Renewed hope for Thailand's
south By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Even as he gives shape to a
political agenda in the Thai capital, coup leader
General Sonthi Boonyaratklin has reason to worry
about the troubled southern provinces along the
Malaysian border.
A week after tanks
rolled into Bangkok, ousting the government of
caretaker prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the
Muslim insurgency in the three southernmost
provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani shows
few signs of abating.
Since then across
the strife-torn region, two civilians have been
killed by gunfire, four
police officers came under fire, two police
stations and a military outpost were stormed and a
school was set on fire, according to news reports.
Such signs of violence-as-usual come
despite the hopes for national reconciliation that
greeted the junta in Bangkok. A view expressed
days after Thailand's 18th coup was that Sonthi
would be an ideal candidate to help usher in peace
in the region, which has seen more than 1,700
deaths on both sides of the conflict since it
erupted in January 2004.
Top coupmaker
Sonthi, a Thai Muslim, it was hoped, could more
readily build a rapport with the predominantly
Buddhist country's largest religious minority,
which is concentrated in the violence-torn three
southern provinces and has long complained of
government insensitivity to its culture and
beliefs.
The conflict in the south - which
has taken the form of an ethnic conflict between a
heavily centralized Thai-Buddhist state and the
Malay-Muslim minority - is significantly not
overtly about religion. Rather, it is believed to
stem from state restrictions on the southern
minority from practicing their unique culture,
including the use of their local Yawi language, a
Malay dialect. For instance, the use of Yawi has
been banned in public schools and the local
bureaucracy, nor is it given space in the local
independent media.
Significantly, Sonthi,
although a practicing Muslim, is not a member of
the Malay-Muslim community that has been rooted in
Thailand's southernmost provinces for centuries.
Rather, he belongs to one of the smaller pockets
of Thai Muslims that dot the country's southern,
central and northern regions, including ethnic
Chinese, Indians and Chams from Cambodia.
As such, political and social analysts are
not as sanguine about the prospects of an
immediate settlement under Sonthi's interim
military administration - even though many in the
region will warmly welcome Thaksin's ouster.
"His being a Muslim is one thing, but what
matters is if he has influence with the separatist
groups in the area. I think he has little
influence with them," said Arafen Thaipratan, a
medical doctor working with the Young Muslim
Association of Thailand, a group monitoring
human-rights violations in the region. "So little
has changed in our lives since the coup because we
are still living under martial law."
A
Thai-Buddhist peace activist working in Narathiwat
province struck a similar note of caution. "We
will have to wait to see what the new government's
policy to the south will be," said Souriya
Tawanachai, a member of the Flowers and Paper
Birds for Peace Foundation. "Things are still not
clear."
Conciliatory statements
Public statements Sonthi has made since
taking over as Thailand's first Muslim army chief
have resonated across the region, signaling that
his would be a more conciliatory approach than his
predecessors had pursued. In April, the
soft-spoken general went on record to reveal that
local authorities, on Bangkok's orders, had
compiled "blacklists" to arrest and monitor the
movements of Malay-Muslim males suspected of being
linked to the violence.
In the weeks
before last week's putsch, Sonthi also made a
public appeal for national reconciliation in the
region. But when he called for formal talks with
the Malay-Muslim insurgents, his request was
quickly shot down by Thaksin, who repeatedly
referred to the militants as "terrorists".
"General Sonthi will have to do more to
win greater acceptance, like saying that they will
reinvestigate all the human-rights abuses that
have taken place," said Sunai Phasuk, Thai
researcher for Human Rights Watch, a US-based
human-rights lobby. "A conducive environment will
also have to be created for the people in the
south to share their grievances."
The
trust between Bangkok and ethnic-Malay Muslims was
shredded after two clashes in 2004. In April of
that year, local community leaders accused the
army of using excessive force to attack
Malay-Muslim militants who had taken refuge in a
historic mosque in Pattani after assaulting
security posts. Thirty-five militants were killed
inside the temple in an orgy of violence across
the region that saw more than 100 Thai Muslims
killed in a single day.
In October 2004,
78 suspected Muslim militants died by suffocation
in military custody after they were arrested for
demonstrating noisily outside a police station in
the southern town of Tak Bai. Notably, none of the
three senior army officers who were found
"negligent" after a government-led inquiry have
been prosecuted.
Some analysts believed
violence in the region was dangerously escalating,
as militants started to target more directly
civilian populations in urban areas popular with
tourists. Three days before the coup, militants
struck the city of Hat Yai in nearby Songkhla
province by simultaneously detonating six bombs,
which killed four people, including a Canadian
citizen, and injured dozens of others. The next
night, militants burned school buildings and a
daycare center and destroyed several vehicles.
The violence is rooted in decades of
cultural and economic injustice that ethnic-Malay
Muslims say they have been subjected to after
Siam, as Thailand was then known, dissolved the
Kingdom of Patani and annexed the three southern
provinces in 1902. Separatist battles have been
waged by Malay-Muslim rebels against the Thai
state since the 1960s in reaction to Bangkok's
heavy-handed policies.
Thaksin's
particularly tough tactics toward the south have
been widely blamed for triggering the latest cycle
of violence. And his follow-on response, including
imposing martial law and a subsequent emergency
decree, has "'worsened the situation", making it
an "us-versus-them conflict", said Thanet
Aphornsuvan, a history expert at Bangkok's
Thammasat University. "The political space for the
locals to air their concerns was also narrowed,
because the sense of 'Thainess' under Thaksin was
reduced to the religion and language of the
majority."
Peace can be restored only if
the army "opens up the definition of 'Thainess' to
accommodate the local language to participate in
the national dialogue", Thanet said. "What we want
is to open up the box. Once there is openness,
understanding will come."
This is the task
Sonthi and a soon-to-be-appointed interim
government will have to tackle.
