Page 2 of 2 ASIA
HAND Point of no return for
southern Thailand By Shawn W
Crispin
shot at point-blank range,
and recent armed assaults on mosques and Islamic
schools, were more likely the dirty work of Thai
Rangers associated with paramilitary groups than
Muslim insurgent groups - as the government has
contended (see Arm thy neighbor, Asia
Times Online, May 11).
Human Rights Watch
contends in a recent report that on April 9 a
government-backed village defense volunteer unit
opened fire
without provocation on a
crowd of Muslim funeral-goers in Yala's Ban Nang
Sta district, resulting in the death of four
students and several injuries. The incident
followed the military-related paramilitary Unit
4202's opening fire on a civilian vehicle and
killing a 15-year-old student passenger in Yala's
main township.
"It looks like the policy
is kill enough people and hopefully the violence
will stop," said a representative with another
international group monitoring the situation.
Last week, top coup maker and army
commander General Sonthi Boonyaratklin approved
another increase of the number of militias active
in conflict areas. The move to arm and deploy more
paramilitary groups would appear to mark a sense
of official desperation. Historically, the Thai
military has deployed loosely regulated militias
to conduct its more controversial operations,
which because of their quasi-government status
gives the state a degree of plausible deniability
for abuses perpetrated by the units. [2]
The insurgents' hit-and-run tactics -
including the use of armed gunmen riding on the
back of motorcycles and the deployment of
remote-controlled improvised explosive devices -
have frustrated Thai troops who are trained more
for conventional than urban-based warfare. Some
security analysts believe recent militia abuses
are part of a deliberate government policy to
inflame local tensions and lure the shadowy
insurgent groups into the open to fight through
more conventional means.
One observer
claims that at least one paramilitary group has
vowed that for every insurgent attack committed
against state targets in the morning, they will
have avenged it by that evening. If true, that
would seem to indicate that the Thai military has
abandoned its earlier stated aim of trying to win
over local Muslim hearts and minds and is now more
overtly coming to the defense of the area's
threatened minority Buddhist population.
The army is now actively recruiting young
Buddhist men, including a conscious effort to sign
up those who have recently lost family members to
the region's violence, to join its paramilitary
forces. The military is also actively recruiting
local Muslims to join, though significantly with
considerable less success.
Thailand has a
long history of supplying and relying on armed
proxy groups to shore up national security and
provide intelligence on regional adversaries. That
includes the ethnic Mon in the 1800s who helped to
repel Burmese invaders, right-wing groups such as
the Khmer Serei in the 1950s to guard against
Phnom Penh's perceived territorial ambitions in
Thailand, and the Chinese Nationalists
(Kuomintang) in the 1960s and 1970s to counteract
the Beijing-backed Communist Party of Thailand.
The Communist Party of Malaya provided
Thai armed forces with invaluable intelligence on
the armed Muslim separatist groups that were
active in southern Thailand in the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. Now, the Thai military lacks an ethnic
proxy group to help counteract the new generation
of Muslim insurgents, which unlike their forebears
are situated under cover as civilians in villages
rather than as uniformed guerrillas in
jungle-covered redoubts.
The lack of
reliable intelligence, people closely tracking the
conflict say, has hobbled the military's
counterinsurgency strategy and wrong-footed Thai
soldiers. The military has recently stopped
patrolling certain border areas where insurgents
are active and scaled back plans to increase the
number of road checkpoints it maintains because
security personnel are reluctant to man the posts,
which have been especially prone to hit-and-run
attacks.
Meanwhile, the insurgents are
bidding for the first time to take total control
of large swaths of territory in Yala province, and
apart from using paramilitaries to swing back
wildly, the Thai military seems increasingly at a
loss over how best to respond.
Notes 1. The recent
insurgent assault on Betong would appear to be
both strategic and symbolic. The local government
had recently allocated a 164 million baht (US$5
million) budget to construct a model "sufficiency
economy" village, in line with King Bhumibol
Adulyadej's inward-looking economic concept. The
70-unit village is populated mainly by former
communist insurgents who laid down their arms in
the 1980s and now work nearby farms. 2. Rights
groups note that throughout Thai history, no
military officers or paramilitary members accused
of human-rights abuses have ever been convicted or
punished. That includes the present conflict,
notably the commander in charge of the April 2004
military siege of the Krue Se Mosque in Pattani
province that resulted in the military shooting to
death 32 lightly armed Muslims holed up in the
shrine.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia
Times Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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