I met Mr Independent

[webfact]

EDITORIAL

When innocents are attacked, the cause is lost
By The Nation

 

Whoever set off the bombs in Pattani this week gained nothing by it, instead earning universal condemnation

 

BANGKOK: -- The double bombing at a large department store in Pattani on Tuesday was an act of cowardice. Whoever the perpetrators were, they were intent on using the lives and safety of many innocent people as bargaining chips to achieve their goal. In this, they had no hope of succeeding.

 

Sixty-one people, including five children, were injured in the twin blasts. At least 20 were hospitalised, four of them with serious injuries. Luckily no one was killed, but a horrendous amount of damage was done to property and to the psyches of local residents. The attack has been described as the largest in months on a civilian target in the insurgency-plagued far South.

 

The perpetrators used two explosive devices. The first was aboard a motorcycle left in the car park, the second a more powerful bomb hidden in a pickup truck outside the store’s main entrance. A passer-by, taking video after the initial blast, caught a huge fireball that sent people running for cover.

 

As is usually the case with violent attacks in the region, no one has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s bombings, but, also as usual, ethnic Malay separatist insurgents are suspected. Authorities believe Muslim shoppers and their children, buying clothes and materials for the new school semester and the holy month of Ramadan, were deliberately chosen as targets in a bid to increase friction with the Buddhist community in the Muslim-majority region.

 

Regardless of whether the attack was aimed at Muslims, however, the perpetrators clearly wanted to hurt civilians. Such indiscriminate and irresponsible attacks appear designed to terrorise people into submitting to the insurgents’ demands. It is, make no mistake, a form of terrorism.

 

The perpetrators obviously didn’t care who would get injured or even killed or whether the victims had any connection with their political enemies. There was no honour in this act. It warrants only condemnation.

 

When children are harmed, it is by the savagery of cowards, a sentiment shared by the United Nations Children’s Fund. “No child’s life should ever be put at risk in this way,” said the agency’s Thailand representative, Thomas Davin. “This is wholly unacceptable.”

 

Angkhana Neelaphaijit of the National Human Rights Commission deplored the targeting of civilians. “The lives of innocent people should not be used in negotiating with the authorities,” she said. “Acts like this are illegitimate.”

 

Those who commit such heinous crimes are wrong to believe that violence can force people to side with them. They might well spread fear, but in conducting their campaign this way they strengthen the opposition. Whatever merit their cause might have is dismissed when violence is used against the innocent. This is not the way to achieve any goal.

 

It falls now to the authorities to be more alert to future dangers and improve safety measures. They must catch and prosecute these bombers, so that at least a measure of calm and normalcy can return to the streets. The violence cannot go unanswered. The lives and safety of ordinary citizens must not become bargaining chips.

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/news/opinion/today_editorial/30314856

 

-- © Copyright The Nation 2017-05-11

[Rhys]

...quite sad, all the best and speedy recovery to those injured.

[kannot]

nope i dont think so, violence  will win the day, same as Northern Ireland.

[darksidedog]

 While I hope they are caught, I do not truly expect it to happen. I recall a month or so back, there were 20 or more small explosions in a day. Not a single arrest. Not a single suspect,. Most of the police here wouldn't be able to find their ass in the dark, without the aid of a flashlight and 3 informants.

[Orton Rd]

But they have submarines to protect the nation

[ChrisY1]

Attempts, such as this article, at downgrading the effects this blast had are pointless.

This incident had a profound effect on the local people and the country.

That such devastation could happen so easily...in front of security personnel...in the main area of town, shows the level of technical expertise that these terrorists are reaching.

For over a decade, the military has been completely useless....the oft used term, "hightened security", has proven totally void of serious action time and again.

Over 7000 deaths and still they bumble onwards....forever denying the real threat!

[Orton Rd]

Give them what they want, vast tracts of the country have been ceded away in the past anyway

[hansnl]

1 hour ago, ChrisY1 said:

Attempts, such as this article, at downgrading the effects this blast had are pointless.

This incident had a profound effect on the local people and the country.

That such devastation could happen so easily...in front of security personnel...in the main area of town, shows the level of technical expertise that these terrorists are reaching.

For over a decade, the military has been completely useless....the oft used term, "hightened security", has proven totally void of serious action time and again.

Over 7000 deaths and still they bumble onwards....forever denying the real threat!

Military useless?

Against those muslim terrorists there is only one answer.

And that answer can not be given, nowhere in the world, because of restrictions laid on the military by conventions that hinder combating terrorism.

 

 

[fruitman]

I don't get the purpose for this bomb at all....Thai muslems attacking eachother? Or were they Malay muslems attacking Thai muslems?

 

 

 

 

[Krataiboy]

When innocents are attacked, the cause is lost

 

If only. Unfortunately, history teaches us the exact opposite. Targetting innocent civilians invariably works like a charm for causes good and bad. In reality, so-called terrorism is deplorable only when one is at the receiving end.

 

The facts down the ages speak for themselves. Unbridled brutality brought victory to the Vikings, earned the Romans a huge empire and enabled the US to emerge as the world's greatest-ever economic and military power after vaporising hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with a new "terror weapon" called the Atom Bomb.

 

I suppose one might argue that the attack on Twin Towers which killed around 3,000 New Yorkers is an example of a cause lost by the means employed to pursue it. But the alleged architect, Osama Bin Laden would doubtless argue otherwise.

 

His intention was to draw the US into a wider war, on his turf on his terms, that it could not win. Sixteen years later the Saudi renegade is long dead,  but the anti-Western cause he espoused has blossomed into a conflict of much greater proportions, bringing misery to millions of civilians across the Levant.

 

Today, the phony "War on Terror" launched by George Bush Jr in the wake of 9/11 is being kept alive not simply to expand the hegemony of an imperial power which boasts 700 military bases globally, but also to exert increasingly authoritarian control over a war-weary domestic population in a manner which would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

 

I have long regarded innocence as a highly dubious virtue and a close cousin of ignorance. Newspaper articles like this naive Nation editorial confirm my worst suspicions.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Krataiboy

[Stargeezr]

I think that these insurgents will be treated differently beginning next year.  These murderers do not have the support they used to have and the more they kill off their

fellow Muslim citizens of Thailand the less local support they will have.  Do not try to compare this to USA or anywhere else in the world, as this is Thailands problem

and it will be taken care of the Thai way. Next year will be a new year, and I believe the policies will also become different than they are now.

I could be wrong so I will wait until next year to see.

Geezer