A Typical Day In Deep South

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SPECIAL REPORT

'Gunfire, teargas blur my camera'

By Charoon Thongnual

The Nation

Published on November 18, 2009

'Gunfire, teargas blur my camera'

It was meant to be like any other day, with another group of suspected insurgents being taken in for questioning. Or so I thought.

Having covered the deep South for The Nation for many years now, my journalist friends and I were often to be the among the first to arrive at bloody scenes. This time it was a bit different because we ran straight into a nightmare that had not yet begun.

Earlier, 10 police officers had marched confidently up to a big wooden house in Ban Tupah in Pattani's Khok Pho district following a tip-off from a local resident that some "irregular" activities were taking place inside.

However, the officers did not get the surrender they were hoping for. In fact, as soon as an officer broke down the door, a gunman opened fire - apparently from a distance. Luckily, the officer got away with no major injuries.

STRIKE-FORCE UNIT CALLED IN

The other nine officers quickly took up position and radioed for reinforcements. A unit of soldiers arrived just before noon, together with a strike-force unit that was trained for just such a gunfight.

We reporters became aware of the operation and rushed in. As usual, we kept a distance, but the action that was about to begin would feel as if we were in the middle of it.

The house, partly on stilts and partly on the ground, was large and insurgents were positioned all around it, with two indoors.

Negotiations started at around 2pm. Authorities brought in the village chief, an imam and a tok kuru, or religious teacher, but the militants were in no mood to listen. They kept shouting slogans to motivate each other and later started screaming in Malay: "We will fight to the death. We are not going to surrender!"

That was translated to us by an officer at the scene.

By 4pm, though, decisions needed to be made. It was growing dark, and the soldiers were deep inside a hotly contested "red zone", where a roadside bomb could go off at a switch of a mobile device or another set of militants could sneak up from behind.

So gunfire erupted, and even though several rounds of tear gas were fired into the compound, the militants held their ground, firing back with AK47 machine guns.

I was shaken. You may assume that, after a few years being at scenes of shooting or post-explosion, I should not. But there's no "been here, done that" in case of us journalists in this volatile region.

Despite being outgunned and outnumbered, the six insurgents held their ground for nearly an hour before the final push came - bullets from all directions.

As the security forces were firing in, the insurgents were firing out. All the while, tear gas and smoke grenades were being fired into the compound to blind the insurgents. There were times when smoke was all we could see. The area was still in a haze when troops and reporters moved in to inspect the dead bodies. Two soldiers were injured. All the gunmen were killed.

I called my office in Bangkok to relate the latest experience and file my report.

They asked me to tell it as I saw it, so here it is.

In hindsight, this was a typical day in deep South; you never know what's going to happen after you wake up.

-- The Nation 2009/11/18

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