Bangkok, Thailand - Buddhist monks have put away their alms bowls in the south of Thailand amid escalating violence in the majority-Muslim region that on Saturday claimed the lives of two police officers. Naratiwat Buddhist authorities announced that followers of the religion wishing to make food donations to monks would have to go to the temples as it had become too dangerous for the monks to make their early morning rounds, said the state-run Thai News Agency (TNA).
Narathiwat is one of three provinces that comprise Thailand's deep South, where 80 per cent of the two million residents are Muslim. The other two provinces are Pattani and Yala.
More than 1,700 people have died in the three-province area since January, 2004, when a long-simmering separatist struggle took a turn for the worse.
On Saturday, in the latest spate of attacks on authorities, four gunmen armed with M-16 automatic rifles opened fire on two policemen in Yala's Yaha district, wounding them before slashing them to death and making off with the sidearms, said TNA.
Earlier this week threats against Bhuddists in Bannang Sata district of Yala forced 120 non-Muslims to flee their homes for safety. Buddhist monks have been the target of beheadings and bombing in the past three years in the region, where attacks on religious leaders and civilians were once avoided.
The stepped-up attacks on authorities and Buddhist residents has been the separatists response to conciliatory moves on the part of the new government to heal the wounds left by the former administration of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled by a military coup on September 19.
Military-appointed Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont last week made a public apology to the people of Pattani for past atrocities committed by past governments and granted freedom to 58 Muslims imprisoned for the past two years for participating in an anti- government demonstration.
Observers say it will take years before the region is restored to its previous calm, partly because the struggle is now directed by a more united, better trained Muslim militant groups who have spread their cells regionwide and are capable of terrorizing both the urban and rural areas.
The deep South was once an indpendent Islamic sultanate known as Pattani. The area was defeated by Bangkok's first king in the late 1700s and incorporated under Thailand's central bureaucracy in 1902.
A separatist movement has flared on and off in the region for decades, fuelled by the local Malay-speaking population's feelings of ethnic, religious and linguistic alienation from predominantly Buddhist Thailand.