Malaysia Issues Travel Warning For South Thailand

[george]

Malaysia issues travel warning to its citizens visiting S. Thailand

Malaysia has issued travel warning to its citizens after a bomb attack killed a Malay man in Sungai Kolok, Narathiwat province last Sunday, Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said.

Relations between the two Southeast Asian neighbors have been strained as the Thai government has repeatedly alleged that Islamic insurgents blamed for an unrest which has caused more than 1,100 deaths in the past two years take refuge in Malaysia.

--The Nation 2005-11-22

[astral]

Interesting.

20 years ago it was the CPM (Communist Party of Malaysia) taking refuge

in Thailand. Now the boot is on the other foot.

[JRinger]

Another Buddhist decapitated in Thai Muslim south

THURSDAY , 24 NOVEMBER 2005

BANGKOK: Suspected Muslim militants have beheaded a Buddhist man in southern Thailand, police said yesterday, the second decapitation this month and the 14th in nearly two years of unrest that has claimed 1000 lives.

The head and torso of a 31-year-old garbage fee collector were found in two fertiliser bags alongside a highway in Pattani province yesterday, police said.

"We suspect he might have been attacked and killed last night without having a chance to use his pistol," an officer at Nongjik police station told Reuters by telephone.

Troops, police and civil servants are key targets of Muslim militant attacks, who fought a low-key separatist war in the jungle in the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite the presence of 30,000 soldiers and police in the region, where 80 per cent of people are Muslim, ethnic Malays, the insurgency appears to be growing, suggesting the anti-Bangkok guerrillas are becoming more sophisticated.

But Deputy Prime Minister Chidchai Vanasatidya, who is responsible for national security, insisted yesterday that the government was making gains against the insurgents.

"We have continuously weakened them and come up with preventive measures. The people are on our side," he told reporters in Bangkok.

Analysts think differently. "Trust between Malay Muslim villagers and the security forces has broken down completely in some areas," Francesca Lawe-Davies of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group think tank said in a report released last week.

"Though this has not been caused solely by the decree, there is no doubt it has significantly exacerbated the problem," she said referring to the Executive Decree on Public Administration in Emergency Situation which took effect in the region in July.

The law, meant to be a softer version of martial law, was in many ways worse, leaving loopholes that heighten the risk of arbitrary detention and mistreatment of detainees, the report said.