Thailand’s government has undergone a number of upheavals this year, but in the country’s south, a bloody, decades-long, separatist insurgency continues to rage. East Village photojournalist Q. Sakamaki was in southern Thailand in April documenting the situation in the Muslim-majority area, which was formerly an ethnic Malay sultanate until Buddhist Thailand annexed it a century ago. The majority of people in the south are poorer than in Buddhist areas. More than 3,000 people have been killed since fighting broke out in January 2004. This page, clockwise from top: Villagers gather rice; soldiers protect Buddhist boys on their way to elementary school; a soldier with a heavy machine gun keeps watch in Rueso. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: In Yala province, at the site of a roadside bomb blast in which two rangers were injured, with a helmet of one victim left in the road, forensic experts and local journalists examine the scene; a Buddhist monk prepares a funeral for a slain Thai officer; Pin Yomtem, 78, holds a photo of her son Ahoop, 52, who was allegedly shot to death by Muslim insurgents in 2004 in his Buddhist-dominated Saicou village in Narathiwat province; a child with a kite in a Muslim fishing village in Narathiwat.
