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.

Nachammai Raman - Correspondent

Virginia Woolf said every woman must have money and a room with a view, but had she been alive, I wonder what she would have said about women and Indian hotel rooms.

Finding accomodation on the road is one of the hassles of being a single female reporter in India.

You would think that all a hotel manager would need is a decent assurance that I will be able to pay for the room. But, typically, they are more concerned with my status – unaccompanied and unmarried.

“You came alone?” they ask.

I hold myself back from saying, “Well, do you see anyone with me?” I answer yes politely, adding that I am there to cover a particular story.

Then they ask me how come I speak Tamil (a language and ethnic group in southern India) if I write for an American paper.

“My parents are both Tamils and we’ve always spoken Tamil at home,” I say.

This prompts the killer question. “If both your parents are Tamils, aren’t they concerned about letting their daughter travel alone like this?” And suddenly even my parents become bad parents.

When I came to Nagapattinam to cover the tsunami five months ago, I didn’t stay overnight. This time, I planned out a two-night stay, but arriving in Nagapattinam, I found that no half-decent hotel had a room for me.

They said they were booked up because of Clinton’s visit. I wasn’t willing to believe it until they tried to help me get a hotel room in a neighboring town. But since the commute took too much time, I begged one of the hotels in Nagapattinam to give me whatever they could for the next night at least. So, they obliged.

This supposedly top hotel in Nagapattinam, I found, had no Internet facility, no air-conditioning (at least in my room), and no in-house restaurant. So, to file my story, I invaded a good-natured person’s office and to fuel my body, I drank tea and ate dry snack foods in packets. Now I don’t know what they’ll say when I go back so late.

Once in Cochin, Kerala, a schoolmarmish female hotel manager told me she wouldn’t let me into my room if I didn not come back by 7:00 p.m.

“But I have to meet a source at seven,” I expostulated. “Then you can’t come back here,” she said. Fate was kind to me that day because my source called and rescheduled for the next morning because he had something else to do.

But the hotel experience that tops my list is in a hill region called Yercaud. I was the only woman staying at that particular hotel. And this was the only hotel that would give me a room, although no hotel there was booked up.

One of the male guests in the hotel rang my room in the middle of the night and said coyly that he wanted to chat with me. Galvanized by fear, I shut the door on him as quickly as I could and moved all the furniture in the room to barricade the door in case he tried to force it. Luckily, nothing like that happened, but I was scared to death the whole night. I didn’t sleep a wink because my mind was incessantly planning escape strategies in case something happened. The next morning, I fled Yercaud to the nearest city where I stayed with a family my father knew.

So, Virginia Woolf, would you throw me a few lapidary insights about surviving single in Victorian India?