Published on Sep 19, 2006 - The crisis in the deep South crossed a new threshold with the weekend
bomb attacks in Hat Yai, because of the scale of the damage and the
choice of targets.

However, targeting areas beyond Hat Yai is still a long way off,
security officials say.

The deputy commissioner of the Ninth Police Region, Maj-General Thani
Thawidsri, said the attacks on Saturday night did not reflect the work
and

mindset of the vast majority of insurgents in the Malay-speaking
South, which includes the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat,
and a couple of districts of Songkhla.

Authorities believe the Hat Yai bombings were carried out by a cluster
of zealous operatives working under the leadership of Faisal Haji
Isma-ae and Abdul Kamae Saleh.

The pair were linked to the Hat Yai Airport bombing in April last
year, as well as the blitz in downtown Yala three months later. The
latter incident featured a brief but deadly gunfight in the heart of
Yala, as well as firebombs that torched a number of high-profile
places, including a karaoke bar and a shopping complex.

Hat Yai is not far from the boundaries of the troubled Malay-speaking
region - about 100km north of Pattani and about 50km east of Saba Yoi,
a Malay-speaking district in Songkhla.

Thani, who has overseen the restive region for most of the past two
decades, said it was important to understand that the current
generation of militants in the deep South were organised into small
independent cells of about five to eight people. There was no
top-down, pyramidal chain of command and no suggestion that they could
evolve into conventional guerrilla outfits with designated chains of
command.

However, they had shown they can carry out simultaneous attacks.

More than 50 government offices and 22 banks have been hit in
simultaneous bomb attacks in two separate incidents over the past
three months.

Officials say these were largely designed to discredit the government,
rather than to damage for the sake of destruction. The bombs were
small and contained no shrapnel.

But with their admission that insurgent violence in the deep South has
now spread to the commercial hub of non-Malay-speaking Hat Yai,
political leaders and security chiefs are effectively telling the
public that the worst is yet to come.

>From caretaker Deputy Prime Minister Chidchai Vanasatidya to police
chief General Kowit Wattana, the official response is that the Hat Yai
bombings were the work of Malay insurgents looking to separate the
Malay-speaking South from the rest of the country. Yet the explosions
that ripped through crowded bars and cafes, department stores, a hotel
and a massage parlour in the tourist hub of Hat Yai were in an area
that is not in the Malay-speaking South.

The bombs killed four people and injured more than 60, shattering the
area's tourist industry and its business confidence, and raising
implications far beyond the Muslim-majority region, where more than
1,700 people have been killed since January 2004.

Police have questioned more than 40 witnesses, but have yet to pin
down any significant leads.

A leading security expert, Assoc Professor Panitan Wattanayagorn, said
Saturday's attacks showed the coordination and capability of the group
involved was much higher than authorities believed, although the
tactics - bombs attached to motorbikes - were more or less the same.

He said the southern violence has crossed a new threshold because the
choice of targets and the scale of the damage had far-reaching
implications beyond the strife-torn region. And while the insurgency
in the deep South may be home-grown, the separatists showed they had
learned from foreign

militant and terrorist groups that tend to go after high-profile
places to create the greatest possible psychological impact, Panitan
said.

"Repairing the economic infrastructure and the tourist industry is
much harder than repairing damage inflicted on military and government
targets," he said.

What was most worrying, Panitan said, was that every successful hit
usually leads to a bigger attack, more lethal, efficient and precise
than the first.

Don Pathan
The Nation