After five months of violence that has killed more than 200 people, Thailand is still groping to find the cause of and develop a strategy to end the unrest in its mainly Muslim south, analysts say.
Despite an ultimatum by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to his top security staff last week to restore peace in the region in 30 days, violence persisted with shootings of security officers and civilians, arson attacks and bombings.
Thaksin, who chaired a high-level meeting on Friday to find long-term solutions for the poorly developed region, has ordered security forces to "go on the offensive" by stepping up patrols and intensifying searches to prevent attacks.
But analysts argue that the government still has no clue who or what is behind the latest violence in a region where a Muslim separatist insurgency fought in the 1970s and 1980s but petered out in 1990s.
"The government does not have a clear target. They just don't know who the culprits are," said Chidchanok Rahimmula, a security lecturer at Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani province in the south.
"The problem is so complex, and there has been so much procrastinating by past governments, they have no clue where to start," she said.
The unrest, which began with a January raid on an army camp and escalated in April when 108 militants were killed by soldiers and police in a bloody uprising, has hurt economic growth and undermined investor confidence.
Since January, the government has entertained various theories on who or what is behind the unrest in a region that is home to most of Buddhist Thailand's 6 million Muslims and that borders Muslim Malaysia.
"We have the military's views on how to tackle the problem, the bureaucracy's views and local political leaders' views," said Steve Wilford, Southeast Asia analyst for Control Risks Group in Singapore.
"Some of these views are not being heard, and some of them are competing. I think there is a degree of drift right now as to how to face up to what is going on in the south," he said.
At first, gunrunners were blamed for the army camp raid in which four soldiers were killed and 400 guns, most of them M-16 rifles, were stolen, authorities said, for possible sale to rebels in Sri Lanka and in Indonesia's Aceh province.
Police quickly arrested two dozen Muslim suspects, who were later freed after prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence against them.
Since then, the government has only pressed charges against a southern member of parliament from Thaksin's ruling Thai Rak Thai party in connection with the raid. He has denied charges of treason and premeditated murder.
"The lack of arrests with sufficient evidence to prosecute underlines the degree of confusion as to where the violence is coming from," Wilford said.
"Names of groups have been bandied about and names of some individuals, but nobody really seems to have a bead on how these attacks are coordinated and what kind of structures are orchestrating them," he said.
In the months after the January raid, the almost daily killings of police and government officials led Bangkok to blame crime gangs upset by a bloody government war on drugs last year.
The April 28 uprising -- in which young militants, many of whom believed they would be protected from bullets by wearing sacred cloths and bathing in holy water, attacked government targets in three provinces -- changed everything.
Security officials are now zeroing in on the activities of religious teachers, some of whom they say have been educated in the Middle East and are suspected of preaching violence at home.
The government has made much of a Malay-written booklet, entitled Berjihad di Pattani, found on one of the dead militants after the April attacks.
Authorities say the handbook called on Thai Muslims to rise up and fight a jihad, or Muslim holy war, for a separate state of Pattani.
Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, the country's top security minister, said this month crime gangs were a "minor factor" in the violence. He blamed the unrest on "some preachers who have changed the original teachings" of the Koran.
Chavalit said the teachers were spurring young Muslims into a violent struggle for an independent state, and he urged Islamic leaders and preachers to teach "correct" Islam.
But security analysts and Islamic scholars have warned that by targeting religious teachers, the government may further anger a Muslim community already upset at months of martial law, which itself looks set to get more heavy-handed after Thaksin ordered security forces to go on the offensive.
"The government is adding petrol to the fire," said Ahmad Somboon Bualuang, an Islamic academic at Prince of Songkhla University.
"When people are fed up with the presence of the troops and unable to resort to peaceful means, some might attack state symbols," he said.
The world has become less predictable, less rules-based, and more shaped by the impulses of strongmen and short-term dealmaking. Nowhere is this more consequential than in East Asia, where the fate of democratic Taiwan hinges on how global powers manage — or mismanage — tensions with an increasingly assertive China. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has deepened the global uncertainty, with his erratic, highly personalized foreign-policy approach unsettling allies and adversaries alike. Trump appears to treat foreign policy like a reality show. Yet, paradoxically, the global unpredictability may offer Taiwan unexpected deterrence. For China, the risk of provoking the
Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
Young supporters of former Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) were detained for posting the names and photographs of judges and prosecutors believed to be overseeing the Core Pacific City redevelopment corruption case. The supporters should be held responsible for their actions. As for Ko’s successor, TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), he should reflect on whether his own comments are provocative and whether his statements might be misunderstood. Huang needs to apologize to the public and the judiciary. In the article, “Why does sorry seem to be the hardest word?” the late political commentator Nan Fang Shuo (南方朔) wrote
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) reportedly told the EU’s top diplomat that China does not want Russia to lose in Ukraine, because the US could shift its focus to countering Beijing. Wang made the comment while meeting with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas on July 2 at the 13th China-EU High-Level Strategic Dialogue in Brussels, the South China Morning Post and CNN reported. Although contrary to China’s claim of neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, such a frank remark suggests Beijing might prefer a protracted war to keep the US from focusing on
RSS