Thailand enlists women to battle insurgency
As the conflict deepens in the Muslim-dominated south, women are mobilizing to defend communities and bar government investigators from crime scenes.
By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 4, 2007 edition
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PIAN, THAILAND - The shots rang out at night, the deadliest time in Thailand's lawless south. The victims were Muslim schoolboys, apparently sprayed with bullets by unseen assailants as they lay in their huts at a rural boarding school.
By morning, with two boys dead, an angry crowd gathered at the red-dirt road to the school. Tree trunks and oil drums blocked Thai soldiers from entering. A cellphone video, provided to the Monitor, showed soldiers firing warning shots to disperse the crowd that had swelled to about 500. But the soldiers faced a delicate challenge: Across the barricade stood scores of defiant Muslim women with young children behind them.
As the conflict deepens in the Muslim-dominated south, women are mobilizing to defend communities and bar government investigators from crime scenes. They are also staging frequent protests over detention of suspected insurgents. In response, Thailand has begun training some 200 female rangers and police to negotiate with women protesters. Thai forces are reluctant to wade into a crowd of Muslim women for fear of provoking a riot or being accused of abuses. Even if protests fizzle, they yield provocative media images of soldiers confronting veiled Muslim women.
But militants sometimes don burqas and direct women from behind the front lines, say officials, who believe that a female wing is now active in many insurgent-run villages. "It's a set-up, it's been planned. Most of the women are wives and relatives of the insurgents, not the victims," says Chidchanok Rahimmula, a professor of political science at Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani, who tracks the conflict in the south.
Countering this tactic isn't easy. Efforts to recruit more Muslim women have been thwarted in many cases by anonymous threats to their families, says Col. Pakorn Juntarachota, a ranger commander. Of 40 Muslim applicants, only half joined the first intake of 132 female rangers. "We wanted the majority to be Muslims, but it's hard. Their parents are wary," he says.
Intelligence officials say that the mobilization of women, while fueled by genuine anger over incidents such as the March 17 shootings in Pian, is being manipulated by militants, part of an ongoing psychological battle in this contested area.
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