BACHO, Narathiwat __ Mahrosu Jantarawadee's parents had to wait for four hours before Narathiwat Hospital would release his body because the commander of the Fourth Army Area and other VIPs wanted to see what the 31-year-old man looked like.
Mahrosu was one of the 16 insurgents killed in Wednesday morning's gunfight between heavily armed militants and members of the Royal Thai Marines in Bacho district. About 50 insurgents had walked into a trap. Officials say they had prior knowledge about the planned attack.
To the authorities, Marohso was a fierce militant, a misguided young man they say was caught up in an armed movement that embraces distorted history and false teaching of Islam. He had more than 10 warrants out for his arrest and had been on the run for the past five years.
But to his family and neighbours, he was a responsible person who cared deeply for his wife and children.
"He made sure that our children and I live comfortably. He built this house from the money he made from buying and selling cattle," said Rusanee, 25, the mother of Mahrosu's six-year-old girl and a 17-month boy.
"He bought our daughter a computer tablet and talked about how he would like to see her grown up as an educated woman, religiously pious and possibly go abroad to study," Rusanee said.
"There was this one time that they wanted him to surrender so bad that they took his younger brother into custody thinking that it would get him to surrender," his mother said.
Marohso's funeral drew a huge crowd and was somewhat emotional. Young and old men queued up in an orderly column to pass his body, wrapped in white sheet. In the background there was a constant chant of "Allah Akbar" (God is great).
In spite of the high number of troops in the region, Mahrosu and others on the wanted list move around somewhat freely, mainly because the local community will not turn them in.
Authorities say the villagers are scared of the insurgents but residents say the militants are part of the community. Like the insurgents, they share some of the same sentiments and historical mistrust of the Thai state.
Che Mah Che Ni, 52, said her son's life changed dramatically after the Tak Bai massacre in 2004 that ended in the death of 86 unarmed demonstrators, most of whom died of suffocation.
"He was one of the guys they stacked one on top another in the back of the military truck," Che Mah said.
The massacre, in which no government officials were punished, has radicalised an entire generation of Malay Muslims in an already highly contested region and become part of the local narrative that feeds into the justification for taking up arms in the separatist movement.
A couple of years after the Tak Bai incident, Mahrosu and Rusanee got married. Rusanee said she knew exactly what she was getting into and understood the risks.
The two tried living and working in Malaysia but returned when they were expecting their first child.
Back in Bacho, Mahrosu picked up from where he had left off.
When asked about his insurrection activities, Rusanee replied: "Everybody knows what this is all about."
Mahrosu visited his wife and children three times this past month and made a phone call to his wife before his outfit raided the marine unit just a few kilometres from his village.
"He said he would be home soon and not to worry," Rusanee said.
Mahrosu did come home as he said, but in a body bag. He was buried as a "shahid", or martyr in Islamic tradition.
"This was something he always wanted," said Rusanee, who is proud of her husband and is grateful for the things he provided. She said she has no regrets.
In a way, Mahrosu's death was a blessing in disguise. At least, said the wife, there is no longer any worry about him being caught alive. "He was certain he would be tortured severely if they had got him alive," she said.
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Group says 'fighter' cell may have been infiltrated
DON PATHAN
THE NATION
Bacho, Narathiwat February 15, 2013
Separatist chief considers existence of mole
A senior operative from the Barisan Revolusi National-Coordinated (BRN-C) said his movement has not ruled out the possibility that there was a mole within the local militant cell responsible for planning and implementing Wednesday morning's failed attack on a Marine base in Narathiwat's Bacho district.
He said BRN-C, a separatist group that surfaced in the 1960s and claims to have the best relations with the militants, said the two groups would go back to the drawing board to rethink their future plans, especially those involving such daring attempts.
The Marine Task Force 32 commander, Marine Lt-Colonel Thamanoon Wanna, said information about the attack was obtained from a map found on the body of Suhaidee Tahir, a suspected insurgent who was killed last Saturday in Narathiwat's Sai Buri district in a gunfight with security forces.
Authorities had accused Suhaidee of killing Thai-Muslim schoolteacher Chonlatee Charoen-chon, who was shot dead in front of his students on January 23. BRN-C denies that Chonlatee was killed by the militants, locally known as juwae, which means "fighter" in the local Malay dialect.
The operative said the juwae had killed three teachers and burned down two schools from mid-November to the first week of January in retaliation for the November 14 assassination of Abdullateh Todir, the imam in Yala's Yaha district, and for the Rangae district teashop massacre on December 11, allegedly carried out by a pro-government death squad.At the insistence of senior BRN-C leaders, the juwae stopped targeting teachers and schools around the first week of January, and Chonlatee was not on their hit list, the operative said. He described Marohso Jantarawadee, one of the leaders of Wednesday's attack, as a dedicated juwae.
"Whatever happens in this area, Marohso always gets blamed," said his mother, Che Mah Che Ni, 52, who went on to blast the authorities for being insensitive for sending four truckloads of security officials to search her and her neighbours' homes on the same day that they killed her son in a gunfight.
The action was in stark contrast to statements by political leaders, who earlier expressed regret over the suffering of the families of the slain insurgents.
The Wednesday morning ambush was billed an operational and intelligence success, although statements from officials contradicted each other. While a senior Marine said information about the plan had came from insurgents killed in the earlier operation, other officials said villagers and/or defecting militants tipped them off.
Two villages over from the camp, Ahama Sohkuning, 25, one of the 16 insurgents shot dead, was buried in a cemetery metres from his parent's backdoor. Like Marohso, he left behind a young wife. She is five months pregnant and their son is just 18 months old.
According to Ahama's parents, he went into hiding shortly after he was released from a 30-day confinement in the Ingkrayuth Camp in Pattani where he said he was tortured. He was finally let go because the Emergency Law permits no more than 30 days in detention without formal charges. The torture inflicted upon him had forced him into the movement, his family said.
Like his fellow cell member, Ahama was also buried as "shahid". For the two families, burying their dead as martyrs was as way of coming to term with their losses.
"People here prefer to see their sons killed fighting government troops then dying of drugs because there is no stigma in being a martyr," said a local aid worker. This is the kind of sentiment the Thai public and the state do not want to hear, much less understand, he said.
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