By Max Constant
BANGKOK
A security cordon was placed around a city in Thailand's Muslim majority south on Thursday evening after a spate of remote-controlled bombs left 12 people injured.
Police General Chamlong Suvalak, chief of Yala police station, told Anadolu Agency that the city was rocked by at least 14 almost simultaneous explosions.
“The blasts hit some markets, in front of the university of technology, near the railway station as well as in front of banks and commercial buildings,” he said.
“All were remote-controlled,” he said, adding that police were scouring the city to check for suspicious objects, and controlling who was leaving and entering the center.
Suvalak said he suspected the bombs to be the work of insurgent groups.
The explosions occurred as the junta prepares to restart negotiations with some insurgent groups in the region.
BenarNews reported Wednesday that security and insurgent sources had indicated that talks between the two sides could restart at the end of this month or the beginning of June.
The Thai government of Yingluck Shinawatra had held two sessions of negotiations with rebel groups between 2012 and 2013, but had to suspend talks in Dec. 2013 when massive anti-government demonstrations brought Bangkok to a standstill.
Yingluck's goverment was overthrown in a coup on May 22 last year.
The three southernmost Thai provinces – Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat - constituted an independent Islamic sultanate with great religious influence in the Southeast Asian Muslim world until it was incorporated into Siam after a 1909 anglo-siamese agreement.
Great Britain was then the colonial power in Malaysia and was exerting a degree of control over the region.
From 1938, a virulently nationalistic campaign organized by Field Marshall Phibulsongkhram's government tried to impose Thai cultural norms onto Malay Muslims, who reacted by asking for some degree of political and cultural autonomy.
Things turned for the worse in the 1960s, when military dictator Field Marshall Tarit Sanarat attempted to control the Islamic boarding schools, locally known as pondoks.
Several Muslim groups took up arms and began the guerrilla war against the Thai state.
