BANGKOK
The beginning of the holy month of Ramadan on Sunday was shattered by violent incidents in Muslim majority southern Thailand, claiming the lives of two policemen.
Police investigator Wutichai Laobutsri told the Anadolu Agency that six police officers riding motorbikes were ambushed by around 10 insurgents close to midnight Saturday in Narathiwat province’s Tak Bai district.
Two policemen were killed in the ensuing 20-minute firefight, after which the attackers fled with the deceased officers’ weapons.
More than 100 security personnel were sent to track the insurgents.
Tak Bai is considered a highly sensitive district ever since October 2004, when over 80 Muslims youths died at the hands of the military – some of them shot while the majority were asphyxiated after being stashed into the backs of trucks to be transported to a military camp.
Early Sunday morning, two bombs exploded in nearby Ran-ngae district, damaging a power pole and a power transformer.
On Sunday afternoon, suspected insurgents shot at and injured a villager in neighboring Yala province.
Meanwhile, an assistant village chief was wounded by a bullet in an attack in Pattani province.
Ramadan – the Muslim month of fasting - is a period of increased insurgent violence in southern Thailand. The Thai military and police have reinforced security, setting up checkpoints on main roads and at the entry and exit points of municipal areas.
The atmosphere has also become more volatile after the Thai junta - which seized power on May 22 - overhauled the region’s administrative structure, putting the main civilian agency managing the region - the Southern Border Provincial Administrative Center - under military control. Panu Uthairat, a former pro-establishment high-ranking civil servant, was appointed its new head.
Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, an independent analyst who has studied the southern conflict for over ten years, recently told AA, “Panu Uthairat is very much an old-style conservative bureaucrat.”
Meanwhile, former Pattani senator Vorawit Baru had added that Uthairat will probably “rely on the village chiefs’ network, which will be dangerous for them.”
Thailand's three Muslim-dominated southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat have been wracked by a Muslim insurgency since Siam (the name of Thailand pre-1939) took control of what was then a Malay Sultanate following an Anglo-Siamese treaty in 1909.
The insurgency became a full-blown civil war in the 1960s when the Bangkok government tried to control education in the region's Islamic schools.
In January 2004, a rejuvenated movement launched a series of attacks that shook up the Thai State. Since then bomb attacks, drive-by shootings and ambushes have happened on an almost daily basis; almost 6,000 people – Buddhists and Muslims, military, teachers, civil servants and civilians – killed and 10,700 others wounded.
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