Published on September 13, 2005 - Riddled with bullet holes sprayed by gunmen in a failed assassination attempt just weeks earlier, the front porch of village chief Usman Tahey, 51, is emblematic of the more than 20 months of violence that has rocked this restive region.

Five armed men walked up to his house and commenced to fire. Usman ducked and went for his shotgun as one of his assistants returned fire. It was a scene straight out of a cheap gangster B-movie.

But in this restive region that has seen generations of separatist movements come and go, no one is willing to predict how it will end. But that hasn’t stopped Usman from doing what he believes is right.

Sitting on the very spot where he was shot at just three weeks before, Usman talked about the headway this generation of insurgents has made and what he himself has been doing about it.

About 30 young men from his community have over the past year decided to join the insurgency. Eventually, they would be required to take up arms against the state.

“They were good kids,” said Usman. They helped their families with rubber tapping, they were devout Muslims.” The problem is they strayed.

If anybody can relate to these young men, Usman is probably the most qualified. At 18, he joined the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (Pulo), a separatist organisation that surfaced more than three decades ago. He was in charge of logistics, supplying Pulo foot soldiers in the jungle with food and other essential supplies. It was a short-lived period in his life that he does not regret.

Today, he is off on another daunting task – to get all of the 30 or so young men in his community to turn their backs on the insurgents. So far, he has managed to “rescue” 20. His efforts have been recognised by regional officials. District officers and even the provincial governor have tried to cash in on his success, but Usman said he was not too thrilled about the idea of being paraded in front of the media simply to enhance someone’s political standing.

In an interview with The Nation, Anwar (not his real name) – a young man who just a month ago turned his back on a local insurgent cell that he had joined a year and a half before – spoke of a charismatic religious teacher, who had come to his community to convince residents it was their religious duty to take up arms against the state.

At the time, it sounded like the right thing to do, said Anwar, mentioning also the historical resentment and discrimination against ethnic Malays by this predominantly Buddhist nation.

The storming of the Krue Se Mosque in April last year and the Tak Bai demonstration – incidents which together ended the lives of nearly 180 Muslims – served to reinforce the religious teacher’s points about injustice.

Usman said that at one point, the men in his cell had grown so confident that they openly tried to recruit more members and win the local residents over.

But that confidence appeared to have got the better of them. A turning point came just over a month ago, when they told a janitor of a local public school to quit his “government” job.

The janitor refused and shortly afterwards was found dead. All fingers pointed to the local insurgent cell. Since then, more and more have begun to turn their backs on the insurgents’ twin message of Islam and liberation.

Over the past two months, the 20 out of the 30 who decided to turn themselves in did so in return for an amnesty that requires them to attend a week-long “re-education camp”, a psychological-operations programme that was common during the height of the communist insurgency. It was supposed to stop young men from taking up arms against the state and instil a sense of patriotism in them.

In retrospect, said Anwar, it was not patriotism, but rather a sense of right and wrong that changed his mind.

While Islam sanctions taking up arms against injustice, the deaths of innocent civilians were unacceptable to Anwar.

“I couldn’t see a real future for myself in that organisation,” he said.

In Usman’s view, this generation of insurgents cares very little about “collateral damage”, which he claims is completely different from previous generations of separatists who saw themselves as Malay nationalists with a bone to pick with the government of Thailand. Before, fighting was mainly carried out in remote hills between separatist forces and government troops.

The previous generations of fighters received lots of sympathy and support. But a blanket amnesty a decade ago crippled the insurgents on the ground and brought about relative quiet to the region for most of the 1990s.

Bangkok mistakenly assumed that the absence of violence meant a permanent peace. But last month’s shooting in front of Usman’s home was one of many incidents that have dispelled that notion.

And when the dust settled on that unfortunate evening, an insurgent lay dead by the road, just metres from his front door. It was a young man from the village.

“It was so hard for me to talk to his parents,” said the soft-spoken Usman. “But we didn’t have much choice.”