Page 1 of
2 ASIA HAND Dimming
peace prospects for southern
Thailand By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - On January 16, Thai court
officials agreed to release on bail 16 Muslim
suspects, most of whom had been apprehended and
detained in the aftermath of an October 2004 fatal
melee between local Muslims and security forces in
front of a provincial police station in the
southern Thai city of Tak Bai.
Eight of
those suspects, all Islamic religious teachers,
recently
failed to show up for a
scheduled court hearing and are now officially
considered missing. What's unclear is whether the
suspects fled to join insurgent groups or instead
were nabbed and "disappeared" by wayward Thai
security officials, as some international monitors
fear.
Such murky incidents were
commonplace during former prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra's heavy-handed administration, which
pursued a tough securitization policy toward the
restive Muslim-majority southern region; there
were widespread allegations of state-sanctioned
torture and disappearances. However, those
heavy-handed tactics were supposed to be a thing
of the past under Thailand's new
military-appointed government.
Coup leader
and army commander General Sonthi Boonyaratklin
vowed upon seizing power last September that his
ruling Council for National Security (CNS) would
seek to negotiate a settlement with the various
Muslim insurgent groups behind the violence,
including the Pattani United Liberation
Organization (PULO), the Barisan Revolusi
Nasional-Koordinasi (BRN-C), Bersatu, and the
Gerakan Mujahideen Islami Pattani (GMIP).
As a fellow Muslim, many took heart that
Sonthi's military-led government would move to
ease the spiraling conflict, which has so far
claimed more than 2,300 lives, mostly Thai
soldiers, officials, teachers and intelligence
operatives. Significantly, Sonthi failed to lift
the blanket immunity from prosecution Thai
security forces have operated under since Thaksin
enacted an emergency decree in 2005, meaning
aggrieved Thai Muslims still have no legal
recourse against security forces that abuse their
power.
Five months after the coup, it
seems instead that the Thai army under the CNS is
still pursuing a military rather than mediated
solution to the conflict. Sonthi's inability to
halt the violence notably gives the lie to earlier
academic theories [1] that military officials
loyal to the crown and disloyal to Thaksin had
first cynically provoked the violence to discredit
his administration as inept in its handling of
national-security issues. Since Thaksin's ouster,
the conflict has intensified, not subsided, in
several geographical areas.
As the CNS
focuses its main national-security attentions on
guarding against a possible backlash among Thaksin
supporters, Thailand's southern conflict has by
certain strategic assessments reached a crucial
tipping point. Until recently, insurgent groups
have operated exclusively embedded in Thai
villages, from where they have launched surprise
hit-and-run attacks while riding on motorcycles,
and under civilian cover planted remote-controlled
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against both
military and state targets.
Insurgents
have more recently taken total control of remote
areas in Narathiwat province where Thai soldiers
now reportedly don't dare to patrol, and the
separatists' aim of purging the ethnic-Malay
Muslim-majority region of ethnic-Thai Buddhists
appears to be gaining ground, judging by the
increasing number of abandoned rubber plantations
and Buddhist temples, on-the-ground observers say.
Moreover, there are growing indications
that the insurgents' technical capabilities are
improving, particularly through the use of more
powerful IEDs. As the death toll mounts,
government policies continue to alienate the local
population and military planners grapple with how
to respond, the conflict is fast morphing into
what some on-the-ground observers have started to
refer to as "Thailand's little Iraq".
Hobbled negotiations Entrenched
mistrust and a culture of anonymity among certain
crucial insurgent leaders have hobbled ongoing
behind-the-scenes mediation efforts, which
apparently are or least were advancing on
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