The Troubled South

The old woman we encounter in an isolated village in Narathiwat province visibly shakes with terror at the approach of outsiders. A week before, her husband had been wounded by an unknown gunman, and government soldiers now stand guard in the shadowy rubber plantations surrounding their simple tin-roofed home. If the soldiers had not been there when TIME's reporters approached, the old woman later vows, she would have taken her husband's rifle and "I would have shot you myself." Tourist brochures call Thailand the Land of Smiles. But in villages across its troubled Muslim-majority south, strangers are now greeted with suspicion and anxiety. The only smiles are brief ones of relief, when those strangers finally take their leave.

These are testing times for Thailand. The government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is battling a faltering economy, rising consumer prices and persistent allegations of corruption. Thaksin, whose popularity was once bulletproof, is slipping in the polls. But the country's biggest headache is its embattled south, where most people are Muslim. Once part of the kingdom of Pattani, the southern provinces were annexed by Thailand in 1902. Militant separatist groups surfaced in the 1960s, riding the resentment that many Muslims felt at being marginalized. In recent years, however, the region had been relatively peaceful. Then, in January 2004, unidentified gunmen raided an army base in Narathiwat, killing four soldiers before fleeing with more than 300 assault rifles and other weapons. Ever since, the south has been wracked by bombings, drive-by shootings, beheadings and arson attacks, which have claimed hundreds of lives—military and civilian, Muslim and Buddhist.

There was no letup in the violence last week: over a 48-hour period, at least 10 people were killed—the highest toll in six months. Today, the south looks and feels like a war zone. Schools and government offices are ringed with razor wire. At night, military helicopters fly fast and low over the rubber plantations, their lights off to foil militant attacks. Meanwhile, edgy, heavily armed militiamen patrol the more remote villages. Country roads are deserted. Charity workers who once raced to emergencies 24 hours a day now hunker down until daylight to collect corpses. Ice cream sellers no longer wear their customary sky blue uniforms for fear of being mistaken for policemen or soldiers, and shot.

Thaksin blames the escalating violence in the south on a small group of insurgents inspired by distorted Islamic teachings, combined with underworld battles over drug smuggling and other illegal activities, and his government has fought back by dispatching thousands of soldiers and armed police to the region. The authorities intend to get even tougher. On July 15, a day after two policemen were killed and 23 people injured in a mass attack by suspected Muslim militants with guns and bombs in the provincial capital Yala, the Cabinet approved a special decree that designates the southernmost provinces—Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat—as "severe emergency zones." Security forces can now, among other powers, search and arrest without warrants, and can detain suspects for up to 30 days without laying any charges. The decree also grants immunity to police and soldiers who may have committed abuses—a provision that the U.N. Human Rights Committee has condemned.

Thaksin has defended the emergency powers as "necessary evils" to restore law and order. "Many people have been too quick to make a judgment without reading the decree," he said during a live TV broadcast last week. The Prime Minister's fiercest critic is Anand Panyarachun, himself a former PM who now heads the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), a government-appointed body that has recommended, among other proposals, a ban on civilians carrying firearms and the establishment of a national justice committee to investigate violent cases. During the same TV program in which Thaksin appeared, Anand said: "The local community sees this decree as a license to kill."

Other critics—including journalists, lawyers, human-rights activists and U.N. officials—claim that heavy-handed measures will only exacerbate fear and mistrust of the security forces, which already stand accused by the NRC and human-rights activists of arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances. Two bloody events last year further alienated the Muslim majority in the south: the April 28 killing by security forces of 108 Muslim extremists—31 of them at the ancient Krue Se mosque—after they had attacked police posts; and 85 deaths, mostly by suffocation while in military custody, after an October protest outside the border town of Tak Bai. Even the revered constitutional monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej has, Thaksin publicly admitted, expressed concern about the decree.