A far cry

The killing started early in Damabuah village. From first light on the morning of December 11, people had gathered at the village teashop, an open-sided shack with a corrugated iron roof, as they usually did before heading to work in nearby rubber plantations: the mainstay of the economy in Thailand's deep south. Young and old, they sat on plastic chairs and chatted as they ate snacks and drank tea - unaware that six of them would be dead within the hour.

"I was sitting with my back to the road when the firing started. It was about 7am. I got under the table to take cover. Then the guns stopped and people began to cry and scream," says Hamisi Jehdo, a 23-year-old rubber tapper, speaking to Post Magazine just a few hours after the shooting. Sitting on the porch of his wooden house, he is in a state of extreme shock.

Hamisi's great-uncle died that morning, along with five others - including an 11-month-old girl - when a pick-up truck stopped outside the teashop and three men in the back sprayed its customers with automatic fire. They fired 42 rounds in little under half a minute, before speeding away. Their victims died for one reason only: because they were Muslims.

Within hours, as Islamic tradition dictates, the funerals had taken place. The young father of Infami Samoh, the dead baby, carried his daughter in outstretched arms to the village burial ground, where she was laid to rest in a shallow, muddy hole under a Mangosteen tree. Fellow villagers followed silently behind while the army, police and local militiamen who had gathered in Damabuah after the shootings watched from the side of the road, their rifles clutched to their chests.

The infant's death was shocking only because she was so young. She was just one of the almost 5,400 people who have been killed in this region in the past eight years. More than 9,500 others have been injured since 2004, when the long-festering grievances of the majority Muslim population in the deep south erupted into outright guerrilla warfare against the overwhelmingly Buddhist Thai state.

About 80 per cent of the 1.8 million people living in the three provinces at the southeast tip of Thailand - Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, the latter two of which border Malaysia - are ethnic Malay Muslims. They speak Malay as their first language and use Arabic script to write, and many want their own independent state.

"The land here was colonised by the Thais. In the past, we were a country, the Sultanate of Pattani. We want to take it back. We don't want to be part of Thailand or Malaysia; we want to have our own country," says a senior representative of the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (Pulo), one of the two main separatist groups in the area.