The South Thailand Insurgency is an ethnic separatist insurgency taking place in Southern Thailand, predominantly in the Malay Pattani region, made up of the four southernmost provinces of Thailand. In Thailand it is known simply as Unrest in southern Thailand (Thai: ความไม่สงบในชายแดนภาคใต้ของประเทศไทย). Violence has increasingly been spilling over into other provinces. Although separatist violence has occurred for decades in the region, the campaign escalated in 2004.
In July 2005, Thaksin Shinawatra, then Prime Minister of Thailand, assumed wide-ranging emergency powers to deal with the insurgency. In September 2006, Army Commander Sonthi Boonyaratkalin was granted an extraordinary increase in executive powers to combat the unrest.
Soon afterwards, on 19 September 2006, Sonthi and a military junta ousted Thaksin in a coup. Despite conciliatory gestures from the junta, the insurgency continued and intensified. The death toll, 1,400 at the time of the coup, increased to 2,579 by mid-September 2007.
Despite little progress in curbing the violence, the junta declared that security was improving and that peace would come to the region by 2008. The death toll surpassed 3,000 in March 2008. During the Democrat-led government of Abhisit Vejjajiva, Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya noted a "sense of optimism" and said that he was confident of bringing peace into the region within 2010. By the end of 2010, insurgency-related violence had increased, confounding the government's optimism. Finally in March 2011, the government conceded that violence was increasing and could not be solved in a few months.
Read more about South Thailand Insurgency: Causes of The Insurgency, Escalation of Violence, Krue Se Mosque Incident, Tak Bai Incident, National Reconciliation Commission, Negotiation Attempts, Attacks and Responses Since 2004, Post-coup Reorganization, Casualties, Government Harassment of Suspected Insurgents
Famous quotes containing the word south:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)