Word: maing
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...Ma-ae's generation is a fertile recruiting ground for the insurgency. Southern Muslims have long felt neglected and marginalized by successive Bangkok governments, a sense reinforced by clumsy attempts to assimilate their Malay-speaking Islamic culture. Many Muslim youths are first groomed for rebellion at tadika, or private weekend schools, where they are taught that the invading Siamese (as Thais were then known) stifled their religion and enslaved their people, a version of Pattani history still banned by the state. History seemed to repeat itself when Thaksin sent thousands of troops south to quell the rebellion, culminating with...
There's something striking about Ma-ae, but it takes a while to work out what it is. It's not his looks: he's a lanky teenager who, like most Thai youths, wears blue jeans and a T shirt. Nor is it his religion: he's Muslim, like almost everybody else in Thailand's three southernmost provinces. What's striking about him is this: in a part of the country where a separatist insurgency has claimed more than 1,800 lives since it flared anew three years ago, and where ordinary people are gagged by fear and secrecy, Ma...
...Ma-ae (not his real name) is not the only one talking. In an interview with TIME, a high-ranking insurgent leader confirms what the teenager suggests: a new generation of militants is tightening its grip on the south, employing increasingly brutal methods that threaten to wreck an uncommon mood of conciliation in Bangkok. The leader, who calls himself Hassam and commands 250 fighters, claims there is now at least one militant cell in 80% of southern villages. His and Ma-ae's rare testimony help to illuminate a shadowy insurgency remarkable for its secrecy, resilience and bloodiness...
...will these initiatives be enough to douse the southern fires, which have burned sporadically since Thailand annexed the independent Pattani sultanate a century ago? Ma-ae and Hassam suggest otherwise. In modern times, the insurgency has been driven by groups such as the Pattani United Liberation Organization (P.U.L.O.) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front, or B.R.N.), set up in the 1960s. The new militants are more ruthless and, while their youthful ranks overlap with P.U.L.O. and B.R.N., they refuse to publicly align themselves with any insurgent outfit. Their leaders are unknown. In the local Malay dialect, the new militants...
...Ma-ae is no militant; his father convinced him never to join the fighting. But Ma-ae's village, hidden amid fruit trees and rubber plantations near Thailand's border with Malaysia, is what the Thai military terms a "red zone" of insurgent activity. Soldiers patrolling the area were recently injured by a bomb rigged in the branches of a tree. "The moment you enter my village, all eyes are upon you," says Ma-ae. His father, a well-known local official, angered militants by negotiating the release of state employees being held hostage by a mob protesting the arrest...