Word: maing
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...Ma-ae, who has "four or five" militant friends, says a juwae's first task is to scatter leaflets, crude photocopies bearing death threats or diatribes against "Siamese infidels." He quickly graduates to vandalism?for example, burning the Thai flags that villagers are ordered by the authorities to display outside their homes?and then to actual militant attacks, acting as a lookout or helping to block roads with felled trees or burning tires. Later, he might plant a bomb in a teashop or other public place, which others will remotely detonate. Later still, he might remotely detonate it himself...
...alms route; in July a primary school teacher was shot dead in front of his pupils. While Buddhist police and soldiers are still the prime targets, these days the militants are killing just as many Muslim civilians. Anyone who joins the government's Thaksin-era job-creation scheme?like Ma-ae's cousin, shot dead by militants in October?is seen as a possible collaborator. Village chiefs, who are state employees, are routinely murdered. Afterwards, their positions either remain vacant or are often filled by militant sympathizers, forming what a local community worker (who requests anonymity) calls "a shadow government...
...Ma-ae relates all this in a hotel room, out of public view, fearful of meeting the same fate as his father. Militant leader Hassam is different. A doleful-looking man with an ill-concealed revolver in his anorak, Hassam chooses to meet with TIME in a open-air teashop in the southern city of Yala?a measure of how confident the insurgents have become...
...Hassam says he doesn't want an independent Islamic state?just more Muslims in local government and a cutback of troops and police in the area. But while the fighting continues, says Hassam, anyone suspected of feeding information to the police or military?men, women, teenagers like Ma-ae, even Muslim religious leaders?is a legitimate target. "It doesn't matter who you are," he says. "If you spy on us, we'll take you out." In one district, he adds, his brothers-in-arms have vowed to murder 10 Buddhists for every Muslim death. Such tactics unsettle some veteran...
...Ma-ae is pessimistic too, but unlike the militants who now rule his village and hundreds like it, he believes more violence will solve nothing. "Part of me wants to avenge my father's death. But another part tells me that, when these men die, God will punish them for what they have done...