An increasing number of ordinary Buddhists are being targeted in mainly Muslim southern Thailand as 10 months of violence causes decades of simmering social tensions to boil over into ethnic and religious bloodshed.

Analysts say what started in January as an attack on symbols of the predominantly Buddhist state, such as schools and police or army posts, is switching to non-state targets ? Buddhist monks, shop-keepers and plantation workers.

Last week?s beheading of a 60-year-old rubber-tapper, who police say arrived in the region in the 1960s under a government ?Siamisation? drive, has raised the spectre of a campaign of ?ethnic cleansing? by militants intent on driving out Buddhist influence. ?There are two theories?, said Sunai Phasuk, a human rights researcher. ?One is that the social tensions between Muslims and Thais have already exploded; the other that this is a deliberate attempt by radical groups to drive the two communities apart.?

The death toll in the still largely unexplained violence is creeping towards 500. Four or five separate shootings or knife attacks per day are not uncommon. Buddhists, as well as Muslim officials who fear they are being targeted for collusion, are terrified. ?They are trying to kick Buddhist Thai Chinese out of remote towns with shooting sprees, and force them to live only in municipalities?, said Panya Ongsakul of the Chamber of Commerce in the southern province of Narathiwat. ?Many grocery shops owned by Thai Chinese in those towns have been closed and they have moved?, he told Reuters.

He estimated that property prices in the already relatively impoverished region had fallen to as little as 25 percent of their value five years ago as terrified residents try to sell up and head for the exit.

The three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, where a Malay dialect is spoken and over 75 percent of the population is Muslim, have had an uneasy relationship with the rest of Thailand, which has 6 million Muslims, or 10 percent of the population.

Migration

Assimilated just over a century ago into the state of Siam, as Thailand was then called, it always had closer ties with Muslim Malaya to the south, rather than Buddhist Bangkok more than 1,000 km to the north. In keeping with the cultivation of a Thai national identity after the colonial era, successive military governments tried to neutralise ethnic Muslim nationalism or separatism in the south by importing Buddhism and Buddhists.

During the 1960s, thousands of northeastern Thais migrated to the south to work in the rubber plantations, and temples and public Buddha images, including a huge golden statue in Narathiwat, sprang up to counteract the mosques.

?The government felt the Muslim population was not ?Thai? enough. To be Thai, you had to speak Thai in daily and official life, dress in a Thai fashion and be a Buddhist?, said Thanet Aphornsuvan, a history professor at Bangkok?s Thammasat University.

Thai became the sole language taught in schools, where until only recently images of the Buddha had by law to be on display ? even if all the pupils were Muslim. Fear of non-Thai influence in the region has not died away. ?In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese was banned because the government was terrified of communists. Now they are afraid of anything Islamic or Arabic?, Thanet said.

However, despite tensions caused by the 1960s relocation programmes, the two communities coexisted until this year when violence surged, and the government responded with an iron fist, analysts say.

EXPLOSION

Police defuse bomb in Muslim south

Thai police defused a bomb in the province of Narathiwat yesterday, a day after a blast killed one person and wounded eight in the troubled Muslim south. ?A bomb filled with dynamite, fertiliser, nails and designed to be triggered by mobile phone was found near a house in Ruso district?, said an officer at Ruso police station in Narathiwat. At least 28 people, almost all of them Buddhists, have been killed since October. 25 when security forces shot dead seven Muslim demonstrators in the town of Tak Bai in Narathiwat province and a further 78 died after being detained, most from suffocation in overcrowded army trucks.

The Tak Bai deaths prompted warnings from Muslim clerics and analysts of possible reprisal attacks.

The death toll in a ten-month spate of violence in southern Thailand is creeping towards 500.

<B>Ed Cropley</B>