Page 1 of 2 BOOK REVIEW Light on a dark conflict Tearing Apart the Land by Duncan McCargo
Reviewed by Jason Johnson
PATTANI - The violence in Thailand's ethnic Malay Muslim-dominated southern
border provinces, now into its sixth year, has caused the deaths of some 3,300
people. Although the insurgency's lack of a declared leadership and political
demands have obstructed a clear understanding of the causes of the
unprecedented levels of violence, scholars and analysts must also shoulder some
of the blame.
Academics, journalists, human-rights activists and terrorism experts have all
relied extensively on Thai academics, security officials and various
second-hand sources for accounts of the conflict. Many have spent short stints
in the violence-hit provinces
of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, but few have spent extended time in this
region that has had a long and turbulent history since Siam, present-day
Thailand, incorporated the Malay Kingdom of Patani and other areas into the
Thai state in 1902.
Duncan McCargo's recently released book, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and
Legitimacy in Southern Thailand, thus marks a major breakthrough on the
topic. At the height of the violence, the prominent Thai studies scholar
resided in the town of Pattani for a year and regularly traveled to some of the
region's most violence-prone areas, acquiring on-the-ground insight into the
local dynamics of Southeast Asia's most perplexing conflict.
As the violence has occurred alongside the United States' "war on terror", many
journalists and policy oriented security analysts have been quick to question
and speculate the extent to which "fundamentalist" strands of Islam or
international Islamic terrorist networks have penetrated the region, once
dubbed Southeast Asia's "cradle of Islam", and influenced Thailand's Malay
Muslim insurgents.
McCargo contends that reformist forms of Islam, brought back by some Malay
Muslims through associational activities in the Middle East and South Asia,
have not been associated with the insurgents. Instead, he argues, the form of
Islam associated with the Malay Muslim separatist movement is largely Malay and
rural in character. Reformist movements such as Salafism, which seeks to return
to a purer form of Islam and sometimes carries anti-Western connotations, have
either been slowly and partially accepted or flat-out rejected by most rural
Malay Muslims, contributing to divisions between old- and new-school Islamists.
Divisions within the Muslim community are at the heart of McCargo's main
argument. By and large, he contends those lines have not been drawn from
differences in Islamic faith, but rather from local Malay Muslim elites'
collaboration with the Thai state. Focusing specifically on the period from the
1980s onwards, the author argues successive Thai governments' attempts to
co-opt and control former Malay Muslim separatists and other political and
religious elites through a range of representative and bureaucratic bodies
failed to even move beyond securing the allegiance of the elite.
By collaborating with a Thai state that has never acquired full legitimacy in
the region, the Malay Muslim political and religious elite have often alienated
ordinary people. Leading religious figures who had long been highly regarded in
their local communities for their Islamic knowledge have lost that moral
authority by becoming political entrepreneurs for the Thai state, while local
politicians have enriched themselves at their constituents' expense. Moreover,
the middle class has increasingly adopted the official Thai language, thereby
denigrating the local Malay language and, by extension, the legitimacy of Malay
Muslim identity.
McCargo, for over a decade the most prolific foreign scholar of Thailand's
politics, cleverly categorizes Bangkok's two modes of political control for the
Malay Muslim elite: network monarchy and representative politics. From 1980 to
1988, Thailand's politics were dominated by network monarchy, a heuristic term
McCargo initially coined in his 2005 book The Thaksinization of Thailand
to describe the royally backed bureaucratic power arrangements that had
dominated Thailand's form of governance until challenged by the arrival in 2001
of telecommunications tycoon-turned prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond, a loyalist to the crown and now
chairman of the monarchy's Privy Council, established in 1981 the Southern
Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC), ushering in a new era of
institutional foundations that McCargo fittingly describes as Thai "virtuous
style rule". Largely mediated by Prem and the SBPAC, the Thai state brokered a
"social compact" with the Malay Muslim elite, successfully compelling them to
rein in separatist violence in exchange for political and material rewards.
For instance, owners of traditional Islamic pondok schools - long viewed
by the Thai state as the bastions of Malay Muslim nationalism - increasingly
collaborated with central authorities by transforming their schools into
state-accredited private Islamic schools offering both religious and secular
education through the medium of the official Thai language. In doing so, these
owners not only eroded the Malay Muslim identity but also accumulated enormous
wealth through their ties with the state, thereby losing their moral authority
in the eyes of religious teachers at these schools and others.
Although McCargo contends that the alienation of ordinary, particularly rural,
Muslim Malays in the region had been quietly brewing for some time, it was
severely exacerbated under Thaksin's administration and his Thai Rak Thai
party. In an apparent effort to marginalize the power of the network monarchy,
Thaksin in 2002 removed those who had managed security in the region for two
decades by dissolving the SPBAC and removing the Fourth Army Region. The latter
was replaced with a group of Bangkok police who were given carte blanche to
find and eliminate separatists.
Insurgents responded in 2004 by staging three major incidents that led to the
killings of over 200 Malay Muslims by Thailand's armed forces, generating new
waves of Malay Muslim resentment towards the Thai state. The Wadah faction, a
group of Malay Muslim politicians that had dominated the far south's
parliamentary seats for almost two decades, were representatives in Thaksin's
government and lost all legitimacy from the standpoint of local Malay Muslims.
Insurgents quickly moved in to capitalize, and calls for substantial political
reforms quickly ensued.
McCargo, like other analysts, does not shed much new light in terms of the role
of older generation separatist groups. In analyzing the tragic events of April
28, 2004, when at least 105 militants were killed following simultaneous
attacks on various security checkpoints, the author surmises that even though
some raid leaders expressed an affinity with the older separatist group Barasi
Revolusi Nasional, the leader of these militants, Ustadz Soh, did not. Based on
this, as well as the clandestine nature of the insurgents' activities and
organization, McCargo concludes that the movement operates as a network without
a core.
The author does not prioritize the role of Thailand's security forces in giving
rise to the violence, but his chapter on security succinctly overviews the
mishaps of the Thai state's forces. The implementation of the 2005 Emergency
Decree, for instance, has granted security forces immunity from prosecution,
contributing to frequent human-rights abuses that have already been
meticulously documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the
International Crisis Group.
Meanwhile, the numerous local militias created by the government have been
poorly trained and equipped - and all too often poorly disciplined - further
disaffecting locals. Peace-building camps that proselytize the virtues of the
Thai nation-state to suspected insurgents have been utterly hopeless and few
militants have even been prosecuted. McCargo also wryly observes the disturbing
and simplistic tendency of the security forces' top brass to categorize Malay
Muslims as either "good people" or "bad people".
But while McCargo astutely documents and analyzes the inadequacies of the
security forces and more broadly the Thai state, he perhaps unwittingly drifts
toward a sympathetic portrayal of Malay Muslim nationalists, even in places
adopting his informants' language as his own categories of analysis. For
instance, he frequently uses the term "sell-out" to describe the region's
political and religious elite, but softens his blow for insurgents by
describing one group as "unassuming" (p IX) and insurgents in general as
"well-regarded" (p 149) in their local communities.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
Duncan McCargo's recently released book, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and
Legitimacy in Southern Thailand, thus marks a major breakthrough on the
topic. At the height of the violence, the prominent Thai studies scholar
resided in the town of Pattani for a year and regularly traveled to some of the
region's most violence-prone areas, acquiring on-the-ground insight into the
local dynamics of Southeast Asia's most perplexing conflict.
