Posted on 11/20/2002 10:09:03 PM PST by Angelus Errare
Thai Muslim guerrilla at peace as fears of unrest mount
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By Dominic Whiting
BA JOH, Thailand, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Yousuf "Pakistan" Longpi led a band of 11 men in darkness down the jungle-clad mountain, wielding Vietnam war relics -- an M-79 grenade launcher, two carbines and an M-60 machinegun.
Their mission: to destroy a police station and grab as many weapons as possible for a struggle to create an independent Islamic state in Thailand's southernmost provinces.
"We launched the first bomb and the attack started," the 54-year-old former guerrilla said. "But the second bomb didn't explode, so we withdrew."
One policeman was killed in that attack in 1977, an operation typical of the low-scale Muslim separatist war fought in the late 1970s and 1980s against predominantly Buddhist Thailand.
Yousuf, a founding member of the separatist Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO) until he took up a government offer of amnesty in 1991, lives in a ramshackle wooden house only 10 minutes walk from the police station he blew up.
A former battleground, his village now rests in a deep slumber, interrupted only by the occasional passing motorcycle or crowing cockerel.
Casualties, surrenders and pressure from predominantly Muslim Malaysia to the south took their toll, and the armed separatist struggle petered out in the early 1990s.
Support for separatism among Thailand's six million Muslims -- 10 percent of the population -- waned as the army withdrew from politics and democratic governments tried to integrate the south into the country's booming economy.
But a rump of PULO and various splinter groups have stubbornly carried out sporadic attacks on state targets, such as police stations and railway stations, in the last decade.
NEW ATTACKS
Arson and grenade attacks on schools, a Buddhist temple and a Chinese shrine in the last month, have been dismissed by the government as the work of bandits and drug addicts. Ministers say groups such as PULO are now more interested in extortion and petty crime than any political cause.
But some southern politicians fear a separatist resurgence, inspired by a rise in Islamic militancy worldwide.
Several Western governments have issued travel advisories for resorts such as Phuket and there has been speculation militants may have used southern Thailand as a base to plan last month's bomb blasts on the Indonesian island of Bali, which killed more than 180 people.
"In the past, any violence has challenged the symbols of state -- schools, police stations, government offices," said Surin Pitsuwan, a Muslim member of parliament and Thai foreign minister from 1998 to 2001. "Now it's taking a definite turn, which is why people are worried. It's taking an ethnic turn."
Surin said PULO and a handful of other shady separatist groups lacked the organisation for a major attack on Westerners in Thailand, but could volunteer to help militants from abroad.
"You could have accomplices but no real perpetrators," Surin said. "I don't think these people have had direct links on a level of terrorism, more on a fundamental Islamic level. There's a psychological affiliation more than a political one."
Yousuf says PULO's links with militant groups abroad go back to when he and fellow students in Pakistan decided to fight a state he says oppressed its Muslim minority by denying full citizenship rights and educational opportunities.
On their return to Thailand the students found strong support for a separatist war and, under his new nom de guerre, "Pakistan", Yousuf began making contacts abroad.
LIBYAN AND SYRIAN TRAINING
"We got our weapons from a broker in Thailand. We didn't get much material support from outside, but we got moral support, mostly from the Middle East countries and some political parties in countries such as Syria and Libya," Yousuf said.
Yousuf said he received training in guerrilla warfare tactics in Syria, where he said the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) also trained PULO troops, who numbered about 3,000 at the movement's height. He then became PULO's representative in Libya for two years from 1979, overseeing a Libyan training programme.
"Around 10 people went to Libya every year for four or five years, for a variety of short and long courses," he said.
"It's the nature of the movement. Radicals are going to make friends with radical people. That's natural."
Police believe PULO's two or three top leaders are abroad, possibly in Europe, while the group's strength in Thailand is estimated at 20-50 by the government, and 150-200 by independent analysts.
The group runs a Web site, www.pulo.org, on which it hankers for a return to the seven sultanates that Thailand, then called Siam, annexed in 1902 out of fear of a northward extension of British colonial power from Malaysia.
The Web site also condemns Yousuf as a traitor.
Yousuf shrugs, and contemplates his new life as a rice and rubber farmer, shared with a wife, five children and an assortment of ducks, geese and caged birds.
"I gave up my life for 20 years for their way, but we have to choose a good way to live and God will help us," he said.
"We were successful. Because of the moral support from people in this area, we changed the way the government ruled and now people here are happy," Yousuf said.
"Mostly people here don't want radicalism, especially the younger generation. But it depends on the rule of the government. If the father is stupid, the son will also be stupid."
He exchanges nods with a policeman riding past on a motorcycle, a survivor of Yousuf's failed attack 25 years ago.
"His wife is my relative. When we meet each other, we talk as if it was a sport, like football. The game's over now and the past is the past. Forgotten."
He also supported Idi Amin In Uganda with troops and is supporting Mugabe in Zimbabwe with bodyguards and intelligence assistance.
He should be on the "axis of evil" list IMHO.
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