Thailand-Buddhists Are Being Targeted

[Annie]

by the RofP:
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/03/war_of_shadows.php

War of Shadows
PJM in Seattle
March 8, 2007 1:00 AM


athai.jpg

Who is Thailand fighting in Thailand? Is it a Muslim jihad or an insurgency? Either way it has cost more than between 1,200 and 2,000 people their lives and shows every sign of becoming more violent.

by Richard Fernandez, PJM editor in Sydney


Yesterday “suspected Muslim militants beheaded a 58-year-old rubber-plantation worker Wednesday in Yala, part of Thailand’s deep South… Police found the burned body of Sathit Tongin, a Thai Buddhist, near an Islamic religious school on the outskirts of Yala City, 760 kilometers south of Bangkok.” It was only the latest in a round of escalating attacks and atrocities.

On February 19, as thousands of Thais celebrated the Lunar New Year, dozens of bombings and shooting attacks struck across four provinces of southern Thailand. The attack killed 8 people and wounded dozens of others. These provinces are the center of an insurgency by largely Muslim ethnic Malays against Bangkok which has claimed a 1,200 lives in the past decade — one thousand of them since 2004. Largely ignored by, and hence unknown to the West, it is the most lethal insurgency in Southeast Asia. In the wake of the most recent attacks an army spokesman believed that unidentified insurgent forces were trying to intimidate ethnic Chinese — who celebrate the New Year holiday — into fleeing the predominantly Muslim region. Even so, no organization has claimed responsibility for the direction of the insurgency. Reuters continues the story:

Thailand’s army-appointed government admitted it had no idea who in particular was behind a wave of bombs and shootings in which eight people were killed in the Muslim-majority far south as the Lunar New Year began. The attacks hit a variety of targets. Shortly before a special security meeting in Bangkok, an army major was killed outside his house in Yala, one of the four southern provinces hit by around 30 bombs on Sunday night, after he picked up a bag containing a bomb, police said. … "The problem now is that we don’t know who’s responsible and where they are," army chief of staff General Montri Sangkhasap told reporters after Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont met security chiefs to discuss the violence.

The recent wave of unattributed attacks followed the attack last month in Bangkok which forced the cancellation of New Year’s Eve celebrations in the capital. The attacks were calculated to both disrupt and intimidate. "The first bomb exploded at the Victory Monument, an area crowded with food stalls … subsequent bombings were at … Klong Toey and in the parking lot of Bangkok’s largest mall … in the movie theater in Bangkok’s newest and glitziest malls, the Siam Paragon … two more bombs were detonated just after midnight, this time in more heavily tourist areas." The New Year’s Day attacks signaled that the insurgency had left the periphery and truly come to the capital. The Lunar New Year attacks showed the capability to launch multiple simultaneous attacks was no fluke. A number of insurgent groups were the usual suspects, but in the absence of a clear set of demands, the question remained: who was leading it?

...

 

[Tarantulas]

Globalsecurity.org blames it on the Religion Of Peace:

A wave of attacks in southern Thailand forced the government to stop blaming "bandits" and acknowledge, for the first time in decades, that separatist militants were operating in the country. On 05 January 2004 Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared martial law in most of the affected region, the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala. Defence Minister Thamarak Isarangura authorised Fourth Army Region commander Lt-General Phongsak Aekbansingha to place six districts in Narathiwat, three districts in Yala and four districts in Pattani under martial law. This followed a deadly arms raid and arson attack which re-ignited security concerns in the majority Muslim provinces of Southern Thailand. More than 100 assault rifles stolen in a raid on 04 January 2004 by dozens of assailants who killed four Thai soldiers and torched 18 schools. In early 2004 there were reports of more than 100 fighters moving near the border.

The premier blamed the assault on the Mujahideen Islam Pattani, one of several Muslim separatist groups accused of killing about 50 police officers over the previous three years. The banned Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO) had boasted in May 2003 that Thai security forces were "falling like leaves" as Muslims fought to free the south from Bangkok's rule. PULO Deputy President Lukman B. Lima charged that Bangkok "illegally incorporated" the far south into Thailand 100 years ago and now ruled it with "colonial" repression while "committing crimes against humanity in the area."

Link

 

[Bullypulpit]

Like any other religious radical group, the leaders aren't truly religious. They wear the mantle of religion, like a wolf in sheep's skin. They twist the tenets of whatever religion they claim and use it to inflame the passions and fears of those susceptible to its message against injustices, real or perceived.

One example, still virulent here in America, is the white supremacist movement. How often do Biblical themes appear in their pompous sounding names?