THAILAND: Violence Pushes Country Deeper into ‘Anti-terror’ Drive

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 7 2004 (IPS) - By attending a just-finished meeting against terrorism, Thailand took another step in affirming that it has indeed gone from being a passive player to an active participant in the drive by governments across the region to combat this problem.

The Feb.4-5 meeting in the Indonesian resort island of Bali, where 202 people were killed following massive bomb attacks in October 2002, resolved to create a regional counter-terrorism mechanism in the Asia-Pacific region.

That would include law enforcement measures, legal frameworks and information sharing, according to the document endorsed by ministers from 25 countries in the meeting.

Governments also committed to help one another on transnational cases in an effort to ”bring known (or suspected) terrorists to justice.”

Thailand’s support for these measures comes in the wake of Bangkok throwing its weight behind the recently created Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) anti-terrorism control centre and its backing the U.S.-led ”war on terrorism” effort in the region.

”Thailand will stand to gain from the meeting’s commitments if it leads to the region’s early warning mechanism being strengthened, enabling Thai authorities to be alert to possible attacks,” Panitan Wattanayagorn, a national security expert at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, observed during an interview.

The openness with which the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is embracing these anti-terrorism measures stands in sharp contrast to way it and its predecessors had behaved previously on this security front.

During the first half of 2003, for instance, Bangkok maintained that the country had little reason to feel threatened by attacks like the Bali blasts.

But the August arrest in Thailand of the Indonesian Islamic scholar Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, shattered the image that Thailand was immune to activity by terrorist suspects. Hambali had been identified by the U.S. government as a leader of a Muslim group bent on spearheading a wave of terror in South-east Asia.

The attitude that Bangkok held till then was also reflected in Thailand’s position on a U.N. resolution for countries to take steps to prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts. The Thai government did not support this resolution, which was passed by the U.N. Security Council soon after the Sep. 11 attacks in the United States.

Senior Thai journalists like Kavi Chongkittavorn, assistant group editor of ‘The Nation’ newspaper, have argued that Bangkok projected a sense of being a passive player by turning a blind eye to militant groups in the region who used Thailand’s southern coast for gunrunning.

For instance, on the eve of the peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tiger rebels in September 2002, Kavi had written, ”(Thai authorities) have not given any serious thought to stopping these arms smuggling activities”.

”The prevailing feeling among officials is that as long as these arms shipments are not targeted at Thai people, they should be treated as ordinary arms (activities),” he had added.

But the four weeks leading up to this month’s meeting in Indonesia were dotted with grim details that offer a reason why Bangkok has taken a strident position against militants in the region.

Since Jan. 4, the Thaksin administration has been shaken by a spate of violence – some of it extremely brutal – across the largely Muslim provinces in the south.

Thursday’s shooting of a policeman by motorcycle gunmen in the southern Narathiwat province brought to 14 the number of people who have been killed by attackers.

The other victims include four soldiers who were killed when attackers raided an army camp in the south, three policemen who succumbed to subsequent attacks, and a government official.

But by far the most worrisome of murders – and one that was received with shock in this predominantly Buddhist country – was the gruesome killing of three Buddhist monks. The three robed clerics were hacked to death in late January in Narathiwat and Yala provinces.

The brutality of such attacks, coming in the midst of the destruction of 18 schools and two police checkpoints, has been singled out by some security experts as a marked shift in the nature of the violence that has erupted sporadically in the south since the early 1970s.

”The intensity and the nature of the attacks are new,” said Panitan. ”The targeting of innocent people was not the case before, where there were clashes of the conventional kind with troops.”

The religious tone the attacks have taken is also ”an attempt to destroy the equilibrium and good relationship that prevails in the south between Thai Muslims, Thai Buddhists and Thai Chinese,” said Panitan.

Even a long-serving Asian diplomat here drew attention to the new victims. ”If the murder of Buddhist monks is part of a pattern, then this conflict is bound to take a turn for the worse,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”It is going to be a challenge for the Thaksin government.”

Thai Muslims, too, are troubled. ”The Muslims in the south think they are being manipulated, because the idea of hurting Buddhist monks is something they condemn,” Arong Suthasana, chairman of the Institute of Islamic World Studies, a Bangkok-based think tank, told IPS.

”Muslims have been living with Buddhist people and Buddhist monks for decades in the south and no one thinks of hurting the monks,” added Arong, a Thai Muslim. ”The religious leaders have condemned it.”

That view, in fact, lends support to the government’s theory that this latest phase of violence can be the result of a non-Thai influence in the cultural milieu down south.

On Friday, Thai Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha was quoted in the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper as saying that ”separatists wreaking havoc in the Muslim-dominated southern border provinces may have received support from outside the country”.

Thai Muslims are this country’s largest minority, accounting for close to six million of the country’s 63 million people.

Armed clashes have occurred in Thailand’s south over the past three years, resulting in the deaths of over 50 government officials. But Muslim separatist groups have been around since 1971, often launching attacks against the armed forced or symbols of the state.

”Thailand can no more ignore this threat and the government’s presence at the Indonesia meeting is proof that it needs outside help if the need be,” the Asian diplomat said. ”It is clear that Thailand is finally feeling the heat.”