By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Mar 23 2008 (IPS)

As Thailand’s new government searches for fresh options to quell an escalating insurgency in the country’s south, its stance towards the region’s pondoks (Islamic schools), will be keenly watched.

Pondoks, which dot the three provinces close to the Thai-Malaysian border, have been in the firing line since the current cycle of violence erupted in January 2004. The conflict has now passed a grim milestone. Over 3,000 people have been killed in the last 50 months, reports the ‘Bangkok Post,’ quoting the AFP news agency.

And recent events only point to more tension in a region that is home to this largely Buddhist country’s Malay-Muslim minority. The latter make up the largest slice of the population in the provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, where over 30,000 heavily-armed Thai troops are battling suspected Malay-Muslim rebels.

On Wednesday, Yapa Kaseng, a 56-year-old imam (prayer leader), from a village in Narathiwat was arrested with five others by Thai troops searching for separatist rebels. And that was the last time the prayer leader’s family saw him alive. They were informed on Friday that he had died while in custody, a human rights activist in the south told IPS.

Around the same time, in Yala, there was an unrelated clash, where two police officers and one militant were killed during an exchange of gunfire, reports ‘The Nation’ newspaper in its Saturday edition. ‘’Militants opened fire on the security forces as they approached a house.’’

Imams who have graduated from pondoks, or who are still teaching in them, have come under suspicion over the past four years, says Preeda Tonchumnum, the legal affairs officer for the Cross-culture Foundation, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working in the South. ‘’In Pattani, many suspects are religious teachers from pondoks.’’

The pressure that the pondoks are under has not eased, adds Arafen Thaipratan, a medical doctor in Yala who is on a local human rights committee. ‘’The schools, students and teachers are always under watch. Yet the attendance has not dropped.’’

‘’There are many ustads (religious teachers) on the black lists of the military,’’ he revealed in an interview. ‘’They are people who are currently attached to the Islamic schools or those who have graduated.’’

If at all, the only change that has occurred over the past four years is the drop in the military raiding pondoks to arrest students and teachers with links to the separatist insurgency, which was a regular feature during the first three years of the conflict.

The militants, however, have struck back by targeting public schools in the three provinces. According to one recent report, 75 teachers have been killed and over 290 schools have been torched.

This reality, in fact, confirms the distinct feature about the conflict in southern Thailand, setting it apart from other ethnic conflicts. Here, the schools are at the heart of the struggle, pitting a secular, non-Islamic education system against a traditional system going back centuries, where Islam and the Malay-Muslim culture are prized.

Currently, there are four types of schools in southern Thailand, ranging from the public schools, which offers a general education that is taught to children across this South-east Asian country, to tadikas, which are pre-schools attached to mosques for Malay-Muslim children. There are some 500 traditional pondoks, of which half are registered and recognised by the government.

The pondoks have students of all ages attending them and are often run by a ‘tok guru,’ the head of the school. These small schools, where students live in during their academic terms, have been central to sustaining the Malay-Muslim culture in the region.

‘’The traditional pondoks are the heart and soul of the Malay-Muslim community, like the wats (temples) are for Thailand’s Buddhist society,’’ says Don Pathan, regional editor for ‘The Nation’ newspaper, in an interview. ‘’Students go there because of the pondoks’ long history of religion, theology and culture.’’

The importance of the pondoks gained added significance in the last century after the Thai state began to impose a harsh assimilation policy in the south. That included the local Muslims having to adopt Thai names, give up religious and cultural customs and being denied education in their own language, Malayu.

Such policies came after Siam, as Thailand was then known, annexed the three southern provinces in 1902. Till then, these provinces had been part of the Malay-Muslim kingdom of Pattani.

In such an environment, the pondoks were seen by the local Muslims as the only refuge to help ‘’preserve their identity,’’ writes Ibrahem Narongraksakhet, deputy director of the College of Islamic Studies, at the Pattani-based Prince of Songkla University.

Yet the Thai government viewed such local schools with suspicion, adds Ibrahem in a chapter to a book that studied the ethnic tensions, ‘Understanding Conflict And Approaching Peace in Southern Thailand’. ‘’Pondoks did not offer secular courses and the students had no opportunity to be exposed to modern knowledge and disciplines. Moreover, most of the pondok students could not speak the Thai language. Therefore, pondoks were viewed as not being helpful in raising awareness of Thai nationality.’’

The current cycle of violence is rooted in the tensions that have grown out of this cultural difference. Malay-Muslim feelings of cultural, linguistic and, later, economic marginalisation, gave rise to the first generation of rebels, who mounted a separatist campaign in the 1970s.

But after the violence was brought under control, and a decade of relative peace prevailed in the 1990s, it erupted again on the night of Jan. 4, 2004. ‘’The new generation of fighters are driven by anger and hatred after seeing their community being belittled and shown little respect by the Thai government,’’ says Don, the editor.

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