LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

By D. Arul Rajoo

BANGKOK, Oct 10 (Bernama) — Bersatu, a coalition of Muslim separatist organisations in restive southern Thailand, is willing to open talks with the Thai government at any location or time to be decided by Bangkok after meeting military officials several months ago.

Its leader Dr Wan Kadir Che Man said the Thai side could choose any venue or natural ground that both sides could feel comfortable, but denied newspaper reports here that a meeting would be held in Singapore next month.

“I contacted a few groups yesterday and nobody knows about the talk, we just read in the newspapers. But for the first time, we have seen positive signs from Bangkok and we don’t want to jeopardise that by putting conditions,” he said when contacted at an undisclosed location where he has been living in exile.

Furthermore, he reiterated that no foreign countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia, were involved in the southern insurgency despite allegations by some Thai officials in the past.

Wan Kadir also confirmed that he had met former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and several Thai military officials several months ago, saying that he welcomed such talk as it would be a good start to bringing lasting peace to the restive southern provinces.

“Tun Mahathir is well respected in the region, and in Thailand too. I will certainly come personally if a talk with the Thai authority is arranged through him…I see him as an experienced and trusted man,” said Wan Kadir.

Bersatu is made up of several organisations like the BRN (National Revolutionary Front), Pulo (Patani United Liberation Organisation), BIPP (Patani Islamic Liberation Front) and GIMP (Muslim Mujahideen Movement of Patani).

Some groups like Pulo emerged in the 1970s during the armed struggle by ethnic Malays in the southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat seeking independence from Thailand.

Peace was restored in the last decade but more than 1,700 people had died since separatists launched a campaign of bombings and shootings in January, 2004.

Last week, Mahathir confirmed that he had initiated a roadmap to peace in southern Thailand following his visit to Bangkok late last year where he met Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej and then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

He said the Perdana Global Peace Organisation (PGPO) and Honorary Royal Thai Consul Datuk Shazryl Eskay Abdullah had prepared a draft of the Joint Peace and Development Plan for South Thailand and a copy was delivered to then Thai Deputy Prime Minister Chitchai Vanasatidya in August.

Eskay had said last week that the Thai side was represented by the Armed Forces Security Centre chief Lt-General Vaipot Srinual during the meeting with separatists.

The prospect for talk with militants gained momentum after Army chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin said that he would like to talk to separatist groups, a reversal from the policy of Thaksin whom he ousted in the Sept 19 coup.

Asked how many groups were involved in the southern problem or if he was in control of them, Wan Kadir, who went into exile in 1989, said it was difficult to say although older groups still existed.

“In the past, we had many groups with different names, like Pulo that fights and uphold their names to show their strength. But now, it involves different generations and they don’t care for names, they just fight and go for the end result,” he added.

On fear that any talk would not achieve peace due to the existence of new and unknown groups operating individually, Wan Kadir said the talk must start at some point with some known groups before moving to all players.

“You cannot go straight to every group…you have to go one by one. People on the ground, the ordinary people in the south will judge the progress and eventually support the peace talk when they see the sincerity of the authorities,” he added.

Asked if Bersatu would press for independence for the three provinces during the talk, Wan Kadir said he would prefer to initiate the talk first and get the response from Bangkok before going into details.

But he said the objective of the meeting would certainly depend on who they were going to talk with in the first place.

“In the past, the Thai side never said they wanted to talk to us. Some lower ranking officials would come to talk and promote themselves to their superiors but nothing happened as most points were rejected by the superiors.”

Wan Kadir, however, said there were new developments now as top people, including Sonthi, the first Thai Muslim army chief, had made the move to approach the separatist groups.

On the violence in the south, Wan Kadir said most were related to separatist groups although other elements like extra judicial killing and drug syndicates were involved.

“But separatists don’t target civilians. When civilians are killed, some people put the blame on separatists,” he said.

BANGKOK, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has held a series of talks with rebel leaders from Muslim-majority southern Thailand under a peace drive backed by Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej, his son said on Tuesday.

The discussions with more than 50 senior members of various guerrilla groups behind the unrest, in which more than 1,700 people have been killed, stretched from the middle of last year to August this year, Mukhriz Mahathir told Reuters.

“This was a series of interviews to try to understand what really are their grievances and grouses and what they want from the Thai government,” he said.

“We discovered that it was not secession they wanted, but really more attention by the Thai government for the south, in particular economic development and education.”

The groups represented were all separatist guerrilla groups active in the 1970s and 1980s in the three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, an independent sultanate until annexed by overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand a century ago.

To this day, 80 percent of the population in the jungle-clad region are Muslim and speak Malay as a first language.

Mukhriz listed them as Bersatu, an umbrella grouping, the Pattani United Liberation Organisation, the Barasi Revolusi Nasional (BRN), or National Revolutionary Front in Malay, and the Gerakan Mujahideen Islam Pattani, or Pattani Islamic Mujahideen Movement.

He said he was confident Mahathir’s non-governmental Perdana Global Peace Organisation, which initiated the talks, was talking to “presidents and vice presidents” of the groups and had the tacit backing of Kuala Lumpur.

The talks were held on Malaysia’s northwestern island of Langkawi, as well as in the nation’s administrative capital, Putrajaya, he said.

Perdana had passed its findings to General Vaipot Srinual, now head of Thailand’s National Intelligence Agency following a Sept. 19 coup against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Vaipot had subsequently made contact with the same people, he said.

Vaipot could not immediately be reached for comment.

Perdana had made clear it had done as much as it could, Mukhriz said.

“This is as far as we can go, and we recommend that they pursue it from here onwards, but at the same time we offer ourselves to assist in the effort further,” he said, summarising its last letter to the Thai government.

ROYAL ASSENT

Mahathir, 81, was first approached for help by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun when Thaksin made him head of a National Reconciliation Commission.

“Later this request was endorsed by the King in an audience my father had with the King in November last year,” Mukhriz said. “It was at that meeting that the King agreed with Anand that Dr. Mahathir should play a role in bringing the two sides together.”

Mahathir paid a two-day “private visit” to Thailand that month, during which he met Anand and Thaksin, who many people in the far south cite as the root cause of the problem, not least because of his “iron first” approach.

Mukhriz said Thaksin’s overthrow could make a real difference to a simmering decades-old problem that blew up in January 2004 with a raid on a military barracks in which four soldiers were killed and hundreds of rifles stolen.

In the days running up to his coup, army chief Sonthi Boonyaratglin — the mainly Buddhist country’s first Muslim military chief — clashed publicly with Thaksin’s administration over the possibility of dialogue with southern rebels.

The daily cycle of bombings and shootings has alarmed foreign investors and governments although there is no sign international militant groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda are involved.

“The statements coming out of the Thai government have been very encouraging, contrasting to what Thaksin’s administration was saying particularly in the last four or five months before his downfall,” Mukhriz said.

MALAYSIA’s ex-premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad brokered talks between Thai officials and Muslim groups from Thailand’s south to help resolve the conflict there, his office confirmed for the first time yesterday.

The revelation came amid indications from Thailand’s new government that authorities want to hold peace talks with insurgent groups from the country’s Muslim-majority southern provinces.

A spokesman from Dr Mahathir’s office confirmed the ex-premier had arranged meetings between Thai officials and Muslim leaders from Thailand’s south in the last quarter of 2005.

“Yes he did try to broker a ceasefire, that started off some time last year and there have been about two meetings so far,” he said.

The meetings were on Malaysia’s northern holiday island of Langkawi, which is close to the countries’ shared border and where Dr Mahathir has business interests, he said.

Dr Mahathir, 81, was quoted as saying in a report on Saturday that he had initiated a peace plan and that it was up to Thai authorities to continue the efforts.

“My mission is now complete. It is now up to the Thai authorities to proceed with follow-up action,” Dr Mahathir was quoted as saying in the Star newspaper.

The elder statesman said he initiated peace talks after discussions with former Thai premier Mr Anand Panyarachun and had also consulted with Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

“I sought an audience with the king in October following Mr Anand’s advice. The king agreed with Mr Anand’s suggestion that I be involved in the peace initiative for southern Thailand,” said Dr Mahathir.

Several insurgent groups, including Bersatu and the Patani United Liberation Organisation, attended the meetings, while the The Thai government was represented by Lieutenant-General Vaipot Srinual, Dr Mahathir’s spokesman said.

Malaysian deputy premier Mr Najib Razak said Dr Mahathir had brokered the talks as the head of a non-government organisation and that Malaysia would not intefere in Thailand’s internal politics, reports said yesterday.

Dr Mahathir, currently in a stand-off with the Malaysian government for criticising its policies, has spent his time since retiring as premier in 2003 lobbying for world peace.

Thailand’s coup leader Mr Sonthi Boonyaratglin last week confirmed that authorities want to hold peace talks with insurgent and a Thai official said discussions would start early next month.

Separatist violence and other unrest in southern Thailand has killed more than 1,500 since January 2004.

Meanwhile, police said yesterday that three Muslims and a Buddhist have been killed in separate shootings by suspected militants in Thailand’s troubled south.

A Muslim rubber plantation tapper was shot dead yesterday morning in Pattani, one of three southern provinces bordering Malaysia that has been plagued by separatist violence. AFP

Michael Carmichael

Soumaya Ghannoushi’s comment copied below is a cry for help. Islamophobia is now virtually total in the United States and Israel. Of course, there are exceptions - the Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom, and the Jewish Peace Network in the USA - but the momentum in both powerful nations is Islamophobic. In Europe, the attitudes of the US and Israel are shifting the political center away from the tradition of tolerance to new Islamophobic positions. The reason for this tide of Islamophobia? There is little credible opposition to the Islamophobic diatribes emanating from the White House of George Bush, Number Ten Downing Street where Tony Blair echoes every Islamophobic syllable of his American master and the Vatican, where Pope Benedict XVI eagerly inserts anti-Islamic motifs into his pronouncements to remind the faithful of Roman Catholicism’s exclusionist religious authority. The xenophobic brayings of a host of right-wing heads of state in Europe from Merkel and Rasmussen to Aznar, who is still spouting Islamophobic harangues even though he was booted out of office for supporting the Bush-Blair wars against Islam, are strident signals that are not being heeded nor effectively counter-balanced by the Muslim world and its small cadrer of effective interlocutors in the West.

An encouraging development: the constructively critical reception presented to Condoleezza Rice during her recent visit to the Middle East - but that is another story.

Much more needs to be done in the West on a broad array of fronts - and nothing anywhere in sight appears to be in the offing.
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Stop The War Coalition

On 27 September 2006, a war criminal addressed the Labour Party Conference in Manchester. He has been compliant in the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza sanctioned Israel’s barbaric attacks, which destroyed much of the infrastructure of those countries, killed nearly 1500 people — one third of them children — drove 250,000 people from their homes and scattered one million deadly cluster bombs across southern Lebanon, which every day are killing and maiming civilians.

The war criminal’s speech was acclaimed by nearly all the mainstream media as “brilliant” (BBC), “electrifying” (Telegraph) and “majestic” (Guardian).

HERE ARE 10 THINGS THAT TONY BLAIR DIDN’T SAY IN WHAT THE INDEPENDENT CALLED “THE SPEECH OF THE CENTURY”:

* The majority of Iraqis want the immediate withdrawal of US troops from their country, saying the departure “would make them feel safer and decrease violence.”

* In Iraq, one attack on US forces takes place on average, every 15 minutes. The majority of Iraqis approve of attacks on US forces.

* Reports to the US and British governments show that the Iraq war has acted as a “recruiting sergeant” for extremists and increased the threat of terrorism.

* The security situation in Iraq is so out of control that over 240,000 Iraqis have fled their homes in the past six months and registered as refugees.

* Only 20 percent of Americans “have confidence” in George Bush’s Iraq policies.

* The Iraq war is currently costing US taxpayers around $2bn (#1.07bn) a week.

* The United Nations says over 6,600 Iraqis were killed in the months of July and August, September brought the highest level of civilian casualties since the war in 2003 and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says Iraq is on the brink of all-out civil war.

* British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are six times more likely to be killed in combat than soldiers in Iraq. Only 31% of British people support the war in Afghanistan.

* According to senior military sources, Britain’s armed forces are “arguably losing or potentially losing” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* Only 31% of British people support the war in Afghanistan.

THE SOURCES FOR ALL OF THE ABOVE STATEMENTS ARE LISTED HERE: http://tinyurl.com/jjqjs

LEBANON: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

The last Israeli soldier left Lebanon this week. This followed the three week war in August, when Israel — using the capture of two of its soldiers as an excuse — was given the green light by George Bush and Tony Blair to unleash a long planned onslaught on Lebanon, which ended in terrible death and devastation for Lebanon but without Israel achieving any of its objectives.

Effectively Israel was defeated for the first time in its history by the resistance of Hezbollah fighters, who were supported by the overwhelming majority of Lebanese people. This defeat has opened up new prospects for the anti-war movement internationally. Trade unionists, campaigners and anti-war activists now have a new chance to deepen their links, co-ordinate action and to redouble their efforts to end the imperialist policies of the US and its allies in the Arab region.

An International Solidarity Conference in Beirut on 24-26 November has been called by the Cairo Conference in association with the broad based Samidoun relief organisation in the Lebanon. The Stop the War Coalition is supporting the conference on and believes that all anti-war movements around the world should make sure that they encourage the greatest number of activists to attend this crucial conference.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO GO TO THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY CONFERENCE IN BEIRUT ON 24-26 NOVEMBER, CONTACT THE STOP THE WAR OFFICE: EMAIL office@stopwar.org.uk