By Ed Cropley

BANGKOK, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Malay rebels in southern Thailand are prepared to continue their armed struggle for an independent Muslim homeland for another five years before they contemplate talks with Bangkok, a leading rights group said on Tuesday. In a 104-page report on the Muslim-majority region where 2,400 people have been killed in the last four years, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the BRN-Coordinate group that appears to mastermind the unrest had more than 7,000 "youth members".

New York-based HRW said it had made rare contact with members of the BRN-Coordinate, which has never made its aims public, and been told the group had "no plans to give up the armed struggle for Pattani Darulsalam".

Pattani is the name of the independent sultanate annexed by predominantly Buddhist Thailand a century ago. Darulsalam means "peaceful state" in Malay, the language spoken by 80 percent of people in Thailand's southernmost tip along the Malaysian border.

Along with Narathiwat and Yala, Pattani is one of the three Thai provinces racked by the daily shootings, bombings, machete attacks and beheadings that started with a well-organised raid on an army barracks in January 2004.

HRW said the rebels, who have shown no desire to hook up with international militant groups such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda so far, were preparing for the long haul.

"They believe that at least three to five more years of the kind of violence that has taken place since 2004 is necessary before they are in a strong enough position to come into public view and participate in any kind of political process," HRW said.

The far south has always been distinct from the rest of Thailand, despite efforts by various military governments in the 1950s and 1960s to import Thai language, culture and religion.

Separatist rebels waged a low-level guerrilla war in the densely forested region throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but their campaign petered out in the 1990s under a more conciliatory, democratic government in Bangkok.

However, violence flared anew in 2004 shortly after then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a former policeman, dismantled the Southern Border Province Peace-Building Administration, an army-run organisation that included civilians and Muslim religious leaders, and put police in charge of security.

Thaksin's subsequent decision to flood the region with 30,000 troops and police further alienated the population, especially after 78 Muslim men arrested after a protest died of suffocation in army custody.

Srisompob Jitpiromsri, an academic at the south's Prince of Songkhla University, said he had contacted militants through third parties and been told the plan was to take the death toll into the tens of thousands before entering negotiations.

"One or two thousand deaths is just the beginning. Once you have more than 20,000 people dead, you have more bargaining power for independence," he told Reuters in June. "They want independence. They will not compromise on this goal."

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