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Published on March 25, 2008

The attitude among Thais outside the Malay-speaking deep South has been to "get the job done by any means necessary and stop bothering me about it." This has been a characteristic public attitude even when extrajudicial killings and the deaths of innocent villagers at the hands of authorities are involved.

The latest person to die while in official custody was imam Yapa Kaseng, 56, a resident of Ban Koto village in Narathiwat's Rusoh district who had been held since Wednesday, along with his son Anant, by that province's 39th Special Task Force.

His relatives found out about his death on Friday when they went to the camp to visit the religious leader. They said he was healthy when they took him in last week - and now they are demanding an explanation. One informed source said the imam's ribs were fractured, probably from being violently kicked. Imam Yapa was not the first person to have died while in the custody of government security officials and he probably won't be the last.

Hardly a month has gone by over the past four years without allegations of torture and the targeted killings of suspects in the restive region.

As if they are not already in over their heads, the armed forces have accepted the latest proposal from the government that they take the lead in reviving investment in the deep South in order to restore business confidence. This plan was the result of a high-level meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej late last week, to find ways to bring permanent peace to the area where more than 3,000 have died since January 2004.

The meeting concluded with officials deciding that the military would expand

its mandate from security to economic strategies aimed at developing the region's economy. Officials hope that investments from military owned enterprises will help revive the economy in the deep South. The drive would start in Satun and Songkhla, which border the trouble-plagued region, as a way to convince the militants in the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat about the merits of investment.

The deep South is one of the poorest regions in the country. Compared to an economic growth rate of 4.3 per cent for all of southern Thailand, the Muslim-majority South's economy is growing at a rate of about 1.8 per cent.

Samak didn't say that the differences reflect that the deep South has long been neglected by the rest of the country, which continues to be somewhat

indifferent to the senseless killings there, not to mention the root cause of the problem -  the obvious violation of basic rights.

Military officials continue to fool themselves into believing they have been successful in handling the violence. Never mind that their response to incidents and attacks continues to be slow -such as tardy reinforcements for ambushed patrols - inpart because they lack solid coordination with other units in the areas. And yet the best the government could come up with its economic development plan for Satun and Songkhla.

It's not strange for the government to want to develop the South, but we also need to be practical. The plan calls for the military to enter into joint ventures in which it would hold a 51-per cent stake, with the private sector holding the remainder. The Defence Ministry's near-bankrupt battery and tannery enterprises have been singled out as the armed forces' investment arm. Satun will be promoted as an economic gateway to Malaysia and Indonesia. Pattani will be developed as an international hub for halal food and Islamic studies. Yala will be promoted as a centre of agriculture and Narathiwat as an economic gateway to Malaysia's east coast.

There is an old saying: amateurs talk about strategy while professionals talk about logistics. The problem with the deep South is that there are just too many amateurs to do any good. Good intentions are not the same as good policy.

The Nation