Simon Montlake - Correspondent

It was an invitation I couldn't pass up: A barbecued seafood dinner at the house of my driver in the southern Thai city of Narathiwat.

Madaree's four children were hushed at first when I arrived, looking somewhat disheveled after a long day of reporting on  the escalating violence in southern Thailand.

Most Thais are Buddhist, but Madaree and his family are Muslim, as are the majority of people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia.

Simmering ethnic tensions here have led to violence and harsh crackdowns by Thai security forces in recent months. Armed ethnic-Malay Muslim separatists, who draw on a pool of angry disaffected men, are increasingly terrorizing southern Buddhists – monks, teachers, farmers – causing some to flee or relocate to safer areas. (See recent story for more).

The Thai government has recently introduced sweeping emergency powers to combat separatist rebels fighting in Thailand's "Deep South." The emergency decree grants Prime Minister Thaksin Shinwatra the power to detain suspects without trial, monitor phone calls, ban public gatherings, and expel foreigners from trouble spots.

Fed up with the daily violence in the Muslim-dominated South, many Thais seem ready to see the authorities taking a tougher line.

Back in Madaree's house, the promise of grilled crab was a welcome respite from the day's reporting on the ethnic violence and a chance to savor the distinctive Malay cuisine.

The children soon warmed up to me. My gift of candies and Coca-Cola quickly got the youngest daughter on my side.

After introductions, Madaree steered me and my Thai assistant into the yard and sat me on a carpet spread under a hand-built wooden shelter. 

As the children swarmed around us, Madaree lit the coals on two small burners. He then connected two electric fans to the power cable snaking out of the house and pointed them at the coals.

Soon we had enough heat to begin cooking the vast pile of seafood we had bought earlier in the day at a border-town market.

As I squatted on the carpet, the food started to flow: crabs, shrimp, clams, and fish that I didn’t recognize but was happy to eat.

A local journalist and his girlfriend joined us, and still the food kept coming. I groaned as my host pushed more crab on my plate.

This is one of the great joys of working in this corner of the world. You can nearly always find some decent food when you’re out reporting. In fact, you often come away singing the praises of the local cuisine.

The delicious blend of flavors and styles testifies to the multiples of ethnicities, cultures, and races that call Southeast Asia home.

Of course, food can also be a divider, a marker of who stands where.

In southern Thailand, Muslims tend to eat at their own restaurants, not only because it’s prepared according to “halal” standards, but because they like this style of food, which is heavily influenced by Malay cooking.

Aom, my Thai assistant on this trip, a Buddhist from northern Thailand, is an enthusiastic convert to Malay-Muslim cuisine.

From the moment we touched down in Narathiwat, she was sizing up the food options and mapping out our mealtimes. Her local knowledge of curry houses and coffee shops was uncanny.

At one roadside stop, I sampled an unforgettable rice dish – the house specialty – that blended flakes of coconut, chili, and other herbs.

Aom explained that it was named for Her Majesty Queen Sirikit, who has a summer palace in southern Thailand. Apparently this Muslim-owned restaurant was the exclusive palace caterer for this dish.

After all the grim stories of religious tensions and fraying bonds, this was something to cheer. A Buddhist monarch requesting Malay-Muslim food is a small start, but in food-obsessed Thailand, it’s not a bad one.

Simon Montlake - Correspondent

In Thailand's Muslim-dominated ‘Deep South’, as Thais call it (it’s humid, yes, but the similarities to the US Deep South end there), I’ve discovered that sometimes the closer you get to a story, the less you see.

Let me explain.

This was my third attempt since January 2004 to make sense of what lies behind the frequent bombings, shootings and arson attacks (see story).

Each time, I’ve run into the same brick wall: many locals aren’t convinced there is an insurgency, let alone one directed by Muslim separatists.

From afar, the pattern seems clear. Soldiers, police, and government officials are shot. Schools, banks, and utilities are bombed. Muslims suspected of snitching to the authorities are silenced.

That’s exactly what you’re supposed to think, a Thai army officer told me.  The criminals are using the separatists as cover for their normal activities.

Normal? Yes, he continued, as we barreled down the highway, swerving past army checkpoints. One had red-and-white irrigation pipes spliced into a X-shaped barrier; someone had jammed hairy coconut husks into the pipe ends.   

According to the officer, only 30% of the violence consisted of terrorist acts committed by the separatists. Criminals who thrived on mayhem were responsible for 50%. The rest was political or personal. 

So who are the terrorists? Analysts and government officials can reel off names, organizations, and networks.

But ask a Muslim villager and he might tell you that it’s all a smokescreen for corrupt officials involved in border smuggling rackets. This theory conveniently unites the criminal and political, and leaves out the terrorists (who appear to be homegrown, at this stage).

On the second day of my latest trip, I met Masakrit, a burly man with a graying crewcut who seemed to have a foot in several camps.

The scion of a prominent Muslim family, he had been accused of trafficking drugs, then linked to last year’s deadly raid on an army camp that ignited the current insurgency.

After fleeing to neighboring Malaysia, he returned in February and met with some government heavy-hitters in Bangkok who decided he was innocent of all charges. Now he’s a peace envoy of sorts.

We drove into the countryside to visit his village where, he assured me, I would see his modest house and realize what a modest man he was.

“They said I’m a drug dealer. But look at my house? Is this the house of a wealthy man?” he grumbled. 

Indeed, it was a modest house, as was his wife’s noodle stall in the front yard. Ducking into the shade, Masakrit began offering his insights on the insurgency, saying that Thai drug dealers were behind it.

And the separatists? Only 4% of the Muslim population wanted to break away and form an independent state, he said. (That’s about 50,000 people, by the way.)

He seemed most aggrieved at his family’s treatment at the hands of the Thai government, which had relieved him of his old job of village chief. 

When I’d heard enough of his martyrdom, he brightened up and suggested trying his wife’s excellent noodle soup.

Keen to talk to other locals, I agreed. The first one I met puffed out his chest and said he was the village chief.

“Yes”, cried Masakrit. “Meet my brother!”

Clearly the government’s persecution of his family was of a limited nature.

Later that day, I visited a family-run Islamic boarding school that had been shut down after an Army raid recovered training videos and weapons.

I’d visited several Islamic schools in southern Thailand with a similar layout of dilapidated wooden huts in a sandy clearing of coconut palms, plus a family house.

The school’s name gave me pause for thought. The hand-painted sign read, ‘Jihad Wittaya school’, in Thai and English. Here, according to the Thai Army, was a recruiting and training center for the insurgency.

I asked the laconic son of the school’s director, who had been arrested and released on bail, about the white crosses painted on the huts and the school’s row of classrooms.

“We don’t know how they got there,” he said. Apparently a truck was heard during the night, and in the morning the crosses were there.

Unfortunately, sitting down to a proper chat with this man, a crucial source for the story I was writing, was difficult.

The reason was that we weren’t the first on the scene. Two Muslim men from a Thai Senate fact-finding team were already there to interview him.

This seemed fortuitous for my story, since they were presumably also trying to throw some light on this shadowy conflict.

Once introduced, the team leader told me he was willing to share his theory on what was really going on in the ‘Deep South’.

Apparently the masterminds behind all the violence were – wait for it – the CIA. Naturally, they had a motive, he continued. “America wants to control the sea lanes.”

He then questioned my credentials and warned that local people would all assume I was CIA, too.

(Later that evening, when I ran into his team at my hotel, I asked if he really believed I was CIA. He did. So I sat him down at the PC in the lobby and Googled my name and the Monitor. I don’t think it swayed him.)

When I asked if there were any other competing theories, he nodded sagely.

China was also involved in the plot, together with Thailand’s biggest chicken producer that was run by ethnic-Chinese investors.

Their motive was to wrest control of the fertile coastal plain and force Muslims to work for a pittance to produce cheap produce.

Finally, the arch conspirator slunk off to continue his research, leaving me to my interview.

Afterwards, we drove to the nearest town Pattani where we would spend the night. In the center of town, I noticed hundreds of people gathering by the river and a sea of fluorescent-lit food stalls.

"What’s going on?" I asked my assistant. "Oh, this? It’s the Annual Pattani Chicken Festival," she explained.

Chicken Festival? Maybe there is a conspiracy, after all. A poultry one.