RANTAU PANJANG - The bridge over the muddy river at this small border town is short, but it spans a cultural chasm between Malaysia and Thailand which has rung alarm bells on both sides of the frontier.

On one bank is Kelantan, the only Malaysian state ruled by the fundamentalist Islamic party PAS. On the other, an apparently rising tide of Islamic militancy in freewheeling Buddhist Thailand.

The Islamic headscarves worn by the women of Rantau Panjang are also common across the border in the town of Sungai Kolok in Narathiwat province, one of five southern states inhabited by Thailand's Muslim minority.

But when dusk falls, they disappear from the central streets, iron shutters are raised and rows of seedy hole-in-the-wall bars open for business, displaying a few tables, flocks of scantily-clad women and a lot of beer.

In Rantau Panjang, which lies at the end of a quiet road through a flat landscape of paddy fields and coconut groves, the sale of alcohol is restricted and dancing is frowned upon.

Over the bridge, booze, sex, drugs and bad rock and roll are Sungai Kolok's economic heartblood - kept pumping mainly by Malaysian day-trippers.

But a bomb attack against a bar there in late March injured 28 people, including eight Malaysians, and brought business to a shuddering halt.

Tourism down

The attack was part of a wave of violence blamed on Islamic separatists in Thailand's southern provinces which has killed nearly 200 people since the beginning of the year.

Now, customers are cautiously returning to the bawdy bars of Sungai Kolok, but police armed with automatic rifles are on patrol.

Malaysian men always talk of the town's nightlife with a nudge and a wink, but it is not Las Vegas. Wandering goats and dogs share the dusty streets with the hookers, and its appeal as a tourist destination is limited.

"Eighty percent of our guests are usually tourists from Malaysia," Marina Hotel front office manager Worachet Haji Ali told AFP . "Now, our occupancy rate is down to between 15 and 20 percent."

Naowarat Kaewtongpan, who runs the Beer House off Charoenkhet Road, says it is not only fear that is keeping her Malaysian customers away, but a military crackdown along the border.

"They used to come across the river in sampans, avoiding immigration, but now police and army patrols have made that difficult."

Like hotel manager Worachet, as well as the government in Bangkok and puzzled Malaysians, Naowarat struggles to explain the outbreak of violence.

"These are just a few Muslims, not all Muslims, they are just young boys under the influence of drugs," she says, echoing a government line.

Job factor

Worachet, a Muslim, says most of his fellow-believers do not want a separate Islamic state in Thailand - one of the aims of a separatist movement that thrived in the 1970s and 80s and now claims a revival.

But, he says, the government must help the region economically and create jobs for disaffected young people if it wants to end the rebellion.

It is an opinion echoed across the border, where Malaysia's Muslims, with a shared history over the centuries with their Thai counterparts, shake their heads over the violence and are reluctant to offer an opinion openly.

"The Thai government must take care of the Muslims, find jobs for them," is all that a Malaysian customs official would say, refusing to be named.

The governments in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have come to the same conclusion, stressing at meetings they have held since the outbreak of violence that economic development of the poor south is the key to solving the problem.

Thailand, which thrives on tourism, obviously has an interest in portraying the unrest as anything but Islamic terrorism.

However, reports have surfaced in Malaysian media of Indonesians being involved in disastrous attacks on Thai police and army posts last week in which more than a hundred young Muslims died.

Indonesia is home to the regional Jemaah Islamiah (JI) group, which is linked to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, the most feared terrorist group in the world.

Providing preachers

Proof that JI or Al-Qaeda were involved would shatter the illusion that Thailand's problem - and its support for the US-led invasion of Iraq - is somehow divorced from the mainstream of global Islamic militancy.

Australia, Britain, Denmark and New Zealand have already advised their citizens not to travel to the five Muslim-majority provinces.

Malaysia's government - which fears that violence could spill over the border - offered at a meeting in Bangkok Tuesday to send Malaysian Islamic preachers to Thailand, to teach that Islam is a religion of peace.

Malaysia itself, however, has in recent years locked up without trial more than 80 alleged Islamic militants with suspected links to JI and Al-Qaeda, meaning that the jitters felt in Bangkok resonate all the way south through Sungai Kolok and Rantau Panjang, to Kuala Lumpur. - AFP