By Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat
The way forward for one of Asia’s deadliest ongoing conflicts.
On 10 April, a car bomb exploded in the underground car park of a shopping mall on the southern resort island of Samui in Thailand. The incident saw 10 people injured and damage to several cars. Police have issued arrest warrants for at least six individuals. How will this attack impact the stalled peace process in southern Thailand?
Current speculation links the incident to either the Malay-Muslim militants or to a new collaboration between the Malay-Muslim liberation movement and the Red Shirts, an anti-establishment force affiliated with the ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. But there are several reasons why the Koh Samui car bomb is more likely to be a military attack by the Malay-Muslim liberation movement.
The modus operandi of this attack is in line with similar attacks by southern separatists. According to the police investigation, the car used to make the bomb was stolen from Yala’s Yaha district. Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat and four predominantly-Muslim districts in Songkhla are hotbeds of violent conflict, which has claimed more than 6200 lives since 2004. This is not the first time that the southern separatists have planted a car bomb outside their traditional theatre of operation. The Thai authorities do not formally count the commercial district of Hat Yai in Songkhla as part of the conflict zone, but for several years the area has witnessed a number of major coordinated bombings.
Previous bombings linked to the southern militants have several similarities to what happened in Koh Samui. Since 2004, there have been 44 car bomb incidents in Thailand’s four southernmost provinces. The first car bomb attack outside the insurgents’ traditional area of operation took place on 22 December 2013. On that day, attacks involving motorcycle and car bombs hit Songkhla’s Sadao district, injuring 27 people. Shortly after, a second car bomb was found on the resort island of Phuket, but the police defused it in time. The incident in Koh Samui could be another attempt to sabotage an area of economic significance, which is known to be one of the militants’ strategies.
So how can this violence be stopped?
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