An upsurge in terrorist violence in remote southern Thailand in recent weeks has escalated the sense of national panic and urgency to cope with this unusual threat in a country already sensitive to international threats.

One regional law officer commented recently that “No one knows what goes on there. It’s out of control.” Prior to the 2004 attacks, there were a series of such incidents in recent years.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who had openly sided with Washington in its global war on terrorism and taken a tough law-and-order stance regarding his own country, declared martial law in the southern region and dispatched special forces there. He also immediately said the attacks might have been carried out by a group know as the Mujahideen which operated in both Thailand and Malaysia. No Jemaah Islamiah members were left in Thailand after the arrest of local and foreign suspects last year, said a Thai official. And Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi dismissed suggestion the attacks in Thailand had links to JI, which he indicated had also been dismantled in Malaysia in campaigns in 2002.

The recent attacks began in early January when fires were set in dozens of schools, bombs were set off, two policemen died trying to defuse another and an armory was raided, four soldiers killed and some 100 rifles stolen. Some reports even suggested that as many as 300 weapons were stolen. In this and subsequent incidents, the attackers brutally murdered Thai Buddhists and monks. Thai police on the scene were said to have suggested that the attackers were bandits rather than rebels.

Thaksin immediately suggested that the attackers might try to transfer the stolen weapons to rebels in Indonesia’s Aceh province nearby. There were also reports in the Thai press that rebels from Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and other neighbouring countries were buying weapons on the Thai black market.

In an unprecedented televised broadcast of a weekly cabinet meeting, Thaksin Shinawatra and his ministers discussed the violence. Defense Minister Thamarak Issarangura told the meeting and Thai television viewers that militants had been giving combat training to young Thai Muslims in the jungle, and said the group had plans to seize the border province of Narathiwat "within 1000 days" of the violent campaign's launch.

Thailand also said, it would spend US$225 million to tackle unemployment and promote development in the Muslim-majority south to stamp out separatist-linked violence there.

The government has stepped up security and mulled new efforts at public dialogue in the troubled southern provinces.

Thai officials say the groups had its origins in the return of Thai militants from Afghanistan. Several of the wanted leaders were said to be holed up across the border in Malaysia, one of whose border provinces, Terengganu, is controlled by an Islamist political party which has introduced Islamic shari'a law. Thailand's six million Muslims, about 10 percent of the country's population, speak a dialect of the Malay language used across the border.

Thailand and Malaysia soon after began their first joint land and air patrols of the border region since the 1970s, when Bangkok was fighting an earlier Muslim separatist campaign, and Malaysia faced a communist insurgency launched by rebels hiding out in the Thai jungle.

Bracing itself for a vulnerable period when thousands of people cross the Thailand-Malaysia border for family gatherings on the completion of the haj pilgrimage, the military added a further 1,000 troops to its deployment in the region.

In the latest flare-up, a Thai border patrol policeman was killed before dawn on February 1, as he guarded a police academy in the violence-torn south, police officials said.

The brutal attack marked the fifth killing of a policeman since a spate of attacks erupted in the Muslim-majority south early last month, which had also left several soldiers and Buddhist monks murdered.

The troubled region borders with neighbouring Malaysia and some reports had alluded to the possibility that some of the militants could disperse among the Muslim population across frontier. Malaysian officials, although they explained that they had close cooperation with their counterparts in Thailand in combatting cross-border crime, rejected reports that they could be familiar or even apprehended some rebel suspects.

In addition, the Thai Supreme Court in February judged that a national anti-terrorist law with a death penalty was legal although it had been adopted by the Cabinet when the Parliament was not in session and did not approve it. While the opposition had challenged its legality, the Court ruled that its adoption by the Cabinet was justified to combat terrorism, especially in August just before the country was to host an Asia-Pacific Summit meeting attended by world leaders.

The dissatisfaction with the Thai Government in the southern province of Songkla also extended to the ballot boxes in February, when the region long an opposition Democrat party stronghold voted to fill a vacated Parliamentary seat with a Democrat candidate rather than a contestant from the ruling Thai Rak Thai party. Thaksin’s party had been hoping to make inroads in the area in the aftermath of the Democrats relative disarray since the last election. Thaksin had also appointed a prominent Muslim as Interior Minister in the hopes of improving his standing in preparation for the next national election in early in 2005.

The attacks came just before an Asia-Pacific counter-terrorism conference in Bali. Indonesia and Australia, co-hosts of the meeting, announced plans for a new Centre for Law-enforcement Cooperation in Jakarta, aimed at supplying countries in the region with both the data and technical skills needed in the fight against terrorism. A key theme that emerged from the closed-door meeting on February 4th was that regional countries must step up cooperation because militants are regrouping.

Senior Asia-Pacific ministers are claiming to have made real progress on the threat from international terrorism. The closing communiqué contained 17 proposals, mostly focusing on law enforcement, legal frameworks and sharing information. The two-day gathering, attended by some 16 Asian states as well as representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States Attorney General, John Ashcroft, agreed to set up two working groups to bolster co-ordination on security matters.