ASIA
HAND No peace in sight for southern
Thailand By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - If Thailand's new
military-appointed interim government is suing for
peace with the Malay Muslim insurgent groups
ravaging the country's three southernmost
provinces, nobody apparently told the rebels.
One month since military coup-makers
ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and vowed
to reconcile Bangkok with the historically restive
region, the security situation has only gone
from bad to worse.
While new Thai Prime Minister Surayud
Chulanont met last week
in Kuala Lumpur with his
Malaysian counterpart Abdullah Badawi to discuss
possible peace strategies, insurgents added at
least another 23 murders to the conflict's
spiraling death toll, which, according to one
independent estimate, has surpassed 2,300,
substantially higher than the 1,700 figure that
the Thai government acknowledges.
The
local and international media have misread the
significance of the Thai government's recent peace
overtures. Significantly, Surayud purposely
refrained from mentioning former Malaysian prime
minister Mahathir Mohamad's recent mediation
effort, which was launched clandestinely in August
and entailed meetings between insurgent leaders
and Thai intelligence agents on Malaysia's
Langkawi Island.
Mahathir's efforts were
not endorsed by Kuala Lumpur and were apparently
arranged more with a view to upstage his successor
Abdullah than to establish a legitimate peace
process, according to people familiar with the
situation.
Mahathir's initiative also
managed to complicate parallel mediation efforts
that were already under way, and his brusque
handling alienated some insurgent groups when he
suggested that they lay down their arms as a
goodwill gesture before proposed formal talks
began.
The hard reality, according to
those involved with ongoing mediation efforts, is
that peace is still a long way off for southern
Thailand. Insurgent groups are deeply entrenched
and have achieved total control in areas along the
Thai-Malaysian border in Narathiwat province,
where Thai soldiers reportedly dare not patrol.
Although Kuala Lumpur steadfastly denies it, Malay
insurgent groups often plan attacks and take
sanctuary from Thai reprisals in remote areas of
Kelantan province in northern Malaysia, according
to people who have met with the rebels.
Nearly three years into the renewed
conflict, Thai officials still do not have a clear
idea concerning who exactly they should be
negotiating with to stop the violence. Thailand's
shadowy insurgency notably lacks any charismatic
leaders and is being perpetuated by a number of
different autonomous rebel groups, some of which
share divergent outlooks and competitive
objectives for the resistance.
When former
Thai insurgent Wan Kadir Che Man told journalists
on the sidelines of an academic conference in
Malaysia in 2004 that he controlled insurgents and
was willing to negotiate an end to the conflict in
exchange for more regional autonomy, his
shirt-tie-and-jacket look didn't jibe with the
Islamic flavor of the rebel groups. Thai officials
later discovered that the aged insurgent, who at
the time was serving as an academic at Malaya
University, had closer links to Malaysia's
special-branch police than to Thai insurgent
groups, and they immediately broke off
communications with the ethnic-Malay Thai
national.
Thailand's inability to gain any
traction in behind-the-scenes talks is reflective
of the resistance movement's complicated
fragmentation. According to people familiar with
the situation, certain insurgent-group
representatives will not attend meetings if other
groups are also invited. That is, rather than a
united front, as the umbrella rebel group's
Bersatu name translates in the local Yawi
language, Thailand's Muslim insurgents often don't
see eye-to-eye, which has complicated past efforts
to work toward a blanket solution for the
conflict.
Fresh start, same result Surayud has signaled that he wishes to make a
clean break from Thaksin's heavy-handed policies,
which arguably tipped the restive region back into
conflict. This week he announced plans for
restoring the Southern Border Provinces
Administrative Center and possibly later the
Combined 43rd Civilian-Police-Military Command,
agencies that had successfully mediated between
Bangkok and local Muslim leaders before Thaksin
unilaterally dismantled them in April 2002.
But a return to the status quo ante
likely won't be enough to settle what has arguably
morphed into a full-blown insurrection. Thailand's
southern Muslim communities earlier took seriously
the decentralization articles enshrined in the
1997 constitution, which among other democratizing
measures opened the way for Muslim dress codes in
state schools, greater liberty to use the local
Yawi language, and access to radio airwaves for
local groups to broadcast Islamic sermons and
programs.
Those local-level reforms were
slowly but surely bringing the country's
long-marginalized Muslims into the national fold
and had undermined the influence and clout of
violence-bent insurgent groups, which had largely
been consigned to the political and, in certain
cases, literal wilderness.
Thaksin's
policies violently reversed many of those
democratic gains by reinforcing the Thai state's
authority, centralization and regulation over the
region. The reform rollback included the
harassment and profiling of Islamic teachers and
schools, and as insurgents regrouped and steadily
escalated the violence, detention without trial,
commando-style apprehension and disappearance, and
in some cases torture of suspected Muslim
militants.
Unfortunately for Surayud, most
southern Thai Muslims' and even certain insurgent
group leaders' complaints and grievances are
pinned directly to the on-the-ground security
forces he now commands and hopes to rehabilitate
to forge peace rather than sow violence across the
region. His military-appointed government is
confronted with a population that remains highly
reluctant to cooperate with state agents, lest
they be accused of cooperating with its proven
abusive tendencies.
One possible path to
peace and reconciliation would be greater
mobilization of royal symbolism, from which his
military-appointed government derives much of its
legitimacy. His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej,
although the most potent symbol of the
Buddhist-majority Thai state, is known to be
highly revered among the region's Muslims.
Insurgent leaders have largely refrained from
overtly criticizing the monarch, who local Muslims
often note oversaw the first translation of the
Koran into the Thai language. The palace has also
shelled out variously for the construction of
mosques across the country, and the respected
monarch sometimes officiates at Koran recitals
during important Muslim rites and rituals.
That said, it's not clear stronger royal
signals would necessarily break the impasse. One
indication: the status of the royally appointed
Chularajamontri, Thai Muslims' top spiritual
leader, has come under fire from many Muslims who
view him as too close to the central government
and too distant from his adherents. Adding fuel to
those fiery perceptions, the current
Chularajamontri offered only muted criticism after
the military's April 2004 destruction of the
highly venerated Krue Se Mosque in Pattani
province during a massive siege against a group of
lightly armed rebels that had holed up in the
ancient structure.
Surayud recently said
without elaborating that he would be willing to
consider as part of a peace deal an autonomy
package similar to the one Indonesia brokered last
year to end its 30-year conflict against rebels in
Aceh province. But according to people familiar
with the situation, those in Surayud's inner
circle are still highly reluctant to enact any
sort of regional autonomy that from their
perspective could eventually jeopardize the
territorial integrity of the kingdom.
Indeed, by shredding the 1997 constitution
and appointing mainly conservatives to the body
drafting the new constitution, the prevailing
political winds are blowing against fully
reinstating even the local-autonomy measures that
were enshrined in the previous progressive
charter, which significantly had paved the way for
local democracy and peace to take root in the
region. And so, despite the new government's
change in tone, there is still no clear end in
sight for Thailand's spiraling southern conflict.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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