KO TO, Thailand – The young Muslim man says he watched helplessly as soldiers broke his father's bones and punctured his lungs with vicious kicks. After seven hours of relentless torture, the Muslim religious leader died cradled in his lap.
In a nearby village, a 7-year-old Buddhist girl still dials her father's mobile telephone number every evening. Then she readies his bed. But her father is never coming home. He and his brother were riddled with bullets and their bodies set afire as they motorcycled to a computer class.
A vicious Muslim insurgency in Thailand's deep south has spared few. On the roll call of 3,400 dead are monks and teachers, shopkeepers and rubber tappers, officials and innocents from every background.
Islamic radicals are fighting for a separate state in Buddhist-majority Thailand. And a rift is widening between Buddhists and Muslims — communities that had lived harmoniously for generations and now share equally in the suffering.
The separatist movement, which periodically erupts into violence, was born after 1902 when Thailand took over an independent sultanate in a region where some 70 percent of the 1.8 million people adhere to Islam. But past insurgency leaders restricted their attacks to Thai authorities. Violence seldom affected the ordinary people and thus did not embroil them in mutual suspicion and fear.
This changed dramatically in the wake of hardline government policies in the south coupled with the influence of international jihad. In recent years, the insurgency has spread into the fabric of society, creating tensions, suspicions and animosity between Buddhists and Muslims.
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Perhaps it's the village and their father's role in it which brought on his death, his children say.
Like most communities in the southern, predominantly Muslim provinces, Ko To is deceptively idyllic: wooden houses shaded by lush vegetation, a simple, green-colored mosque, a tea shop for restful chatter, all ringed by the mainstay of the region's economy — rubber plantations.
But the village is within a government-designated "red zone" — an area of high insurgent activity — and subject to martial law. Soldiers patrol through it almost daily, villagers say, entering homes and wary if they find no young men around while often taking those who are for 20-30 days of detention.
Yapa Kaseng was a 57-year-old imam, much loved by some 200 villagers who came to him for religious guidance, his 25-year-old son Anan says.
His home was a center of community life. It may thus have been regarded as a breeding ground for the insurgency by authorities who find it hard to identify the rebels among the apolitical.
It was in this environment — tense and riddled with suspicion — that Anan says soldiers and police grabbed him, his father and several others at ablution before morning prayers. Taken to the Thai Army's 39th Task Force camp in Pattani Province, they were locked inside a truck for two nights before the torture began.
"I could feel the broken pieces of bone when I touched my father's chest. In the end, he could no longer walk so they had to drag him out of the truck by his feet for the final torture session," says Anan, who was detained for another 26 days.
Neither the imam nor his son were charged with any wrongdoing. Last December, eight months after his death, a provincial court ruled that he had been tortured to death by the military. But the court case continues, the soldiers have received no known punishment and Anan says he is still harassed at the omnipresent roadblocks when his name pops up from a computerized "black list" of suspected insurgents and sympathizers.
"The officials don't trust us and we don't trust them. Even if they don't have evidence against us they don't trust us. And this turns young men toward violence," says Anan, who must now work as a low-wage rubber tapper to help his widowed mother, six siblings and others of their close-knit family.
"I am still afraid and feel insecure, thinking that they can come and get me again at any time. Nobody can protect us," he says.
She asks, "Daddy, when are you coming home?"
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