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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Massacre by military in southern Thailand
The Thai military, on Oct. 25, confronted 2,000 Islamist
demonstrators in predominantly Muslim southern Thailand, a region that feels
oppressed by the Buddhist majority. Soldiers shot six demonstrators to death and
then arrested 1,300, who were packed onto trucks for a five-hour ride in the hot
sun to a military barracks. By the time they arrived, 78 more people had died of
asphyxiation. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra praised the military and excused
their barbaric indifference to human life by claiming that the dead had been
"made weak from [Ramadan] fasting. Nobody hurt them." Shocked by the fact that Hambali, the alleged head of Al
Qaeda in Southeast Asia, was found and arrested in Thailand last year, the
government has carried out a brutal crackdown in the South. Last April, soldiers
shot and killed 113 lightly armed young Islamists, who attacked police stations
in an amateurish uprising about which the authorities had obviously been
informed in advance. Such actions, like the U.S. "war on terror," are
sure to swell the ranks of these fundamentalist fanatics by furnishing them with
yet another example of the victimization of Muslims. |
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