October 30, 2004

Separatists warn tourists to stay away

From Eric Ellis

TO THE foreign hedonists who patronise the resorts of Phuket, Krabi and Koh Samui in Thailand’s gorgeous south, the term Pulo might conjure images of lavish tropical fruits.

But mention Pulo to local Thais and the image is very different; of Islamist separatism, terror attacks on government officials and lingering hatreds against the overwhelming Buddhist government 500km (310 miles) to the north in Bangkok.

Pulo is the acronym for the Pattani United Liberation Organisation, Muslim-based separatists who vow to attack Thai government officials in the wake of the “massacre” this week of 78 local Muslims in the Narathiwat province. The group, thought to number no more than 500 members, yesterday warned foreign tourists not to visit Thailand.

Relations between Thailand’s Muslim south and Bangkok have never been good and there remains bitter resentment over Bangkok’s annexation of the region in the early 1900s. Pulo’s fugitive leaders say that Bangkok “illegally incorporated" the region into Thailand and now rule as “repressive colonialists”.

Thai governments have not helped — Bangkok sees the region as a Thai Siberia to which corrupt and incompetent civil servants are banished, underlining the apparent contempt for the area and, as many locals see it, for Islam.

Most of the six million people here are Muslim and speak Yawi, a dialect of the Malay language spoken throughout the mostly Islamic regions of Malaysia and Indonesia. The region’s ancient emnities surfaced in the late 1960s when the separatist Pulo was formed to attack Thai administrators. Banned and effectively neutralised by Bangkok, Pulo retreated across the border to Malaysia from which it periodically claims responsibility for the killing of a policeman or a corrupt government official.

For its part, Malaysia’s governments have tended to look the other way over Pulo activities. Thailand’s Muslim community is mostly gathered along the Kra Isthmus, the long strip of land 600km long but barely 50km wide that connects the rump of continental Asia to the protruding Malay peninsula.

The area is the point that connects the mostly Muslim nations of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia — the world’s most populous Islamic nation — to the essentially Buddhist-controlled countries of Indo-China, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia and Laos.

It’s along the Kra Isthmus that the bulk of Thailand’s famous tourist resorts are gathered. The area is also increasingly strategic internationally. Plans exist to build a £16 billion shipping canal across the isthmus to shorten the oil shipping route from the Middle East to booming markets in China.

Despite pockets of prosperity in places such as Phuket, however, the region remains one of the poorest in South-east Asia and authorities suspect that it provides sanctuary and supporters for al-Qaeda-linked fundamentalist groups such as Jemaah Islamiah. JI’s spiritual leader, the Javanese septagenerian cleric Abu Bakr Bashir, is facing terrorism charges in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

Pulo’s resurfacing this week creates diplomatic difficulties for Thaksin Shinawatra, the Thai Prime Minister, and his neighbours in the region’s leading political grouping, the Association of South East Asian Nations, or Asean. For much of Asean’s 37-year existence, its most populous member, Indonesia, has tended to carry the biggest stick in the ten-nation grouping.

But the fall of the Suharto regime during the 1998 Asian financial crisis led to a political vacuum within Asean, which has been filled by Mr Thaksin, to the barely concealed ire of other members.

That was evident this week when Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the Malaysian Prime Minister and a devout Muslim, described the violence in Thailand as depressing during a pointed tour of Malaysia’s Kedah state, which neighbours the disputed Thai region.