Peace stays
far away in southern Thailand By Bertil Lintner
NARATHIWAT, Thailand, and STOCKHOLM,
Sweden - Add Thailand's Muslim minority to the
growing list of Thais who believe a change in
government would likely be in their best interest.
That's what many Thai Muslims in the country's
conflict-ravaged southernmost provinces of
Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala are hoping for -
though few say so openly for fear of landing on a
government enemies list.
Over the past two
years, more than 1,000 people have been killed in
drive-by shootings, bombings and other random acts
of violence that have pitched government security
forces against a shadowy
Muslim insurgent movement.
Under a heavy military presence, fear is gripping
the daily lives of people as Thai security forces
raid homes in search of radicals. The insurgents
have responded by attacking police stations,
government schools and other symbols of Thai
authority.
Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra, whose controversial leadership style
has recently ignited massive anti-government
rallies in Bangkok, last year handed himself
sweeping emergency powers to deal with the growing
unrest in the south. Eight months later, hardly a
day goes by without another bomb attack or
assassination, and the troubled region has become
one of Southeast Asia's hottest security
flashpoints. Heavily armed police search cars at
checkpoints along all major highways and cruise
the streets of the provincial capitals in a show
of force that has not been seen in Thailand since
the height of the communist insurgency in the
1970s. Allegations of human-rights abuses tar both
sides of the conflict.
Thaksin's hardline
military approach to the problem contrasts sharply
with attempts at finding a political solution by
the royally appointed National Reconciliation
Commission (NRC), led by former prime minister
Anand Panyarachun, a well-respected senior
statesman. While Thaksin still dictates security
policy, if a new government were somehow to emerge
in Bangkok, it is widely expected that a new
administration, particularly if it were royally
appointed, would be more sympathetic to Muslim
grievances.
The NRC has been holding talks
with Muslim community leaders in the south, but
the problem is that few of them dare to speak
their minds as long as the present government
remains in power, and therefore have remained
mostly silent during the meetings. Insurgent
leaders in exile have been much more outspoken. In
a recent interview at an undisclosed location in
Sweden, Kasturi Mahkota, chief of the foreign
affairs department of the Patani United Liberation
Organization (PULO), told this correspondent that
the only viable path to conflict resolution would
be good-faith negotiations with the Thai
government. PULO is one of the main
anti-government groups in the south, and the
insurgent group's foreign affairs department is
located in Sweden, where several hundred Muslims
from southern Thailand now live in exile.
Mahkota indicated that his group was
willing to compromise. "Our initial goal was
independence for Patani," he said. "But the world
has changed and we are willing to discuss other
solutions than a total breakaway. The main thing
is to get the Thai authorities to the negotiating
table."
Mahkota - which is a nom de
guerre - comes from Narathiwat and has lived
in exile in Sweden for 16 years. He claims to have
good contacts on the ground in southern Thailand,
and certainly was well informed about the latest
security developments in the area. Mahkota also
stressed that the insurgents' struggle is not a
sort of Islamic jihad, but rather a fight to
preserve the unique culture of Muslims in
southernmost Thailand. Other Muslim-populated
areas of Thailand, including Muslim-majority Satun
province, and southern provinces with strong
Muslim minorities such as international tourist
havens Phuket and Krabi, have been spared from the
violence.
Mahkota chalks that up to
historical differences, as other regions were more
effectively co-opted by the Bangkok-centric Thai
state. "We are Muslims, but there are other
Muslims in Thailand, too. The difference is that
we speak a completely different language - Malay -
and that we once had our own independent
sultanate."
That sultanate was first
annexed by Siam in 1832, and after years of
centrally appointed leaders, the last sultanate
was deposed in 1902 when Bangkok tightened its
grip on the country's northern and southern
frontiers. (Siam was renamed Thailand in 1939.)
Mahkota strongly dismissed the notion that
the present generation of Thai Muslim insurgents
belong to some kind of international Islamic
brotherhood. "We have nothing to do with al-Qaeda
or Jemaah Islamiah," he asserted.
The
Aceh model Mahkota and other rebel
representatives are closely following the peace
process in nearby Aceh province, Indonesia,
another Southeast Asian security hot spot that was
ravaged by a 30-year separatist conflict that
likewise aimed to resurrect an ancient Islamic
sultanate. A peace agreement signed last August in
Helsinki between the Indonesian government and the
rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) has so far held up
nicely.
GAM rebels have surrendered all of
their self-declared weapons, and the Indonesian
army had reciprocated by pulling nearly 10,000 of
its 24,000 troops out of the territory in northern
Sumatra by year's end. Aceh arguably represents
the first regional experiment with full-blown
autonomy, and mediators in Helsinki last year
hinted that the model might be applied to resolve
the breakaway insurgencies in both the southern
Philippines and southern Thailand.
Lars
Danielsson, deputy minister to the Swedish Prime
Minister'S Office, said in January that Stockholm
would be willing to help broker a similar peace
deal between the Thai authorities and the groups
in the south, if Bangkok so requested. However,
Thai Defense Minister General Thammarak Isarangura
na Ayutthaya, widely viewed as a hawk in Thaksin's
government, shot down the suggestion out of hand.
"There is no way this will happen. We are
not interested in negotiations. Other countries
don't know what is really happening here. This is
not a good solution," Thammarak told ThaiDay
newspaper in response to Danielsson's offer.
Without question, there are important
cultural and strategic differences between the
conflict in Aceh and that in southern Thailand.
First and foremost, ethnic Acehnese are Muslims
like the vast majority of Indonesia's sprawling
220 million population - although many Acehnese
have indicated their preference for rule by sharia
law rather than Jakarta's secular mode of
governance. Furthermore, Aceh is geographically
isolated on the tip of an island and does not
share a land border with any other country.
In contrast, the people in Thailand's
southernmost provinces represent a small Muslim
minority in a Buddhist-majority country, and their
land area borders Malaysia, whose majority
population share the same religion, language and
culture. Thailand has recently repeatedly accused
certain fundamentalist groups in northern Malaysia
of supporting separatist movements in the south,
and historically that was often the case during
the height of Thailand's southern insurgency in
the 1970s and 1980s.
If a new government
with a more conciliatory approach were to assume
power in Bangkok, it would first face the problem
of exactly whom it should be negotiating with in
the south. While PULO appears on the surface to be
the politically most active group in exile, the
majority of the ground forces appear to belong to
various factions of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional
(BRN), which was founded in Narathiwat in 1960.
PULO was formed eight years later by
Tengku Bira Kotanila, who now lives in exile in
Syria and remains the nominal head of the
organization. In 1995, Afghan war veteran Nasoree
Saesaeng founded the even more militant Movement
of Islamic Mujahideen of Patani (Gerakan
Mujahideen Islam Patani, or GMIP). Other, smaller
groups also exist, but it is difficult to
ascertain whether the abundance of insurgent
organizations reflects actual factionalism or just
a division of labor in the struggle for a common
goal.
If that goal is no longer
independence, as Mahkota suggests, one possible
solution would be to establish the deep south as a
"special administrative region" or, in effect, an
autonomous region. Only Bangkok and Pattaya are
currently designated as such areas, and these
notably are municipalities rather than provinces.
The government has also announced its intentions
to establish a special administrative area, to be
called Nakhon Suvarnabhumi, around the new Bangkok
international airport that is scheduled to open
this year.
The only province that has been
promised the status of special administrative
region is the internationally renowned resort
island of Phuket. But the handover to local
authorities promised last year has been delayed,
likely because Phuket is relatively close to the
restive southernmost provinces and the Thai
government fears setting what it perceives to be a
precedent that might inspire southernmost Muslims
to demand the same status.
It is also an
open question whether the majority of Thais would
oppose a move to turn an entire region comprising
at least three provinces into an autonomous area -
particularly if it were seen as caving into the
violent tactics of insurgents.
Yet
something must be done to change widespread
sentiments in the troubled south that it is
somehow under "foreign occupation" - which is how
many southern Thai Muslims characterize their
situation. While 75-85% of the population in the
three southernmost provinces are Muslim, as many
as 90% of the government administrators, and in
particular the police and the army, are Thai
Buddhists, usually hailing from other regions of
the country that lack understanding of Muslim
mores and culture.
"We have no leaders of
our own to turn to if there is a problem," said a
young Muslim in Narathiwat, who, like so many of
the area's younger generation, did not want to be
quoted by name because of fears for their safety.
"These outsiders do not understand us and our
problems."
A significant misunderstanding
among Thai Muslims and Buddhists has been the role
of Muslim boarding schools, known in Thai as
pon-oh, a corruption of the Malay word
pondok. There are hundreds of such schools
in the south - 130 of them in Narathiwat province
alone - which teach young boys and girls the
virtues of Islam, some Arabic language, and local
history (The truth about pondok schools in
Thailand, September 3, 2004).
The Thai
authorities have widely blamed these schools for
playing a key role in organizing the bloody
uprising in the south, believing they have lent
themselves to being exploited by anti-government
and separatist elements. It is well established
that many of the insurgency's leaders and
activists were educated at such schools. But so
too have 60% of the south's children, and Thai
Muslims point out that most of them have not grown
up to become terrorists.
According to
Mahkota, the pon-ohs are where Malay
culture is handed down from one generation to the
next, and without them the unique identity of
southern Thai Muslims would eventually be lost.
One young teacher at a Narathiwat-based pon-oh
argued that the schools actually have a
moderating rather than a radicalizing influence on
the region's youth: "Many of the pupils are
orphans, and if we didn't take care of them and
teach them discipline and good conduct, they could
easily be co-opted by bad elements."
The
insurgency and the government's tough response
have widely undermined confidence in Thaksin's
handling of the situation. Many Muslim leaders,
speaking on condition of anonymity, said that in
light of the political crisis now unfolding in
Bangkok a new, royally appointed government would
represent the best hope for conflict resolution in
the south.
Thaksin's government has
accused, often without substantiating evidence,
local Muslim leaders, including elected
politicians, of behind-the-scenes involvement in
the insurgency. Islamic community leaders now say
there are only three Thai politicians who they
believe sincerely understand the complex nature of
the conflict-torn area's problems.
The
most widely mentioned political figure is General
Prem Tinsulanonda, a former prime minister and
current Privy Council chairman, who is a Buddhist
but is a native of the nearby southern province of
Songkhla. The second is another former prime
minister, General Chavalit Yongchaiyuth, whom
Muslims remember as the first Thai politician
publicly to suggest autonomy for the southernmost
provinces. His wife, Pangkreua Yongchaiyuth, was
born in Indonesia and understands the Yawi dialect
of Malay spoken in the south.
The third,
they say, is Yala member of parliament Wan
Muhammad Nor Matha, one of Thailand's most
prominent Muslim politicians, who has served as
both a Speaker of the Thai parliament and minister
of interior. A former member of Chavalit's New
Aspiration Party, he is currently a part of
Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party - which to some
degree has eroded his grassroots credibility in
the south.
"He said nothing after the Tak
Bai massacre, but we are willing to give him a
second chance," said a Muslim community leader in
Narathiwat. (In October 2004, at least 78 young
Thai Muslims died in army custody in the southern
border town of Tak Bai, many suffocating in
covered trucks while being transported to an army
base (Suffocation deaths inflame Thai
south, October 28, 2004).
Foundations for change On
January 7, Prem and Chavalit were guests of honor
at a meeting attended by hundreds of southern
community leaders to discuss avenues toward
reconciliation. At this meeting there was no
conversation about granting the region autonomy,
but Prem did tell the audience: "I would like to
request, especially Muslim Thais, that you should
be proud to be Thai. Please be proud to be Thai
under His Majesty the King. Please arise and
announce, 'I am Thai but I am a Thai Muslim.'"
The meeting was convened by Abdulrahman
Abdulsamat, chairman of the League o f the Islamic
Council of Southern Thailand, and former chairman
of the Narathiwat Islamic Council.
While
declaring his loyalty to the King, he also
stressed his pride in being a Malay Muslim - an
identity he and most Thai Muslims are unwilling to
surrender. He is extremely careful in his comments
so as not to end up on the authorities' "black
list", but is skeptical of the heavy-handed
approach to the problem in the south. "This cannot
be solved by armed force," he said. "We need good
understanding, and General Prem is the right man
to solve the problem."
Perhaps it is still
far-fetched to expect any Thai government to heed
the Aceh model, which would inevitably loosen
Bangkok's grip on the restive region and fuel
fears that more autonomy could eventually lead to
calls for full-blown independence. And negotiating
with the insurgents could be perceived as caving
in to violent terror tactics. But if Prem, often
viewed as the conscience of His Majesty King
Bhumibol Adulyadej, openly played a role in
designing a royally appointed government in the
event that Thaksin somehow fell from power,
judging by the widespread sentiments of local
Muslim leaders, it could be the best way to solve
southern Thailand's damaging conflict.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific
Media Services.
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