More deaths as Thai Muslim unrest enters third year

Suspected Muslim militants killed two village officials in Thailand's south, police said on Wednesday, the second anniversary of the start of an insurgency in which more than 1,000 people have been killed.
In the sort of incident now commonplace in the provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, a motorcycle gunman shot dead 51-year-old Maromae Masae, a Muslim deputy village chief, as he ate breakfast at a roadside tea-shop.
"The gunman posed as a customer, then shot the victim with an 11-mm pistol and got away on the motorcycle his friend was riding," a police officer told reporters at the scene in Sungai Padi, a Narathiwat village 1,200 km (700 miles) south of Bangkok.
On Tuesday evening, a gunman using an AK-47 automatic rifle shot dead village-headman Hama Masae, also 51. The gunman lay in wait outside the victim's house and then escaped on a motorbike, scattering spikes behind him to deter pursuit, police said.
Despite the mounting death toll of Buddhists and Muslims - the two latest incidents took the police tally to 1,076 - the government says it is making progress in a traditionally lawless region with a century-long history of opposition to rule from Bangkok.
In what was an independent Muslim sultanate until annexed 100 years ago, 80 percent of people in the far south are Muslim, ethnic Malay and do not speak Thai as a first language, presenting a major problem for mainly Buddhist security forces.
About 10 percent of Thailand's 65 million people are Muslim. The majority of the remainder are Buddhist.
Since a January 4, 2004, raid on a military camp marked the start of a new separatist uprising, Bangkok has flooded the region with 30,000 troops and police with martial law powers.
It has also tried more unconventional schemes, such as an origami air-drop of millions of paper birds, or free English soccer on cable TV - although the military and softly-softly approaches have met similar degrees of failure.
In one of the darkest moments of the past two years, 78 Muslim men died in military custody in October 2004 after hundreds were rounded up and "stacked like bricks", according to one survivor, in army trucks after a protest.