Malays Muslim ethnics Thaïs conflict and new war
Indonesia-mediated peace talks between the Thai government and representatives of the Muslim community in southern Thailand with a commitment to ending years of conflict that have claimed. about 3,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed, and tens of thousands wounded. The two sides pledged to resume negotiations the second round of negotiations would take place on Nov.1 and 2, and the third round in mid-Nov at the same location in Bogor, West Java, to find ways to meet the Muslim group's demands for justice, economic development and use of the Malay language in Thailand's three southernmost provinces -- Pattani, Narathiwat, and Yala -- while maintaining Thailand's territorial integrity. The Thai government sent five negotiators, headed by Gen. Khwanchart Klahan, the supreme commander of the Southern Border Provinces Peace Building Command (SBPPC), which oversees the country's southern provinces. The country's southern Muslims were represented by leaders of the Pattani Malay Consultative Congress (PMCC), an umbrella organization of insurgent groups in southern Thailand. Vice President Jusuf Kalla acted as the mediator during the closed meetings. University of Indonesia political expert Fachry Ali and Paramadina University political expert Anies Baswedan were also in attendance at the talks. Other notables included the Vice President's political advisers, Johermansyah Johan and Farid Hussein, and Indonesian Ambassador to Thailand M. Hatta. Demands by Thai Muslims include the introduction of Islamic law and making ethnic Pattani Malay (Yawi) a working language in the region, as well as the improvement of the local economy and education system. Previous negotiations, including that sponsored by the Malaysian government, failed to halt violence within the three provinces, because of a lack of trust between the parties, as well as the Thai government's failure to identify which groups or individuals it should talk to. An official close to the preparation of the meeting said Kalla wanted to apply methods used during the Aceh peace talks in 2005, in which Finland acted as the mediator. Thai Government policies towards the conflict caused tensions in bilateral relations with Malaysia and Indonesia several times. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) also expressed reservations about the Thai government’s handling of the violence in southern Thailand. The United Nations Human Rights Committee also raised questions over the actions of security forces in the South and the culture of impunity apparently surrounding them if the violence continues than a large scale war is going to happen in south East Asia seems to be American future agenda. The South has seen a growing polarization between the ethnic Malay Muslim population and Thai Buddhist communities, prompting concern that inters communal violence will escalate. The name comes from the former sultanate of Patani, which was founded in 1390 and annexed by Siam (Thailand’s historical name) in 1902. At the time of the annexation, Patani included the modern-day Thai provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala and parts of Songkhla along with neighbouring areas of Malaysia. The Malay spelling of Patani is used here to refer to the area currently affected by insurgency, whereas the Thai spelling, Pattani, is used to denote the province of that name the combined population of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces is approximately 1.8 million, of whom about 80 per cent are Malay Muslims. Many speak the Patani Malay dialect, known in Thai as Yawi. The Patani region accounts for more than 65 per cent of Thailand’s Muslim population. Although communities tend to be arranged along ethnic lines, the Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist cultures have been largely accommodating to each other until recently Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala are among the 20 poorest of the 76 provinces of Thailand and have some of the highest rates of poverty in the country. The use of—often unchecked—violence by the Thai security forces in the region over the years has created deep-seated resentment and fear of the Thai authorities among many Malay Muslims. Failure to address broad structural problems in the relationship between the southernmost provinces and rest of the country is also seen as one of the main reasons for the return to violence. In this view, today as for much of the past 50 years, it is the questions of education, employment in the public sector, language and economic development that lie at the root of conflict. Incidence of extreme poverty concentrated in a few districts. Some basic data on Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces The origins and motives of the Patani insurgency defy any simple explanation. Political, social and economic tensions—some linked with the last Thaksin government’s drive for economic liberalization—are certainly present, as witnessed by the fact that officials, monks and teachers as well as government security forces have been among the targets of attack. The violence in Patani also seems to reflect a resurgence of long-standing separatist sentiments and a rejection of the centralized Thai state, which motivated earlier conflict in the same region, particularly from the 1960s to the 1980s. However, on this occasion there is also clear evidence of the influence of Islamist groups and perhaps of the same type of jihadist ideologies as have motivated the choice of terrorist tactics and indiscriminate violence in other, better-known ongoing conflicts. Another parallel with the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, among others, is that the approaches chosen by the official authorities have not always been well judged to contain the violence. The ex Thaksin government’s espousal of many tenets of the US-led ‘global war on terrorism’ may have helped to destabilize conditions in the Patani region in the first place, and the increasing use of local militia against the rebels seen in recent months is hardly likely to soothe inflamed religious feelings .There is broad agreement that since the late 1960s Islam has experienced resurgence among Thailand’s Malay Muslim community. Although the broad thrust of this revival in Thailand has not been political, it has nonetheless become interwoven with the instability in the South. This close interrelationship may have played a role in changing conflict identities from ethno nationalism, which was at its peak from the late 1960s to the 1980s, to incorporate much more overt religious themes.Since the late 1970s the violence in Patani has increasingly been Characterized as between Buddhists and Muslims rather than between ethnic Thais and Malays. Nevertheless, just how far religion has replaced ethno-nationalism as the driving force of the insurgency is open to question. To an important degree the current religious tensions in the South have their origins in the 1940s, when the Thai Government altered its assimilation campaigns in the South in response to rising Malay nationalism connected to the anti-colonial movements of the time One of the aims of the Thai authorities over the next two decades was to weaken the identity links between the Malays of Thailand and those in Malaya (and subsequently Malaysia). The policies introduced for this purpose may inadvertently have served to emphasize the religious identity of the Malay Muslims of southern Thailand. To weaken these identity links, the Thai authorities—at that time still pursuing Phibulsongkhram’s pan-Thai agenda—needed to delicately balance measures to cultivate allegiance to the Thai nation with recognition of differences between Malay Muslims and ethnic Thais. The formula they developed was to bracket the Malay Muslims together with the country’s other Muslim communities as ‘Thai Muslims’. A number of reforms were introduced in order to encourage the Malay Muslims to cleave to this new identity, including the 1945 Patronage of Islam Act). Language and education were—and remain—key issues in the struggle over reshaping the identity of the Malay Muslims and from the 1940s on were closely connected to resolving the problem of participation. Most of the officials in Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala were Thais who spoke little Malay and it was believed that this did little to strengthen loyalty to the Thai state in Patani. In 1961 the prime minister, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, launched the Pondok Educational Improvement Programme. This introduced registration of pondoks and gave the Thai Government a degree of control over their curriculums. The pondoks had until then operated independently of the state education system. The policy was intended to ensure that pondok students received some secular education and Thai The conflict, what started out as a post- World War II secessionist struggle led by various groups of secular, ethnic, socialist and nationalist ideologues—albeit one that became much more self-consciously Islamic during the 1980s—has today had been transformed into an Islamic style insurgency against the conservative politics of Thailand’s Buddhist-dominated state. In the words of one analyst, ‘In many respects, separatist militants seem to have successfully grafted the concept of radical jihad onto the old, relatively secular, Malay nationalist independence struggle.’ This has taken place against the background of a revival of Islam in southern Thailand and the break-up of the traditional structures of authority in the Islamic community, presenting opportunities for radicals to offer new interpretations of Islam and to put forward strong views about Islam’s political position. As a result of this interpretation, the conflict in the Patani region is increasingly presented as a religious struggle between Muslims and Buddhists, particularly in media descriptions, which now tend to refer to the insurgents as Muslims rather than Malays.Violence has moved from the jungles into villages, towns and cities. The urbanization of the conflict has been accompanied by the use of small cells of militants (from 5 to 10 persons) rather than guerilla armies like those maintained by groups such as the Patani National Liberation Front (Barisan Nasional Pembebasan Patani, BNPP) and the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO) in the 1970s and 1980s. These cells are usually composed of religious young men, most of them in employment. The current lead organization of the insurgency, the Coordinate splinter group of the National Revolution Front (Barisan Revolusi Nasional–Coordinate, BRN-C,) reportedly uses as its main recruiter a student organization called Pemud(youth). More recently there have been reports that cells are spreading into villages, creating a broad network across the region and thus substantially strengthening the organization of the insurgency. According to the Royal Thai Police there were in mid-2006 around 3000 militants in around 500 cells operating under the BRN-C. However, it is thought that other militant cells operate outside the BRN-C structure. A recent report by Human Rights Watch indicates that Thai
authorities believe that well-trained insurgents have established cells in two-thirds of the 1574 villages across the southern border provinces, while there are now more than 7000 Pemuda members. During the 1970s and 1980s the separatist movement became increasingly involved with criminal activities, notably cross-border smuggling and narcotics trafficking in order to sustain the guerillas, leading to the coexistence of criminal groups and insurgents. The contemporary cells are, in contrast, financially autonomous, much cheaper to sustain than a standing guerilla army, and often largely funded by the insurgents themselves through regular and part-time employment—in many cases funding the insurgency is considered a religious obligation It appears that several factions are working together in a loose coalition. The BRN-C appears to function as the lead organization. The BRN-C was at the forefront of the revival of the separatist movement during the 1990s and it played a crucial role in reorienting this movement towards a more Islamist character. It is thought to have about 1000 members and to be led by schoolteachers and religious teachers. A cell-based group called Runda Kempulan Kecil (RKK) is often cited as being responsible for the majority of the insurgents’ terrorist attacks. The RKK is believed to be the armed wing of the BRN-C and to train its members in Indonesia—its name reportedly comes from the title of one of the training courses, meaning ‘small patrol unit’. Alongside the BRN-C, two lesser separatist groups, the PULO and the Patani Islamic Mujahidin Movement (Gerakan Mujahidin Islam Patani, GMIP), are reported to be active, as well as a number of smaller groups One observer estimates that some 15–20 per cent of the Buddhist population of the region has fled. Insurgents in some locations are also reported to have resurrected the practice of taxing dhimmi (non-Muslims living under the protection of Islamic law) in return for a degree of protection. There is considerable evidence, particularly from human rights groups, that the Thai military and police have been involved in violence against local Muslims By the late 1980s the Patani conflict was taking on a clearer Islamic character, as can be seen in the names of the insurgent groups formed at this time. Several leaders of the BNPP broke away in 1985 to form the United Mujahedin Front of Patani (Barisan Bersatu Mujahidin Patani, BBMP). In 1986 the BNPP renamed itself the Islamic Liberation Front of Patani (Barisan Islam Pembebasan Patani, BIPP). The Patani Islamic Mujahidin Movement was formed in 1995 by some of the roughly 2000 Thai Muslims who are thought to have fought as mujahedin in the war in Afghanistan. Further, the political liberalization that Thailand underwent in the 1980s and 1990s is reported to have led to the return of many Malay Muslims who fled to the Middle East during security crackdowns in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these returnees brought with them Salafist ideas that were then becoming popular in the Middle East. The insurgents had some success in trying to reframe the Patani conflict in terms of a religious war. As one scholar has noted, ‘The jihad became a focus of attraction, the solution for the Muslim community’s ills, and even one of the pillars of Islam.’ In this way, the integration of the idea of violent jihad as an obligation into the broader revival of Islam became a means to mobilize militants and support which was further strengthened by efforts to promote other key religious concepts, notably that of martyrdom
The Patani insurgency and international jihadism
While the increasingly religious orientation of the Patani insurgency has been, to a great extent, the result of developments within Thailand, a number of analysts have suggested that regional and international influences, notably Islamist networks, have played an important role in reigniting the insurgency and altering the character of the conflict.During the 1990s al-Qaeda saw South-East Asia as fertile ground for expansion and is reported to have built up terrorist networks in the region based largely on existing groups and grievances. It is a widely held view that, in this way, long-standing insurgencies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines became linked through cooperation between the regional group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and local organizations such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, the Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia (KMM) in Malaysia and groups in Aceh, particularly in Aceh province Patani insurgents are part of this regional cooperation and focus particularly on possible links with JI. The single strongest indicator of contacts between JI and groups in Thailand was the arrest of Hambali, JI’s operational chief and believed to be connected to al-Qaeda, along with his two lieutenants, Zubair Mohamad and Bashir bin Lap (Lillie), in central Thailand in 2003. However, the main reason for their presence in the country seems to have been to plan attacks against Western targets rather than build links to the southern
insurgency. There have also been reports of meetings involving JI and representatives from groups in Thailand. Currently, foreign militants are reported to be training insurgents, notably in Indonesia.It is also known that from the 1970s onwards there were frequent contacts between Patani insurgent groups and other armed groups around the world. It is also probable that significant numbers of Malay Muslims from southern Thailand have come into contact with foreign Islamists during travel to study in the Middle East and Pakistan. There is also reported to be growing interest in the conflict from Islamist radicals around the world. The emergence in southern Thailand of Wahhabi groups supported by organizations in Saudi Arabia has also led some to suggest that Wahhabism is major factor in the violence in southern Thailand. It seems likely that its importance has been exaggerated. As one observer notes, ‘a more sophisticated and contextualized appreciation of Wahhabism is required to understand fully its impact on Thai society, politics and insurgency. Wahhabism remains on the While the Patani insurgents are increasingly using the language of jihad to articulate their agenda, this agenda is different from those of international and regional jihadist groups. Perhaps most importantly, the aims of the insurgency are political and they seem to be focused on the specific local situation in Patani: ‘territorialisation of Islam in the local context’The governance of Thailand’s Muslim community also needs to be reconsidered. With the interpretation of Islam being contested in the country, Thailand lacks a credible and institutionalized religious authority that can command wide support in the South. The institution of the chularajamontri lacks broadbased legitimacy among the Malay Muslims, putting it in a weak position to resist the radicalization being promoted by Salafist groups. Attempts by the Thai authorities to counter radicalization by promoting the idea of a model ‘moderate’ Muslim citizen are failing because, in the words of one observer, ‘no one wants to be seen as a “Muslim Uncle Tom”’. The government may simply have to accept that finding representatives of the Islamic community who have genuine local support and legitimacy will involve working with Islamists whose views do not reflect traditional notions in Bangkok about what makes a moderate and loyal Muslim. Given the inherent difficulties in launching a peace process in southern Thailand and the even greater challenge of reaching agreement on the changes and compromises that are likely to be required from all sides if a permanent solution is to be found, third-party negotiation still seems to have a far greater chance of success than the current military-led initiatives. The experience of the Aceh peace agreement, at least in terms of the involvement of outside negotiators—the Crisis Management Initiative led by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari with the subsequent engagement of the European Union and members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to carry out the tasks of the Aceh Monitoring Mission—points to one possible approach. It is to be hoped that the Thai Government will come to accept that it needs to open the door to international
Mediation with great courage and give the basic right of malay Moslems and fulfill the demands of people by big heart.
Usman karim based in Lahore lmno25@hotmail.com