BANGKOK, 21 February 2004 — Renegade government officials may have played a part in a recent spate of violence in Thailand’s Muslim south, which has killed at least 40 people in the past month, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday.
Hitherto, the finger of blame for the unrest, which has rekindled fears of a revival of the Muslim separatist insurgency that hit the region in the 1970s and 1980s, has been pointed in many directions.
However, Thaksin’s comments are the first time the government has blamed its own officials for the attacks, which started on Jan. 4 when gunmen raided an army base in the southern province of Narathiwat, stealing 100 guns and killing four soldiers.
Twenty-one schools were also torched. “There must have been government officials involved in this, but how many, or what level of these people, we are probing,” Thaksin said. Earlier this week, Bangkok blamed local mafias and also said some politicians might have taken the opportunity of rural election campaigns to kill their opponents and then pin the blame on radicals.
Some security officials believe the architects of the attacks may have links to Jemaah Islamiah, believed by some intelligence officials to be the Southeast Asian branch of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.
Martial law has been declared in the area, allowing the army to detain suspects without court warrants or proper charges. However, police have failed to catch any of the gunmen involved in the first attacks and the low-level unrest has continued.
Thaksin said the almost daily killing of civilian and security officials in the region was a tactic by the architects of the violence to distract police from their manhunt.
“They want us to be swamped with daily killings,” Thaksin said. “They want to delay the probe.” At least 40 Muslims and Buddhists, including three monks, have been killed in 96 separate incidents from Jan. 4 to Feb. 18 in Thailand’s three southernmost provinces, the army told a Senate committee this week.
Around 900 schools in the south were closed for the second time this year on Thursday after threats from unidentified groups. They are due to reopen on Monday.
Maj. Chalor Kingthong, spokesman for the Fourth Army that patrols the region, said a police captain was also injured in the separate attacks in two provinces, while an unidentified man was found with his throat slit. Anonymous flyers threatening violence against teachers has forced the closure of all 360 schools in Pattani province, while dozens more in sensitive areas of neighboring Narathiwat and Yala provinces have been closed.
