The Jakarta Post, 12/18/2004 5:40:30 PM
Militants trained in Malaysia, Indonesia: Thai PM
BANGKOK (Reuters): Jungle hideouts across the border in Malaysia have been the
training ground for Muslim militants in southern Thailand who have launched almost
daily attacks this year, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Saturday.
Thaksin said violence in the region, in which more than 500 people have been killed
since January, had become more gruesome, with cases of Buddhists being
decapitated, because Thai militants had also been exposed to radicalism in
Indonesia.
"Many who have strange behavior have imitated their radical friends in Indonesia,"
Thaksin said in his weekly radio address, adding that many of the militants had been
to study Islam there.
"They (radicals) have recruited prospective youths and trained them in jungles, some
in Kelantan and others in Thailand," he said referring to the northern Malaysian state
along the Thai border.
Thaksin said however that the Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur governments had never
supported the militants and were cooperating with Bangkok.
"The governments of Indonesia and Malaysia are not involved. In fact, they have been
very helpful to us," he said.
Southern Thailand, once an independent sultanate that covered most of the three
provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, has a 100-year history of resentment of rule
by Bangkok and saw a low-key separatist insurgency in the 1970s and 1980s.
A third of mostly Buddhist Thailand's six million Muslims live in the far south bordering
Malaysia.
Since January, there have been almost daily attacks on government targets, and
security officials expect a major incident to mark the first anniversary of the eruption of
the renewed violence. (***)
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