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Published on September 2, 2007

He ordered a small banner to be put up at a pondok, a traditional Islamic boarding school, in Bannang Sata district that read: "Are you fighting for Islam, or are you fighting for Malayu?" It was meant for the insurgents, whom the banner referred to as "than", an honorific title Thai people use when addressing one another, especially among top government officials and the social elite.

The idea, explained a Yala provincial official who himself wasn't sure what to make of the message, was to take a jab at the insurgents.

The local commander wanted to remind the insurgents of the distinction between religion and nationalism in the hope that perhaps the militants would come to the realisation that they had violated the norms of modern warfare by killing civilians and unarmed government officials.

Members of Thailand's security and intelligence community believe that the militants have not crossed the line from Malay nationalism to global jihad where the fighting would no longer be about the liberation of Patani from the invading Siamese but about a borderless Islam that wouldn't give a hoot about a nation-state or sacred border. Even so, Islam has consistently been employed to counter the Malay insurgents. State-friendly imams and leading Islamic figures from abroad have been brought in to condemn the brutality, but nothing seems to have registered.

Like other tactics employed by the Army, the banner succeeded in irritating the local Muslims, as well as the people at the pondok who couldn't understand what the authorities were trying to achieve.

But then again, who ever said pulling off a successful counter-insurgency campaign was going to be easy?

For the past three years or so, the Army has been improvising and employing various approaches that have never quite qualified as a counter-insurgency doctrine.

But what does all this mean on the ground, where security forces for the past two months have been conducting blind raids in remote villages in the hope of netting a hardcore militant or two? Besides the ambiguities surrounding official policy, rules of engagement and standard operating procedure don't seem to add to the learning curve.

Last Sunday in the Yala village of Ban Si Se, scores of soldiers zeroed in on a section of the village to look for a group of insurgents who had been lying low in the area. This was not some blind routine search. After they had searched about five houses in the enclave and netted two suspects, a young private climbed up the stairs of a wooden stilted house, the last one on the list. He peeked through the door and was greeted by a 9mm bullet in the head at point-blank range.

With a handgun and an M16 rifle they took from the dead soldier, the two militants held their ground for nearly half an hour before trying to make a run for it. Surrender didn't seem to be on their minds.

Amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire that left his wooden home riddled with bullet holes on all sides, neighbours said, Harong Salah ran out of the outhouse where had been taking cover. Harong, who had been recovering from a broken leg, got about two steps before he was gunned down. He was not armed.

A police officer at the scene gave a conflicting account, saying Harong had jumped from his house and been shot as he landed behind the outhouse, which was about half a metre from the ladders.

The second so-called militant, Wae-useng Lohsateh, who happened to be Harong's son-in-law, was gunned down just as he stepped out of the front door, allegedly trying to flee. A large pool of blood dripping from the porch formed a small puddle on the ground. A third man took a bullet before he could make it to the door.

In the front yard, tired-looking soldiers in full combat gear puffed cigarettes and wiped the sweat from their faces as a forensics team went to work.

Could the mission have been better executed? Perhaps, considering the fact they had prior knowledge of the suspects' location.

In Pattani, a senior police officer grumbling about not enough money being spent on tackling drug dealers, who he claimed, without offering much in the way of details, were a contributing factor in the insurgency.

Human-rights activists coming down your throat for killing drug-pushers, locals speaking in a language you don't understand and roadside bombings and drive-by attacks killing officers one by one and in pairs - his list of grievances went on.

But quietly he admitted that the government agencies might be in over their heads.

The troops are facing one of the most adaptive opponents in the history of modern Thailand, and all the television airtime in the world doesn't seem to have any impact on the attitude of locals here or elsewhere.

With security-planners and policy-makers fixated on the conviction that the violence is rooted in the "false teaching of Islam" and "distorted history", there doesn't seems to be much room to think otherwise.

The Islamic bit, it seems, was within reach. And so banners such as the one in Bannang Sata will continue to make sense for security and policy-planners who can't make the distinction between "Islamic behaviour" and "human behaviour in an Islamic setting".

Don Pathan

The Nation

Yala