Islam and the Near East in the Far East, Pages 32, 55

Thailand’s Southern Insurgency: Homegrown Problems—and Solution?

By John Gee

THE AFFAIRS of the far south of Thailand came to international attention only on April 28, 2004, when local militants were reported to have attacked symbols of Thai central government authority (chiefly the police) across the region. The radical imbalance in the casualties suffered by the two sides—especially given that the attackers ought to have had the advantage of surprise—seemed hard to credit at the time, except perhaps as the result of a devious provocation. Killed were 105 alleged militants, one civilian, and five security force members.

The most serious violence that day took place at the Kru-Ze Mosque in Pattani province. Militants took refuge there after a local police station had been attacked. Thai police and soldiers then surrounded the mosque and eventually took it by assault. Thirty-two alleged militants were killed, as well as three security force members. The mosque is the most revered in the region to local Muslims, who were appalled at the damage and bloodshed there. Militants had fired from inside the mosque, apparently with the intention of provoking an attack by the security forces, which duly responded.

Details of that day’s events cast some light on what is going on in southern Thailand. The mosque’s assailants did not think about how they might have brought the siege to a less damaging end: they saw suppressing the insurgents inside the mosque as a duty to be carried out quickly and decisively. A colonel commented, “If I agreed not to storm Kru-Ze, I’d be agreeing to give up our Thai land.” Nor was thought given to the desirability of conciliation with the majority of southern Thailand’s Muslim population.

On the other side, one reason the reported “Islamic militants” suffered such disproportionate casualties was that many believed themselves to be protected by spells or by “holy water” sprinkled on them by a religious teacher—hardly ideas consistent with them being zealous Islamist purists, though certainly consistent with long established Malay beliefs.

Duncan McCargo, professor of Southeast Asian politics at the UK’s University of Leeds, was dubious about the value of analyses of events in southern Thailand that relied on secondary sources, and decided to go there himself to try to gain a clearer understanding of what was happening. He investigated the events of April 28, 2004, and the outcome forms part of his thoughtful and carefully researched book, Tearing Apart the Land—Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (NUS Press, Singapore). It is a work to be commended both as a down-to-earth analysis of the conflict in southern Thailand and as a good example of research that proceeds from realities on the ground rather than beginning with a predetermined framework into which convenient facts are slotted and shoe-horned.

Not surprisingly, McCargo is scathingly critical of “terrorism specialists” such as Rohan Gunaratne and Zachary Abuza, who readily locate events in southern Thailand within a wider context of radical Islamic violence in Southeast Asia. That kind of approach has had serious consequences elsewhere in the world, notably in the Middle East, where Israel took advantage of Palestinian responses to its cozy relationship with Washington to paint the national conflict over Palestine as just one front in an international clash between the Western and Soviet blocs.

McCargo finds that the conflict was not contrived or triggered from the outside, but arose within Thailand itself. The status of the predominantly Malay Muslim southern provinces has not gone unquestioned since they were officially incorporated into Thailand in 1909, but it took the bungling and insensitive actions of the populist government of Thaksin Shinawatra to refuel a low-level insurgency and turn it into a war that has cost 3,800 people their lives since 2004. During his first term of office, from 2001-5, Thaksin dissolved the existing special administrative arrangements for the south and put the unpopular and distrusted police force in charge of security there, arousing discontent and weakening links between the central government and local Muslim Malays. He backed the security forces over the Kru-Ze assault and over the subsequent Tak Bai incident, when 78 demonstrators died after being loaded, one on top of another, into lorries for transportation to a military camp on Oct. 25, 2004 (see Jan./Feb. 2005 Washington Report, p. 36).

Thailand’s post-Thaksin governments have made small conciliatory gestures, but have scarcely budged on the basic issue of autonomy for the three southern provinces. Many Malay Muslims see that as an acceptable solution to the conflict, but both at the national political level and among the country’s Buddhist majority, there is a common perception that any concession to demands for autonomy will open the door to secession. Thus, the vital political element that could allow a peace settlement to be achieved is lacking.

Bankok’s actions in the south often read as textbook examples of how not to react to an insurgency: banishing officials and police who were regarded as incompetent, inefficient or undesirable in some other way to work in unpopular posts in the south, for example, or co-opting Malay Muslim political representatives so that they forfeited the respect of their voters—they were even expected to support the government stand on the Tak Bai incident. Accused militants were paraded on television without having been tried. Many who were arrested were coerced into confessing to involvement in rebel activity, but released by judges who found confession evidence alone insufficient for convictions. Nine different government agencies engage in intelligence gathering, with no systematic means of pooling and analyzing the information they collect, none of which comes from people within the heart of the insurgency.

Significantly, McCargo found that religious leaders who were identified with the rebel movement came mainly from a traditional local religious background. While much has been written about the alleged influence of Salafist currents emanating from Saudi Arabia on Islamist militancy worldwide, the religious leaders who were most identified with this outlook and who had spent time studying in the Arab world are generally not identified with the rebels.

When discussing intelligence, McCargo mentions that “[t]he Israelis were believed to have supplied the Thais with very sophisticated telephone surveillance technology for use in the south, but Thai operatives lacked either the patience or the Malay language skills to reap any benefit from this investment.” The Thai military possesses four unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles, also supplied by Israel, which have been used in the south, McCargo notes, “with no obvious direct boost to security effectiveness.”

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Southeast Asia, and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.