of a 24-year-old boy recalled how their son was forced to get into a vehicle as he emerged from a tea shop and was never heard of afterwards. In a house nearby, a 40-year-old man was taken away at two in the morning.

The Young Muslim Association of Thailand (YMAT), which has been monitoring the deteriorating human rights situation in the area, has a list of 21 names of Malay-Muslim males who have been disappeared since January 2004.

”Under the emergency decree, the army has more power to search homes and school,” said Ananchai Thaipratan, a medical doctor and member of YMAT. ”This power can place people in a terrible state.”

This week, Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, Thailand’s army chief, confirmed a fear expressed by local and international human rights groups about the presence of ‘blacklists’ on the basis of which males are rounded up.

The army chief admitted to that ‘blacklists’ were used by authorities to catch suspects in the Malay-speaking south, reported ‘The Nation,’ an English language daily on Wednesday. ”According to one list with 300 names seen by ‘The Nation,’ people have been arrested and killed, many under questionable circumstances,” the report said.

In October, last year, there were as many as 4,000 names on the blacklists compiled for Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala.

Human rights activists said the lists were reminiscent of Thailand’s ‘war-on-drugs’ launched in 2003, which resulted in an orgy of vigilante killings. Over 2,500 people died under mysterious circumstances, many of them after being placed on blacklists for alleged links to a narcotics network.

The current round of violence in the south, pitting a nearly 30,000 strong Thai military force against suspected Malay-Muslim militants (since no group has openly claimed responsibility), is the latest phase in a separatist conflict going back decades. It stems from a long history of discrimination that the Malay-Muslims – who currently number around two million in Thailand’s 64 million population – complain about on such fronts as culture, language, religion and economic opportunities.

The three southern provinces, which border Malaysia, were once part of the Muslim kingdom of Pattani until they were annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.

The likelihood of the conflict escalating is almost certain because of the government’s policy of ”using force to solve the problem,” Piya Kittavorn, a political scientist at Prince of Songkhla University, the premier centre of learning in Pattani, told IPS. ”It is driving local people to support the separatists.”