Thai junta chief plans diplomatic mission to Saudi Arabia

May 10, 2007, 5:43 GMT

Bangkok - Thailand's junta leader General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin on Thursday won permission from the cabinet to visit Saudi Arabia to mend diplomatic ties, still strained by unsolved crimes that date back almost two decades.

Sonthi, who is army commander-in-chief and head of the Council of National Security (CNS) that staged a coup last September, got a go-ahead for his diplomatic foray from Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont and the cabinet at their meeting Thursday morning.

'I am going in my capacity as army commander-in-chief, not overlapping with the duties of the foreign ministry or the interior ministry,' Sonthi told reporters. He did not set a date for the pending visit.

Sonthi's mission will be to discuss and resolve differences over the unsolved cases of three Saudi diplomats who were gunned down in Bangkok in 1990 in what were believed to be assassinations linked to the theft of millions of dollars worth of jewels from the palace of Saudi Prince Faisal bin Abdul Raish in 1989 by Thai labourer Kriangkrai Daechamong.

The theft, perpetrated by Kriangkrai while he was a gardener in the prince's palace in Riyadh, sparked a diplomatic row when Thai police, assigned to hunt down the missing jewelry in Thailand, ended up sending imitation stones back to Saudi Arabia.

Among the missing items was a priceless blue diamond.

Only one police officer was jailed for the theft, the assassinations of the diplomats were never solved and many items, including the diamond, never returned.

Saudi Arabia downgraded its relations with Thailand as a result of the incidents, barring its citizens from visiting the kingdom and greatly restricting the number of Thais allowed to work in the oil-rich nation.

Sonthi, the first Muslim to be appointed army commander-in-chief in Thailand, also plans to meet with Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who visited Thailand last month to assess the conflict in Thailand's majority-Muslim deep South.

While in Bangkok, Ihsanoglu threw his support behind Thai Prime Minister Surayud's efforts to resolve the conflict through conciliatory means.

Thailand's three southernmost provinces - Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala - have been terrorized by an escalating campaign of violence since January 2004, when Muslim militants attacked an army weapons depot and stole 300 war weapons.

The act unleashed a government crackdown under former premier Thaksin Shinawatra on the region's long-simmering separatist struggle, that has in its turn sparked revenge killings, bombings and beheadings perpetrated by the insurgents on a near-daily basis. More than 2,100 people have died violently in the area over the past three years and five months.

Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist country, has painted the southern conflict as a separatist insurgency, down-playing its religious element, a stance that has been accepted by much of the world's Islamic community.

The three provinces constituted an independent Islamic sultanate known as Pattani for hundreds of years before being conquered by Bangkok in 1786. The border provinces came under direct rule of the Thai bureaucracy in 1902.

A separatist struggle took off in the 1950s, fuelled by government efforts to suppress the local culture and religion in the region.