MUSLIM HATE OF BUDDHISTS!
Buddhist worker beheaded in Thai Muslim south
06 Jun 2005
Source: Reuters
BANGKOK, June 6 (Reuters) - A Buddhist has been beheaded in Muslim-majority southern Thailand, police said on Monday, the fourth decapitation of a Buddhist since violence erupted in the region 18 months ago.
Police found the body of the 59-year-old rubber plantation employee at his hut in Yaha district of Yala province late on Sunday.
"We believe it must have been the work of those militants," a police officer said by telephone, declining to give further details of the incident in the largely Malay-speaking region, where more than 700 people have died in the violence.
No group has claimed responsibility for the violence.
The Muslim-majority region has a century-long history of violent separatism from Bangkok.
The first Buddhist rubber tapper was decapitated in May last year. His killers left a note saying they had acted in revenge for the arrest of innocent Muslims.
In November, two Buddhist men were beheaded in revenge for the deaths of 85 Muslim protesters in army custody, most of them by suffocation a month earlier.
Three policemen and two civilians were wounded on Monday when a 5 kg (11 lbs) bomb hidden in a motorcycle and triggered by a mobile phone went off in a park in the nearby tourist town of Sungai Kolok as people were exercising.
Late on Sunday, militants blew up a power transmitter, blacking out the city of Yaha, police said.
The government in the mostly Buddhist country has imposed martial law in parts of the provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, which all border Malaysia, at the same time as offering lavish development aid and regional assistance.
However, neither the iron first or olive branch approach seems to have made any impact. Shootings, bombings and arson attacks mainly against official, Buddhist targets have become daily occurrences.
Violence Aimed at
Driving out Buddhists, Says Thaksin
By Sutin Wannabovorn
AP Writer/Bangkok, Thailand
June 23, 2005
A series of gruesome beheadings and other killings in southern Thailand are part of a campaign by Islamic separatists to scare off the minority Buddhist population and to show that they can still carry out attacks despite a government crackdown, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said Thursday.
Suspected insurgents decapitated a man at a teashop Wednesday in one of the boldest attacks since the Muslim-majority provinces near Malaysia erupted in violence last year. It was the fifth beheading in recent weeks and apparently the first to be carried out in broad daylight.
Thaksin called an emergency meeting with security forces Thursday to discuss the continuing attacks in Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.
More than 880 people have been killed over the past 17 months in attacks generally blamed on the revival of a long-dormant secessionist movement.
"They (the insurgents) have been beheading innocent people to show they are still capable of creating violence," Thaksin told reporters. "They try to make (Buddhist) people scared so they will run away from the region because they want to seize the area."
He added that the insurgents had launched the attacks "out of desperation because several of their leaders have been arrested."
Thaksin's administration has been criticized for taking an overbearing approach to the unrest by posting thousands of troops and imposing martial law in the region. Muslim clerics have complained of soldiers showing disrespect for Islamic traditions in their drive to root out suspects.
But Thaksin has conceded failures in his government's handling of the south and pledged to try conciliatory means to resolve the conflict.
Maj-Gen Thani Thawitsri, the deputy regional police commander for the southern provinces, said the beheadings had become a pattern and that they were intended "to create chaos and scare people away from the region."
He said it remained unclear whether the Thai separatists were trying to imitate Iraqi insurgents, who have beheaded several foreign hostages since the US invasion of their country two years ago, because there is a history of such killings in Thailand.
In 1969, two female Western missionaries were decapitated on a mountain in Narathiwat province that was a stronghold for Muslim separatists at the time, he noted.
Muslim separatists waged a low-level campaign in the southern provinces for decades before largely dispersing after a government amnesty in the 1980s.
Southern Thai Muslims have long complained of discrimination, particularly in jobs and education.
Abdulraman Abdulsamad, chairman of the Islamic Council of Narathiwat, said the beheadings had sparked fear among local people and threatened to turn the region into a "ghost town."
"I cannot say who is the real culprit of this brutal killing," he said. "When you talk to local people, they believe the authorities did it. But when we talk to authorities, they say the terrorists did it."
Thousands of Buddhists flee Thailand’s south
Thursday,7 July, 2005
BANGKOK: Thousands of Buddhist teachers and residents are fleeing Thailand’s Muslim south as 19 months of anti-government violence shows no sign of slackening, officials said yesterday.
Another 2,000
teachers were expected to move to safer provinces after at least two dozen of
their colleagues were among nearly 800 people killed by militants since violence
erupted in the largely Malay-speaking region in January last year, they said.
As incentives to stay, the Education Ministry is offering 3,000 free flak
jackets and faster licenses for 1,700 teachers waiting to buy guns in the most
dangerous parts of the three provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
“Guns are their best friends,” Deputy Education Minister Rung Kaewdaeng told reporters in Bangkok after visiting some of the 20,000 teachers in the region.
“The teachers who survived are those who returned fire on their attackers.”
On Monday, Education Minister Adisak Bodharamik gave teachers wanting to move out a week to register and vowed to provide more security for those who wanted to stay.
Education Ministry data showed about 1,000 teachers have already left the region, where schools have been frequent militant targets as symbols of the government of predominantly Buddhist Thailand in faraway Bangkok.
Another 1,000 applications from teachers who routinely go to and from school with military escorts were awaiting approval.
Bombings, shootings and arson attacks directed at state buildings or workers — Buddhist and Muslim — have become daily occurences despite more than 30,000 troops and police patrolling the region of fewer than 2mn people.
The government has imposed martial law on parts of the region, where separatists fought low-key insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s.
But violence is unabated with nine people beheaded — in killings some top officials say have been inspired by Iraqi insurgents — in recent months and officials say thousands of locally-born people, many of them Buddhists, have moved out.
Government data showed almost 15,000 people left between January 2004 and April 2005. In 2003, 22,000 moved in.
Rung said teachers leaving the far south would be replaced by volunteer and temporary teachers and the ministry would seek loans for teachers to buy guns to protect themselves.
“Creating debt or saving your life, which one would you choose,” Rung replied when asked if encouraging teachers to take on more debt was a good idea.
A policeman was beheaded yesterday in troubled southern Thailand, the first member of the security forces to be decapitated in a string of such brutal attacks over the past month, police said.
The body of 44-year-old Sergeant Samphan Onyala, who was on duty but plainclothed, was found just after 8pm (1300 GMT) in Yarang district of Pattani province.
“Villagers heard gunshots and informed police, who went to the scene and found Sergeant Samphan shot once and with his head cut off,” a police officer in Yarang said.
The victim’s body was found close to his motorcycle while authorities were still searching for the head, he added.
4 Buddhists shot dead in Thailand`s restive south
Bangkok,
Dec 02: Four Buddhists were shot dead on Saturday in Buddhist-majority
Thailand's restive, Muslim-dominated south, as the government warned it may have
to change its strategy to counter the rising violence.
A gunman posing as a customer whipped out a gun and shot a 59-yar-old food
vendor in Pattani province in front of dozens of horrified bystanders, police Lt
Wichathon Timkrom said.
In nearby Yala Provine, gunmen killed a 34-year-old truck driver as he rode his
motorcycle with his wife, Police Lt Prasom Laungphu said. His wife was not hurt.
Two other Buddhists were shot dead today in Narathiwat province, police said.
Gunmen fired into a grocery store in Rueso district, killing its owner Wanna
Ongananurak, 35, and a second woman who was as yet unidentified, police said.
Thailand's military-installed government has pledged to make peace in the south
a priority, and to reverse the hardline policies of former Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawtra, who was deposed by a coup September 19.
But with daily killings continuing unabated, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont
said today the government may have to change course if the situation does not
improve.
"My government is insisting on a peaceful solution to resolve the problem, but
if the situation is not improved in (the) next three months, the government may
have to adjust the strategy," Surayud said, without elaborating.
More than 1,800 people have died from violence in predominantly Buddhist
Thailand's three southernmost, Muslim-majority provinces - Yala, Pattani and
Narathiwat - since an Islamic insurgency flared in January 2004.
Bureau Report