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Thailand softens on the
south
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Thai Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra appears to finally have found virtue in
taking a softer and more conciliatory approach to
quell an escalating insurgency in the country's
predominantly Muslim southern provinces, just days
before a series of bomb blasts killed at least two
people and wounded 52 others in the region.
Thaksin unveiled this new strategy during
a rare joint session of the country's parliament
and Senate last week, consequently marking a break
from the hardline position he had advocated since
the latest round of violence flared up in
Thailand's restive deep south some months ago.
"Most of what had occurred did not warrant
the use of heavy weapons," the prime minister told
700 members of parliament and senators from both
houses on Thursday, the second day of a debate to
find a resolution to the violence in the south.
In opening the sessions on Wednesday,
Thaksin urged lawmakers from across the political
spectrum to place faith in "compromise and abandon
prejudices for the sake of reconciliation".
According to Thaksin, the government will stress
preventive measures that are acceptable to the
beleaguered Malay-Muslim minority in this
predominantly Buddhist country in responding to
the violence attributed to suspected Muslim
separatists.
That would mean putting on
hold the military operations of an estimated
35,000 Thai troops in the three southern provinces
of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani that have been
under martial law since last year.
"Defense Minister [General] Thammarak
Isarangkura na Ayudhaya and Interior Minister
[Police General] Chidchai Wannasathit would
together work out a plan to remove troops from the
frontline duties and re-assign them to development
projects and safety protection," the
English-language Bangkok Post reported on Friday.
Last week's joint session of lawmakers -
the first since 1992, when Thailand's last
military regime gave way to the forces of
democracy - was triggered by the high death toll
in the provinces that share a border with
Malaysia. Close to 700 people have died due to
attacks by largely unknown assailants against
soldiers, police, civil servants, village headmen,
teachers and even Buddhist priests.
The
deaths include more than 100 Muslim youths who
died during bloody clashes with Thai troops in
April 2004. Among them were 32 Muslim militants
who were gunned down after taking refuge in a
historic mosque in the province of Pattani.
Then in October last year, 78 Malay-Muslim
men and boys died due to suffocation in military
custody following a protest by about 1,300 people
in the southern town of Tak Bai. A further seven
Muslims were shot dead by Thai troops while they
were protesting.
The latest violence came
on Sunday, when bombs hit a Western-owned
department store and a regional airport in
Songkhla province. The spread of violence to
tourist spots such as Hat Yai international
airport - a gateway to the Muslim-majority deep
south - is particularly worrying to the government
and raises the possibility that the militants
could be expanding their field of operations.
Thaksin's change of heart coincides with a
move by the government to appoint a National
Reconciliation Commission (NRC), a 48-member
independent body comprising highly respected
Muslim activists from the south, academics,
parliamentarians, human-rights advocates and
government officials.
Foremost among the
new commission's goals is to lay the groundwork
for peace-building measures in the violence-torn
region.
"The situation is getting worse
daily, and the earlier methods of the government
using force was not a success," Fakruddin Boto, a
senator from the Narathiwat province, told Inter
Press Service. "Those policies were oppressive and
people lived in fear."
He welcomed
Bangkok's latest stance, saying "this is the last
chance we have of finding a peaceful solution".
Yet he felt it premature to applaud, since he had
to judge how the verbal assurances could translate
into action.
To win the hearts of the
Malay-Muslim minority, the Thaksin administration
has even reached out for help from a renowned body
of Muslim theologians in Indonesia, the world's
most populous Muslim country.
Last week,
the head of that group, Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), held
meetings with religious leaders in southern
Thailand to seek remedies for the continuing
bloodshed. "The military and security approach
will not work, but a comprehensive way through
economic and social justice will," Hasyim Musadi,
the leader of NU, which has a membership of some
40 million Islamic teachers, told reporters here
at the end of his visit.
In an appeal to
end discrimination in the south, he urged Bangkok
to "place all the rights of the Thai people at the
same level".
The Malay-Muslim minority in
southern Thailand accounts for about 2.3 million
of this Southeast Asian nation's 64 million
population. These Muslims, who also speak a
different language than the Thai of the majority
and have a different culture going back centuries,
have complained of discrimination due to their
ethnic distinction.
Complaints of economic
deprivation, too, have been leveled against the
Thai state, a fact borne out by Narathiwat having
almost one-third of its population living below
the poverty line.
During the 1970s and
1980s, Thailand's south witnessed outbursts of
separatist violence waged by groups who wanted to
carve out a region that belonged to the kingdom of
Pattani a century ago. The five southern provinces
that were under the Pattani monarchy were annexed
in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.
(Inter Press Service) |
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