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Thailand hits and misses,
again
By David Fullbrook
BANGKOK - Cutting state spending in
villages deemed disloyal is the Thai government's
latest idea for bringing peace to three troubled
southern Malay-Muslim provinces. Shortly after
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced the
planned funding cuts last Wednesday,
coincidentally or not, Thailand's first car bomb
exploded, killing six. With no cure for policy
myopia in sight, the car bomb may not be the last.
Thaksin, ebullient after a landslide
victory in the general election earlier this
month, is proposing to withhold development funds
from villages in districts prone to violence.
Thaksin claims villagers are using state funds to
finance their violent campaign for independence.
A torrent of scorn has greeted the policy,
with observers certain it will do nothing to
improve relations between the state and Thailand's
Malay-Muslim minority, who form the majority in
Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces. Some say
cutting off access to state funds is tantamount to
withdrawal.
It also seems to contravene
the constitution, which guarantees equality for
all citizens and equal access to state services
and funding. Villagers could sue the government in
the constitutional court.
Fingers are also
wagging at security forces for drawing up a map
that labels the three provinces' 1,580 villages as
red, yellow or green. In the 358 red villages - of
which 200 are in the largest province of the
three, Narathiwat - villagers do not cooperate and
are sympathetic to separatists, say security
forces. Yellow villages could cooperate better but
do not sympathies strongly with separatists. Green
villages cooperate well and are loyal.
Thaksin wants to withhold funds from red
villages and cut entitlements for yellow ones.
Alienation seems the only sure result. There is no
talk of applying similar measures to border
provinces in northern Thailand, from where Thaksin
hails, synonymous with drug trafficking and
killings and strong supporters of his party, Thai
Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai or TRT).
In the
three southern border provinces, the TRT failed to
win one seat. Thaksin rejects charges of
chastising them for returning Democrat Party
members to parliament. However, punishing entire
villages labeled as suspect or guilty without
proof is hardly going to woo hearts and minds,
especially as much of the violence is anything but
actions in a separatist war to resurrect the state
of Pattani, which Thailand swallowed a century
ago.
Worse still, the government tars them
as seditious, expecting to find evidence later and
simplistically blaming almost every killing on the
mysterious separatists. Attacks invariably involve
low-ranking engineers, officials, police, soldiers
and teachers, many are Thai Buddhists, but some
are Malay Muslims.
Last Thursday night a
car-bomb exploded outside the Marina Hotel in
Sungai Kolok, a trading entrepot on the Malaysian
border, killing at least six and wounding four
times as many. Many see this as a significant
escalation of the conflict, especially as one
suspect arrested shortly after had sold his
bomb-making skills to various armed groups in
northern Malaysia and southern Thailand over the
past few decades.
However, one bomb does
not make a war. Like most of the arson, bombings
and shootings over the past year, this bomb does
not appear aimed at a specific political target,
nor fit any pattern of attack to destroy the
government's ability to rule and provide services.
All they generate are a few deaths, fear and
headlines. No group proudly claimed responsibility
to demonstrate its power to followers and
sympathizers.
This is a stark contrast to
the Philippines, where communist and ethnic
guerrillas have bombed major cities, attacked key
targets, such as power lines, and operated openly.
For all the trouble and strife in southern
Thailand, there remain just a few burnt-out
separatist groups with little more than a few
websites between them and memories of their
struggles in the 1970s and 1980s.
Political and business disputes relating
to government tenders, corruption or failure to
deliver often end in murder in Thailand, partly
because money easily sways verdicts in the courts,
and partly because of a huge illegal economy,
perhaps worth one-fifth of the country's gross
domestic product.
That is not to say there
are no organized separatists. But winning over
disaffected communities through tackling their
grievances would better check such groups.
Instead, the government is deploying another
12,000 troops to the south to join the 20,000
already on the ground.
Loose talk and
dreams of separatism are but that for most. Still,
if the government cannot take off its blinders and
dig beneath the surface, working to tackle
poverty, discrimination and crime, talk could
harden and dreams could become plans. Instead, the
Thaksin administration seems beholden to gung-ho
policies, which play well with Thai Buddhist
nationalists and are likely to cause an increasing
number of Malay Muslims to wonder whether Thailand
really wants them.
Meanwhile, violence,
half-baked policies and rambunctious attitudes are
rubbing Thailand's Muslim-majority neighbors
Indonesia and Malaysia the wrong way.
Behind-the-scenes talks in January to quietly
transfer a key suspect arrested in Malaysia to
Thailand collapsed when Thaksin brought his arrest
into the open, further souring relations (see Malaysia, Thailand spar over
'mastermind', January 29).
Though Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali,
operations boss of Jemaah Islamiah, which is
fighting to create a fundamentalist Islamic state
in Southeast Asia, did spend some time in southern
Thailand in 2003, before being arrested and
transferred to US custody, there is scant evidence
of foreign terrorists moving in to up the ante -
for now. However, if the government cannot change
its tenor, the day they arrive to open arms only
moves closer.
Peace in troubled southern
Thailand seems to be slipping away, with
Thailand's first car-bomb meeting a plan to cut
state spending as punishment, harsh rhetoric and
more troops. If the government does not change
course soon, the blame for any war that comes will
lie heavily on its shoulders.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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