STOCKHOLM and BANGKOK - Whichever
political group takes power after Thailand's
forthcoming general election, they will find
themselves between a rock and a hard place in
tackling the country's most pressing internal
security problem: the Malay-Muslim insurgency
raging in the three southernmost provinces of
Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
Maintaining
the heavy-handed approach of former prime minister
Thaksin Shinawatra, and some say continued by the current
military-run administration,
would likely provoke a more violent backlash from
the insurgents, who could conceivably extend their
campaign to areas outside the deep south,
including up the southern coast to popular tourist
havens or even the capital, Bangkok.
But
any concessions made to the ethnic-Malay minority,
including provisions of more self-governance and
local autonomy, would likely not be popular with
the population at large, who are clearly opposed
to any deal that could be interpreted as a prelude
to the breakup of the Thai nation.
While
seemingly a no-win situation, there could be some
light at the end of the tunnel if a fledgling
peace process, which has been under way since
Thaksin was ousted in a military coup last
September, produces consensual results. Asia Times
Online has learned that some informal meetings
between Thai government officials and insurgent
representatives have taken place in Geneva,
Switzerland.
Both sides are reluctant to
talk details, even to acknowledge that such talks
have even taken place. In response to questions
submitted by e-mail, Kasturi Mahkota, chief of the
foreign affairs department of the Patani United
Liberation Organization (PULO), emphasized that
"most wars" are solved at "roundtable"
discussions, and that a political solution has to
be sought. PULO is believed to be one of the
dialogue partners represented in Geneva.
Bitter experiences Little
progress can be expected as long as three recent
events are left unaddressed: the military's
storming of the Krue Sae mosque in Pattani in
April 2004, which claimed dozens of Muslim lives;
the death by suffocation of 78 protesters in
overcrowded army trucks at Tak Bai in Narathiwat
in October of the same year; and the unresolved
disappearance of human-rights lawyer Somchai
Neelapaichit, a Muslim but not a southerner, who
was representing a group of accused insurgents who
claimed they had been tortured while in police
detention.
"There will never be peace in
the south if these cases are not solved," said
Kraisak Choonhavan, an outspoken former senator
and staunch defender of human rights in the south,
who now is a member of a newly established
committee investigating the spate of extrajudicial
killings that took place during Thaksin's
premiership.
Although most of those deaths
occurred during his government's controversial
"war on drugs" in 2003 - which claimed some 2,500
lives - many southerners were killed in his
lower-profile "war on dark influences" campaign.
However, it is not only Thailand's
security forces that are being accused of extreme
rights abuses. US lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW)
released last month a groundbreaking 102-page
report titled "No One is Safe: Insurgent Attacks
on Civilians in Thailand's Southern Border
Provinces", which catalogues atrocities committed
by both sides.
While security forces were
responsible for the deaths at Krue Sae and Tak Bai
- and assassinations and disappearances of
suspected militants - the insurgents have targeted
and killed schoolteachers, village chiefs and even
Buddhist rubber-plantation workers who were not
associated with local authorities or institutions.
HRW "found that separatist militants carried out
summary executions of civilians based on
ethnicity", insinuating that the insurgents have
launched a sort of ethnic-cleansing campaign in
the area.
"It's becoming like Sri Lanka,"
said Nitaya Wangpaiboon, a Muslim human-rights
lawyer based in the northern Thai city of Chiang
Mai. "People from one community are killing people
from the other."
PULO's Mahkota reached
out to the Thai authorities in an interview with
Asia Times Online on March 15 last year, when
Thaksin was still in power (see Peace stays far away in southern
Thailand). PULO would drop its demand
for independence in return for peace negotiations
to end the conflict - but Thaksin replied that his
government "had no policy to negotiate with
insurgents". He "would continue to arrest
separatist insurgents and turn up the heat on
them".
The current military-installed
civilian government, headed by former army
commander General Surayud Chulanont, pledged on
taking power to take a new, more peaceful approach
to the southern insurgency - hence, apparently,
the tentative talks in
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