POLITICS-THAILAND: Winning Hearts and Minds in Insurgent Country

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

NARATHIWAT, Apr 24 2006 (IPS) - When he pulls out his electric guitar to entertain visitors, Suriya Tawanachai offers a glimpse of the maverick in him. The instrument is shaped like an AK-47, the famous Russian-make assault rifle and its strap could do duty as a bandolier.

Yet, there is hardly anything menacing about this greying, bearded Thai Buddhist who moved to this southern town in February, last year, from his home in the tranquil terrain of northern Thailand. That decision and his mission here have also added to make him an oddity in this urban setting of narrow streets and low-rise cement and wood houses.

Suriya is in Narathiwat to sing songs of peace, compose new ones about the conflict here and build an image of a man who can be trusted by the suspected Malay-Muslim separatists who have been waging an over two-year battle with the Thai state. It is his way of weaning the separatists away from a life of violence and bringing them back into the mainstream.

”I am in the middle, between the soldiers and the police and the separatists. You must make them (the separatists) trust you first,” Suriya said on a recent morning by the side of a small house with wooden walls that he has converted to a ”gun-free” abode of peace. ”We try to connect with them or wait for their calls and then talk with them before offering any guarantees of safety.”

”We first bring the separatists here because they believe they cannot get caught,” added the 50-year-old, who was wearing a baseball cap, a black jacket, blue jeans and leather boots. The process that he follows often ends with a document signed by the police and the army that the separatists would be spared from arrest and an endorsement by the wanted man, witnessed by an imam (a Muslim prayer leader), that he would renounce violence.

And his success rate shows that this peace envoy’s formula – channelled through a network of nearly a thousand people, many of them local Muslims – has touched a chord with the separatists. ”I have brought back between 200 to 300 of them,” he says of the militants who, according to his records, have been involved in violence such as shootings, arson and robberies in the provinces on Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, which are close to the Thai-Malaysian border.

His prize catch, to date, is Masakree Dorloh, 43, whose name and face featured on ”wanted” posters of Malay-Muslim separatists that the Thai government was targeting in the three southern provinces. Masakree had a 500,000 baht (12,500 U.S. dollars) bounty on his head.

Part of this act included Suriya performing in a town in the northern Malaysian state of Kelantan, where Masakree was hiding, to woo him back. The songs for peace and telephone contact made with Masakree’s wife worked. Early this month, Masakree began a new career by opening a restaurant in the heart of Narathiwat.

”I came back because I missed my family,” said Masakree, a large man with an ample belly, who smoked as he talked near the kitchen of his new restaurant. ”I was worried about my safety, but Suriya assured me that I will not be arrested.” The government subsequently dropped the charges of terrorism against him due to lack of evidence.

Suriya’s inroads into the shadowy world of the Malay-Muslim separatists is gaining respect from both military circles and conflict-resolution experts committed to ending the bloodletting which has claimed 1,200 lives since January 2004.

”People must be encouraged to take such initiatives. If he is someone who can bring peace he must be welcome,” Gotham Arya, secretary-general of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), an independent body of experts set up by the Thai government early last year to help resolve the conflict, told IPS. ”His work is complementary to ours.”

The NRC is expected to offer a set of recommendations to the Thai government to be implemented in the southern provinces as a way of ending the bitterness. In an attempt to win the hearts of the Muslim minority in this predominantly Buddhist country, the government has also offered other sweetners. They include providing jobs to unemployed Malay youth, conducting a football tournament, installing cable television in the local tea shops and dropping paper birds – as symbols of peace – from the sky.

The current cycle of violence, pitting Thai forces against the, still-to-be-identified Malay-Muslim militants (no group has claimed responsibility for the regular attacks) is the latest phase in a conflict that goes back many decades.

The first year of the current phase, in 2004, saw 1,843 incidents of violence, ranging from acts of arson, attacks on military and police posts and shooting of civilians. In 2005, there were some 1,703 violent incidents.

Bangkok’s tough response, evident from the heavily armed soldiers that control the roads and by lanes here, and strengthened by an emergency decree that guarantees impunity to government troops, has led to excesses. But the incident that has left most bitterness among locals was the death due to suffocation of 78 Muslim boys and men in military custody in Tak Bai, a small town a short drive away from Narathiwat.

Siam, as Thailand was then known, annexed these three Muslim provinces in 1902 from the Muslim kingdom of Pattani. Since then the local Malay-Muslim population has had to put up with policies of discrimination that affected their culture, identity and religion. Economically, too, the people in Narathiwat believe they have a bad deal form Bangkok.

Suriya, the guitar-strumming peace envoy, knows very well that for his efforts to succeed, solutions to such broader problems need to be offered. But for the moment, he is committed to reaching out to the angry young men with his songs.

And he does not fear where he treads. ”I can go anywhere and I can connect with the people,” he says. ”You must know the full image, the entire story, like a jigsaw you must collect all the pieces, then you can work easily.”