Tak Bai

Holy shit.

From "The Forgotten Front: Winning Hearts and Minds in Southeast Asia"
by Christopher Bond and Lewis Simons
Foreign Affairs

Across the South China Sea, a strikingly similar situation is developing in the Muslim-majority Pattani section of Thailand. There, among Thailand's southern border with Muslim-dominated Malaysia, more than 3,500 Thai Muslims and Buddhists have slaughtered each other over the last five years.

Many stories of postcolonial ethnic conflict -- such as the bloodshed during the partition on India and Pakistan -- are well known. But the plight of the six million Thai Muslims, who have fought for independence for a century, has never received much attention in the West. While they watch their friends and relatives prosper on the Malaysian side of the border, the Muslims in Thailand live amid poverty and violence. Hardly a day passes without shootings, stabbings, and beheadings perpetrated by both sides. Schools, temples, and mosques are regularly bombed or burned down. It is, by any definition, a full-blown insurgency.

Although the Thai Muslim rebellion can be traced back to 1909, when Pattani was incorporated into Thailand, the most ercent tensions emerged on April 7, 2001. Shortly after the inauguration of then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Sinawatra, three deadly coordinated bomb attacks struck a railway station, a hotel, and a gas plant in the south... [Thaksin] believed that he could snuff out unrest in the south with a burst of brutal force. But he was mistaken.

...Then, on October 25, in the sleepy border town of Tak Bai, some 2,000 residents, most of them young Muslim men, gathered outside the local police station for what was supposed to be a peaceful protest. Without warning, Thai troops shot seven demonstrators dead at point-blank range. The soldiers subsequently seized 1,300 men, stripped them to the waist, bound their hands behind their backs, and heaped them face down, five and six deep, in open army trucks. Then, for six hours, they casually drove the convoy around in circles in the harsh sun. By the end of the day, 78 of the bound men had died of asphyxiation.

Thaksin ordered the crackdown at Tak Bai. Like many Thai Buddhists, he ahd little interest in understanding the source of tensions in the Muslim south. And Thaksin only made a volatile situation worse by claiming on television that the Muslims in the truck died because they were weak from Ramadan fasting.