Word: pattani
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...fabled beaches lies another land that has far more in common with the barbed-wire disquiet of Iraq or Afghanistan than the sunny image projected in tourist brochures. Nearly every day, violence - motorcycle bombs, shootings, arson attacks, beheadings - claims another life in Thailand's three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, which, unlike the rest of the Buddhist-majority country, are 80% Muslim. The region was a Malay sultanate until the early 20th century when Thailand annexed it. While members of both faiths have been killed by Muslim militants, as a proportion of the population more Buddhists have perished...
...With the violence showing no signs of dissipating, Buddhist civilian militias patrol potentially dangerous street junctions or congregate in temple grounds where they peer through monsoon downpours with shotguns at the ready. One morning at the temple of Chang Hai Tok village in Pattani province, a batch of Iron Ladies, outfitted all in black, runs through military exercises. Surveying the training from behind a trio of Buddha statues, 60-year-old abbot Pracharoonkittisophano shrugs his shoulders when asked whether women twirling rifles, along with a shooting range behind his sleeping quarters, elicits any spiritual discomfort. "Guns are normal things...
...work of Buddhist vigilantes. All in all, it's something that Thai tourist authorities would prefer to gloss over in their posters touting palm-fringed beaches [EM] even though those white-sand idylls aren't located that far away from the three violence-wracked provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat...
...even on an official level. In a particularly tragic incident in 2004, hundreds of Muslim protesters in the village of Tak Bai were rounded up by security forces, stuffed like sardines into trucks and left to roast in the heat during a drive to an army detention center in Pattani. At least 78 people suffocated to death, and seven others died during the demonstration itself. Then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose administration had taken a particularly hard line in the south, claimed that the detainees might have succumbed because it was Ramadan and they were weakened by religious fasting...
...grievances. McCargo rightly scorns the legions of post-9/11 armchair analysts who try to shoehorn every conflict into well-Googled theories of global jihad. No armchairs for this author: he researched the book by crisscrossing southern Thailand in a temperamental 1989 Mercedes, hastening back to the town of Pattani by nightfall to avoid militant booby traps. McCargo is the real McCoy...