THAILAND: Muslim Leaders Take on Youth to Stem Southern Violence

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 13 2004 (IPS) - The leaders of Thailand’s Muslim minority have an emerging challenge before them in trying to stop their community’s youth from falling prey to an interpretation of Islam that advocates violence to seek political aims.

To achieve that goal, imams in mosques and Muslim academics will be drafted to serve in the frontlines of an awareness drive to thwart youth, belonging to the country’s Malay- Muslim minority, from mounting attacks in Thailand’s southern provinces.

”The ulema (religious teachers) will have to release the correct facts about Islam to the youth,” Niti Hassan, president of the Council of Muslim Organisations of Thailand, told IPS. ”We are worried about young people being attracted to the wrong teachings and interpretation of Islam.”

This effort follows a meeting of over 40 Muslim leaders held last week, in the capital, at the office of the spiritual leader of Thailand’s Islamic community, Sawasdi Sumalyasak.

What prompted such action is a 32-page book urging Malay- Muslims to fight for the creation of an independent state of Pattani in southern Thailand.

Translations of ‘The Fight for the Liberation of Pattani’ have revealed that the author has included verses from Islam’s holy book, the Quran, to urge Muslim youth to wage a violent jihad (holy war) against the ”occupiers” of the land and the ”enemies of God.”

The book appears in Yawi, a Malay dialect that uses the Arabic script. Yawi is the language of this Muslim minority as opposed to Thai, which is the mother tongue of the country’s Buddhist majority.

For Muslim leaders like Hassan or Ismail Ali, director of the college of Islamic Studies at the Prince of Songkhla University, in Pattani, both the arguments in the book and twists given to jihad go against the grain of the Quran.

”The book has many verses of the Quran, but they have been taken out of context and included to fit into the argument the author is trying to make about violence,” Ali explained in an interview with IPS.

”A young person unaware of the Quran’s correct teachings could be tempted to violence after reading this book,” he said.

What happened on Apr. 28 serves as a grim reminder of such a possibility.

On that day, scores of young Muslim men, armed mostly with knives, machetes and some guns launched a dawn raid on 10 police stations and security checkpoints in the provinces of Yala, Songkhla and Pattani.

The Muslim assailants appeared no match for the heavily armed Thai security forces, resulting in 108 attackers being killed as against five members of the government’s forces.

The bloodiest incident occurred at a historic mosque in Pattani, where 30 of the assailants were killed while taking refuge in the mosque and attempting to take on the heavily armed Thai troops.

‘The Fight for the Liberation of Pattani’ was found on the body of one of the assailants – making it the first concrete piece of evidence to offer some explanation behind the violence Thailand has witnessed since the beginning of this year.

”That was the first document made public to provide some idea as to who was possibly behind the violence in the south,” Panitan Wattanayagorn, a national security expert at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told IPS.

”But that is the tip of the iceberg,” he added. ”The authorities have recovered literature advocating violence from training camps that were raided in the south last year.”

On Jan. 4, Thailand woke up to the news of a daring raid on an army camp in the south, where substantial quantities of arms, including 380 M-16 rifles, were stolen. Since then, the southern provinces have experienced over 500 incidents of violence.

Among the victims have been soldiers, policemen, government officials, school teachers, Buddhist monks and an employee in a rubber estate.

Property has not been spared either, with attacks directed at schools, Buddhist temples, bars and government buildings.

For their part, Muslims have complained that they have been victims of abuse, too, including killings and people being disappeared. The police have been accused for creating this climate of fear even by members of the government, including Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng.

The growing concern in Thailand about violence in the predominantly Muslim provinces in the south – Yala, Songkhla, Pattani, Narathiwat and Satun – is understood in the wake of the relatively low scale of outbursts during the decade up to December 2003.

According to Panitan, the national security expert, there had been, on average, between 40 to 70 incidents a year since 1993.

”The lowest was in 1999 with only 14 incidents,” he said.

The region, however, has a much longer history of violence, due to the separatist struggles waged by Malay-Muslim militant groups such as the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO) to secede from Bangkok’s grip.

At the root of such a struggle, in addition to claims of being discriminated at the economic and educational levels, is the Malay-Muslim identity, which has been shaped by a history, culture and language that is distinct from the rest the country.

Over a century ago, the five southern provinces belonged to the kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.

The Malay-Muslim minority account for 2.3 million of Thailand’s 63 million population, the majority of whom are Buddhists. This South-east Asian country also has small pockets of Muslims that have come from southern China, South Asia and the Middle East.

Initially, the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was quick to dismiss theories that linked the surge of violence this year to separatist groups such as PULO. Thaksin opted, instead, to declare the violence as the work of bandits and criminal gangs but offered little proof to support that view.

But by the beginning of June, government leaders such as Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakula began to go public with the theory that the violence in the south could be the work of a new brand of Muslim extremists.

According to the Thai media, the discovery of ‘The Fight for the Liberation of Pattani’ was one of the major factors in bringing about this sea change in the government.

That book, whose author still remains unknown, also produced a similar shift in the minds of the country’s Muslim leaders. Their response this month to quashing its message was also an affirmation of the gulf that has emerged between the Islam practised by the elders of the community and sections of its youth.

”If the message of this book is not challenged, the good relations we have between the Muslims and the Buddhists in the south will be damaged,” said Ali, the Muslim academic. ”One of the ideas behind this book is to destroy this community link.”