Jakarta  - Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said Saturday his government was conducting a comprehensive review of the way the conflict in the country's south was being handled, and promising a new direction to achieve peace.

A five-year-old conflict in Thailand's southernmost region has resulted in the loss of almost 3,300 lives and cost the state an estimated 109 billion baht (3.1 billion dollars).

In a January report, Amnesty International accused Thai security forces in the mostly Muslim provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, Songkhla, and Yala of systematically engaging in torture, and said least four people had died because of mistreatment in custody.

Amnesty said people were beaten, burnt with candles, buried up to their necks in the ground, subjected to electric shocks and exposed to intense heat or cold.

Abhisit, speaking at the secretariat of the Association of the South-East Asian Nations in Jakarta, said he had seen the report and the promised that the allegations were being seriously investigated.

He also said the government had ordered a review of various laws applied in the provinces and that an emergency decree in force during the past four years would not be automatically extended in April.

The army chief has also accepted as a matter of policy to investigate reports of military abuses and punish officers responsible, the prime minister said.

"I think all the changes we have seen over the last couple of months will set a clear new direction in the way we handle the southern situation, which I believe is the right direction in trying to solve the problem in a sustainable manner," Abhisit said during a two-day visit to Muslim-majority Indonesia.

"I don't pretend it's easy. I don't pretend it's going to take a short time," he said.

Abhisit said the problems in the south could not be solved by military force alone but required a "complete policy package" addressing issues such as economic development, education and culture.

He said the government would seek input from local residents on how martial law, the emergency decree and a new national security law had been applied.

"We are taking some significant steps to make sure that there are no loopholes that could be exploited by officers or officials to step out of line," he said.

Violence in Thailand's south escalated after separatists raided an army depot in January 2004, killing four soldiers and making off with 300 weapons.

The incident sparked a series of brutal government crackdowns on the region's long-simmering separatist movement, which turned much of the population of 2 million, 80 per cent of whom are Muslim, against the central government.

The former independent Islamic sultanate of Pattani was conquered by Thailand about 200 years ago, but it has never wholly submitted to rule from Bangkok.

Analysts say the region's Muslim population, the majority of whom speak a Malay dialect and follow Malay customs, feel alienated from the predominantly Buddhist Thai state.

The Thai military has also been criticized for allegedly pushing back about 1,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees from Thailand's southern shores in December, leaving them at sea in boats without engines and insufficient food and water.

Nearly 400 of the boat people, who claimed persecution in Myanmar, were rescued by the Indonesian navy off the coast of Aceh, where they told officials they were rounded up and beaten by Thai military personnel.

Abhisit said Saturday there were instances in which officers sent the boat people out to sea, but that the government did not find any evidence of abuses as claimed by the migrants.

"Let me once again reaffirm Thailand's commitment to treating all humans according to their rights, and this is our policy," he said. (dpa)