Army chief Gen Apirat Kongsompong flew to Indonesia's Aceh province on Tuesday and signed an agreement on security cooperation aimed at dousing the flames of southern unrest in Thailand.
Gen Apirat's delegation included army chief of staff Gen Thirawat Boonyawat, 4th Army Region commander Lt Gen Pornsak Poonsawas and Maj Gen Thira Daewa, director of the Peace Operations Centre of the Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc) Region 4 Forward Command.
At the meeting, Indonesian army chief of staff Andika Perkasa shared lessons learned from nearly 30 years of armed conflict in Aceh, which the government resolved by using military and political approaches.
Meanwhile Gen Apirat -- the first Thai army chief to visit Aceh -- discussed with Gen Andika how to best tackle insurgent violence in the three southernmost provinces, which is backed by support at home and abroad.
"Such international and domestic threats could lead to security issues in other countries of this region," read the meeting's minutes. They also detailed an agreement to boost bilateral security cooperation including monitoring the movements of extremist, rebel and other clandestine groups as well as fugitives in Thailand or Indonesia.
Links were first made between militants in Aceh and insurgents in the deep South after weapons were stolen from a Thai military arsenal in 2004.
Muslim separatists in Aceh were reportedly involved in the raid and took some of the stolen weapons for their own fight for independence from Indonesia. Thai insurgents kept the rest.
There are also reports that Aceh separatists sent instructors to train a youth separatist group, Permudaa, at Islamic schools in the far South.
