Army plans to take a leaf out of insurgents' book
The Army plans to strengthen the 20,000-strong village defence force in the deep South though extensive military training and link the volunteer units in one wide-reaching network in what appears to replicate the separatist organisation.
Army spokesman Colonel Akorn Thiparoj said yesterday the village defence volunteers would undergo the same two months of basic training given to new Army recruits. Thorough background checks will also be performed on new and potential recruits. Volunteers have been receiving only one week of training before they are sent back to their villages, where their main duty is to go on short patrols or man checkpoints. Akorn said the new structure would consist of five-man units with an identifiable leader and an assistant. The idea is to strengthen team spirit. A senior intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Army was trying to emulate the structure of this generation of insurgents who are organised in independent cells that embed themselves in communities throughout the region. But where the rebels appear to have strong convictions, village recruits don't have the same degree of enthusiasm or the capacity to ease the burden of government security officers, who are stretched quite thin across the three Malay-speaking southernmost provinces. Akorn insisted that the process would be thorough and that extensive screening, including fingerprints, would identify the bad apples. But the intelligence officer said past efforts, such as the government-sponsored re-education camp, had failed to separate extremists from ordinary villagers. He said many of the people who had volunteered for the programme were subversives who went along so they could "whitewash" themselves. The indoctrination camps were aimed at making youths in the region more patriotic. The effort was largely criticised as a ploy by governors of the border provinces to score political points at the expense of the villagers, who largely object to the label of being "misguided" or potential troublemakers for the state. Security and intelligence officers said this generation of Malay separatists had been about eight years in the making before it surfaced. They succeeded in establishing cells in about two-thirds of the 1,500-plus villages in the Muslim-majority region with a history of secessionist violence. More than 1,200 people have been killed since the end of 2003 due to the ongoing insurgent violence in the region.
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