Nineteen Muslim teachers held in restive Thai south

[Ulhas Joglekar <joglekarulhas@xxxxxxxx>]

Reuters.com

Nineteen Muslim teachers held in restive Thai south
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-28T105042Z_01_BKK339857_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-THAILAND.xml&archived=False

Tue Mar 28, 2006

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Nineteen teachers at an Islamic school founded by a top
fugitive insurgent in the Thai south have been held on suspicion of
involvement in two years of bloody separatist violence, officials said on
Tuesday.

The arrests would fuel more resentment among ethnic Malays in the mainly
Muslim region, where more than 1,100 people have been killed in the
violence, Muslim leaders and lawyers said.

Security officials in Bangkok said the 19 men were arrested under a
controversial emergency decree which allows detention of suspects without
charge for 30 days.

The teachers at Thamma Wittaya School in the city of Yala were arrested last
week after they came back from a curriculum preparatory meeting on an island
off nearby Satun province, said a Bangkok-based Muslim lawyer who is working
on the case.

"Police and soldiers went to search their houses and arrested them after
they came back from the island," Kitcha Ali-ishoh, who also works for a
Justice Ministry-appointed agency to bring peace to the south, told Reuters.
"This mass arrest as a result of their meeting, which was not a secret, will
affect students when classes resume," he said.

Thai schools are on holiday until in mid-May.

At least six teachers from the school -- founded by Sapaeing Bazo, the most
wanted separatist leader with 10 million baht ($257,000) on his head -- have
been killed since the latest unrest began in January 2004.

Security agencies have named Sapaeing as a leader of the BRN Coordinate, one
of the groups behind the violence in the region, and say he is believed to
be hiding in Malaysia.

Several teachers and students at Thamma Wittaya, a school of 6,000 students
which teaches both Islam and general subjects, have been arrested previously
on suspicion of involvement in the two-year insurgency, police said.

Security officials told Reuters the 19 teachers were arrested because other
suspects had implicated them during police interrogations and some of these
teachers were educated in Muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
Indonesia.

"They claimed to have a meeting about the school curriculum, but why did
they have to have it on a remote unknown island hardly ever visited by
tourists," a Satun security official said.

A leading Islamic scholar in the region said arresting people on flimsy
excuses would only raise more anger in a region which has seen bouts of
separatist violence since annexed by predominantly Buddhist Thailand a
century ago.

"I've told senior officials so many times that if they suspect someone, they
should invite them for questioning, not just detain them with no charges,"
Yala provincial Islamic council chief Abdullahmee Cheseh said.

The government has tried many ways to end the violence and win the hearts
and minds of the 1.8 million people in the region bordering Malaysia, from
brute force to bombing the region with millions of paper "peace" birds by
Air Force warplanes. But the violence persists.
($1=38.92 baht)

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