Yala, Thailand - Thailand`s army is increasingly using controversial "re-education" camps to indoctrinate young Muslim men in the hope of stopping them from joining a bloody insurgency, officials and activists say.
Detained suspects in Thailand`s southernmost provinces have been forced to go through re-education programmes since the separatist conflict erupted four years ago in Muslim-majority provinces along the Malaysian border.
Last year the government`s efforts to force men to attend the camps -- which could include lessons on anything from Thai history to job training -- ended up in court.
Judges in October ordered the army to release 85 Muslims being held against their will for what was described as a job training course.
But the rules changed in December during the last days of the previous military government, which imposed a new Internal Security Act (ISA) that allows the army to detain people without charge for up to six months.
Now the army is bringing so many people into the camps that it is building a new training centre to cope with the numbers, said Diana Sarosi of the Working Group on Justice for Peace, a Thai human rights group.
"People are asked to participate in all kinds of trainings, mostly re-education or civilising workshops ranging from one to several days," Sarosi told AFP. "People are too scared to turn down these invitations`."
The military isn`t shy about discussing the scheme, which it views as a key part of efforts to win the trust of residents in a region where separatist violence has claimed 3,300 lives since 2004.
Somsae, 39, said he had been a propaganda officer for a group of insurgents when he was caught by the Thai military. Instead of going to jail, he was sent to be re-educated about the history of this region, which was once the autonomous Malay sultanate of Pattani.
"The insurgents gave me false knowledge about Islam," Somsae told AFP in an interview, accompanied by army Colonel Chinnawat Mandech.
"They came into the village and taught us about Islam and the history of Pattani. They seemed to have very deep knowledge," he said.
Somsae said he had already left the insurgency a year before his arrest. It is impossible to know how he really feels about his captors as he talks alongside them.
Chinnawat said the aim of the camps is entirely educational, a battle of ideas aimed at defeating the radical militants` claim that they have an Islamic duty to fight Thai "imperialism" in a Malay Muslim region annexed in 1902 by Buddhist Thailand.
"We sent teachers to give him a course of Islamic study so that he can learn the truth and then decide for himself," Chinnawat told AFP.
He believes the militants learn their extremism when Thai students go to Indonesia to study and fall under the influence of Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah.
When the students return to teach in southern Thailand, they pass on their ideology at local religious schools.
"Then the teachers who spread this go back to their villages and tell everyone else," he said. "I think 90 percent of private Islamic schools here have this radical thought."
At one re-education programme in Yala province, deputy governor Puchong Pothigudsai said the goal is simply to promote peace.
"We try to correct understanding on three issues -- religion, history and race," he told AFP.
"The main world religions support each other. The highest purpose of all religions is the same -- kindness and peace.
"We have to use violence to protect ourselves but the last step must be peaceful so we don`t create new conditions for violence."
But Puchong is unequivocal on how to deal with those who cannot be taught.
"For the ones who are hardcore we have to destroy their hope," he said. "Because you cannot separate and set up a new country."
Experts fear that with the new security law, and little transparency about the programmes, proving instances of arbitrary detention will become harder, and could actually worsen the conflict.
"You don`t win over hearts and minds by branding everyone a suspect and then forcing them to negate their identity," Sarosi said.
"These measures merely aggravate the grievances that sparked the violence in the first place in that Malay Muslims continue to feel like second-class citizens not worthy of rights, justice and dignity."
Source: http://afp.google.com (Juli 17, 2008)