Suspected insurgent dead in latest Thai south violence

By Max Constant

BANGKOK (AA) – A suspected insurgent was killed early Sunday in an exchange of gunfire with a government paramilitary unit in Thailand’s south, just days after a female teacher was shot dead in broad daylight in an attack condemned as “inhumane” and “heinous”.

The deputy investigator at the Rueso district police station in Muslim-majority Narathiwat province told Anadolu Agency that gunfire was exchanged “when a paramilitary unit approached the hiding place of a suspected insurgent”.

“The suspect, named Mahama Maero and aged 29 years old, was killed, but none of the paramilitary were either wounded or killed,” police captain Marut Nilkosee added.

An arrest warrant for Maero had been issued by Narathiwat’s criminal court in 2011 after police investigators concluded he was involved in a bombing on a train in Rueso that killed one person and injured 16 others in November 2011.

The suspect’s death came after a week of violence in Thailand’s insurgency-plagued south, where 80 percent of the population is ethnic Malay Muslim.

On Oct. 24, a bomb exploded near a noodle shop in neighboring Pattani province, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring 21 others.

Last Friday, two men riding a motorcycle shot at a car in front of an education office in Pattani’s Mayo district, killing a 49-year-old female teacher driving the vehicle and injuring a passenger, a female civil servant.

The two attackers, who were captured on security cameras, left a note near the car with the words “for you who killed Malayu people” -- using a local term that refers to ethnic Malay Muslims.

The attack was condemned as a “severe violation of human rights” in a joint statement released by the Internal Security Operational Command (ISOC), the main domestic security agency, and the National Human Rights Commission.

“I ask all sectors of society, especially civic networks, to jointly denounce this act and reject all kinds of violence,” said Col. Pramote Phrom-in, deputy spokesman for ISOC in the southern region.

What Tingsamit, National Human Rights Commission chairman, expressed his indignation against the killing, saying that “taking the lives of education staff is heinous and destroys the future of the nation.”

The southern insurgency -- which has destabilized the three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat for decades -- is rooted in a century-old ethno-cultural conflict between Malay Muslims living in the region and the Thai central state where Buddhism is considered the de-facto national religion.

Armed insurgent groups were formed in the 1960s after the then-military dictatorship tried to interfere in Islamic schools, but the insurgency faded in the 1990s.

In 2004, a rejuvenated armed movement -- composed of numerous local cells of fighters loosely grouped around the National Revolutionary Front, or BRN -- emerged.

After the military seized power in May 2014, the junta continued the overthrown elected civilian government’s policy of holding peace talks with insurgent groups.

But a recent report on the Thai south by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, regarded this dialogue as having “foundered” because both sides “prefer hostilities to compromise”.

“The National Council for Peace and Order [NCPO], which seized power in the 2014 coup, professes to support dialogue to end the insurgency but avoids commitment,” the report said, referring to the ruling junta by its official name.