Feature: Thailand's south living under shadow of violence

Twenty months on since separatist movement taking hold of Thailand's deep south, people here have to move on life trying both to survive unpredictable ambush and cope with traumas left by past violence.

For more than one year, 44-year-old Tim Chaiyasy, a mother of two, hasn't dared to walk out of the door after it gets dark.

Empty roads and dense bushes always remind her of the tragedy of her husband, a gardener who was shot dead in daylight last July by insurgents on a highway in the southern province of Narathiwat.

"I was so scared and asked to move out from our village in Tak Bai (District)," Tim told Xinhua in an interview.

She is one of the first batch of victim families that moved into the Ror Tan Ba Ru village almost a year ago under the royal project funded by Thailand's Queen Sirikit.

The village, some 20-minute bus drive away from the central township of Narathiwa, is designated to provide houses and self- sufficient livelihood to insurgency victim widows, who can hardly make a living by themselves.

The newly-built rural community, therefore, is called by locals "Widow Village", with 65 widows living inside with or without their kids.

Targeting a final goal of 150 single-story houses by the end of 2006, the place is now composed of vast vacant land sparsely dotted with some 105 bungalows.

Brand-new street lamps, straight driving road and lawns being spread by soldiers inside the village make sharp contrast against the outside surroundings -- two-lane country road, rubber tree plantation and thick tropical jungles.

"I feel lonely here, but don't have courage to go back to Tak Bai. It's difficult to face relatives and old friends there," said Tim, lowering both her eyelids and voice.

Leaving her hometown village a year ago, Tim also sent her school-age son to live with his grandmother in Bangkok, where she hopes the boy can get better education and a safer future.

The other child of Tim, an adult daughter, has married and lives with her family in the Tak Bai district.

Still, it's the children that concern Tim most, who now manages to maintain her own life by occasionally working on the sample farm in the "Widow Village".

"I worry about them a lot. I want them all get out of here (the south)," said she.

Tim is not the only one wishing to get out of the kingdom's deep south, where unabated violence has claimed around 900 lives during the past 20 months.

In the past year, local media has reported continuous exodus of thousands of people, including teachers, doctors and government employees, from the southernmost area some 1,000 kilometers off Bangkok.

Meanwhile, the government polices including martial law and a recent declared emergency executive decree have seemed far less than helpful to bring the situation back to normal.

In the latest development, a series of bomb attacks rocked the provinces of Narathiwat and Pattani non-stop in 24 hours from Tuesday to Wednesday.

In the southern provinces of Pattani and Yala, insurgents shot dead four people separately on Friday, burning one of them with gasoline.

Though pinning the unrest on a handful of separatism groups under an umbrella organization named BRN, the authorities so far have failed to bring masterminds of the violence to law or stop the violence now targeting almost everyone in the region.

Analysts believe, the Muslim-dominated region with unique culture and history has been further alienated from the central regime by the government's all-time tough stance on the problem.

Blistering criticism goes mostly to two separate cases of how the government dealing with the violence.

In the first case, more than 100 young insurgents shielded with machetes were all killed by security forces in clashes on April 28, 2005. The second, 78 demonstrators from Tak Bai district died of suffocation when they were detained and transported by the army in last September.

"In the South, we cannot win by force on force, but have to win local's hearts and minds," said Col. Songwit Noonpackdee of the King's Guard, who has overseen the situation in Tak Bai since last October.

In a bid to win back the people's hearts, Songwit and his fellow soldiers have set up community radio broadcast, visited local tea houses regularly, helped villagers build fishing ponds and showed them how to avoid attack when working on rubber farms.

The colonel from Bangkok believes their more-than-half-a-year work has won back young and poor villagers potential for insurgent recruitment and thus cut down violence.

"The insurgent attacks occurring here have dropped from 6.2 cases per month to 1.5 cases since we have been here," said Songwit, telling press in front of a PowerPoint presentation of charts and graphics.

However, winning hearts and gaining trust are not easy jobs to be done overnight.

On Wednesday, residents of Village Ban Rahan closed entrance to security forces, accusing police of having killed an imam and disturbing villagers with raids in name of searching insurgents.

Some 131 village residents have crossed border to the northern Malaysia town of Kelantan and are still there applying for refugeeship.

Though Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the 131 Thais leaving their village for fear of falling victims of insurgent violence, local press attributed the incident to the estrangement between the villagers and the authorities.

"The Thai government, which has vowed to restore peace through winning the hearts and minds of the locals, is now seen as a threat to the very people whom they are supposed to be protecting. Leaders warn more Muslims may flee the country," said an editorial published by newspaper Nation on Sunday.

Source: Xinhua