Muslim Bombings Trouble Thailand

 Don Pathan
The Associated Press

PATTANI, Thailand (AP) _ A wave of bombings deep in southern Thailand has jolted a government preoccupied with Asia’s economic crisis into focusing on an older problem _ trouble in Muslim areas.

Bombs have been planted at train stations, police buildings and roadblocks since early December. Explosions have killed four people and injured scores, and threatened to fan new tensions between the nation’s Muslim minority and Buddhist majority.

They have also opened old wounds with Malaysia, which borders Thailand’s southernmost provinces and has been accused of training and harboring Muslim separatists in the past. The population in the Thai provinces is overwhelmingly ethnic Malay and Muslim.

But Muslim leaders and some national politicians say the recent violence has less to do with separatist feelings than with a rise in drug-trafficking across the border, jockeying by political parties and turf battles between civil servants.

Ismae-ae Alee, director of the College of Islamic Studies at Prince of Songkla in Pattani, 650 miles south of Bangkok, said that authorities have always been quick to raise the specter of separatism as a scapegoat for other problems.

``The movement is finished,″ said Isma-ae. ``Whatever’s left of it does not have the support of the people here.″

The southern provinces were annexed at the turn of the century by Siam, as Thailand was known, from the fringes of British-ruled Malaya.

Relations soured in later decades when governments in Bangkok imposed policies forcing all ethnic groups to adopt the Thai language and culture and, by implication, Buddhism. Muslims were encouraged to make their pilgrimage to the royal palace in Bangkok instead of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest site.

Armed resistence came in 1968 with the establishment of the Pattani United Liberation Organization. The group operated alongside Thai communists in insurgencies that lasted into the 1980s.

But in the past decade, PULO has been largely moribund. Bangkok bought peace by spending lavishly on infrastructure and development in the south and providing financial support to traditional Islamic schools, the preferred choice of most families in the region.

Southern Thailand has a distinctly different look from the north. Virtually all women wear traditional head scarves and veils, and Arabic script on storefronts and mosques coexists with the Thai language used on official buildings. Most people speak Malay.

Though Thailand’s oft-tense relations with Malaysia have improved enormously in recent years, the Thais have never been pleased with what they see as foot-dragging by the Malaysians on turning over wanted terrorism suspects.

Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai blamed the recent bombings on separatists operating out of Kalatan, the Malaysian state across the border. Chuan says they are using young drug addicts to carry out the bombings.

Malaysia and six Muslim separatist groups, including PULO, have denied the allegations.

Divisions between the Thai security forces have given ammunition to critics who say other interests besides those of a misplaced Islam are at work.

Lack of cooperation between army and police is cited as one reason why authorities have yet to determine who was responsible for the torching of 40 schools in the Muslim south two years ago.

Burhanuddin Useng of the Wadah group, a Muslim faction in the opposition New Aspiration Party, blamed the bombings on corrupt bureaucrats and powerful figures fighting for control of drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution.

Burhanuddin claimed that a number of heroin and amphetamine laboratories have relocated from the infamous Golden Triangle in northern Thailand to the south over the past year.

Some corrupt police officers are involved in the trade, Burhanuddin said, and the area is becoming a popular transit point for drugs.

Sen. Aziz bin Hawan echoed the accusations, saying scores of police officers have turned down promotion and reassignment to other regions to stay in the south and benefit from illegal trade.

Ananchai Thaipratan, director of a local drug-addict rehabilitation group, said the number of heroin addicts in the four provinces has exploded some 30 percent over the past three years.

Local disputes have important ramifications for Chuan’s coalition government, which took over in November with a slight parliamentary majority to grapple with the economic crisis rocking Thailand and several other Asian countries.

The strongholds of Chuan’s Democrat Party are Bangkok, the capital, and the south, but the Democrats are facing an increasing challenge in the Muslim provinces from the Wadah group.

Though no one accuses the Democrats of staging the bombings, the party is widely seen as exploiting them to reshuffle bureaucrats in the region that could help its chances in the next election.