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THAILAND: Bombings Hit Peace Plans With Muslim Minority

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 15 2006 (IPS) - A spate of bomb attacks in Thailand’s troubled southern provinces on Thursday morning served up the first of many hurdles to a government blueprint for peace in the region.

A spate of bomb attacks in Thailand’s troubled southern provinces on Thursday morning served up the first of many hurdles to a government blueprint for peace in the region.

The nearly 40 explosions in police stations, government offices, checkpoints and at tea shops in the three predominantly Malay-Muslim provinces killed two people and wounded 16 others. More than 1,300 people have died in the current cycle of violence in Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, provinces close to the Malaysian border, since it erupted in January 2004.

”We don’t know who did it, whether they are real insurgents or not. But if the insurgents are behind this, then it is a challenge to the government,” Dr. Arafen Thaipratan, senior member of the Young Muslim Association of Thailand (YMAT), a community group working on human rights issues in Yala, told IPS. ”The insurgents are showing that they have the power to strike any time at government institutions.”

Interior Minister Air Chief Marshal Kongsak Wanthana blamed ‘’insurgents” for these acts of ”sabotage to create disturbances in the region,” the state-run Thai News Agency (TNA) reported Thursday. It is a line that Bangkok has used before – pointing a finger at suspected militants from the Malay-Muslim minority – but failed to prove conclusively.

The latest explosions came just as Thailand began debating the suggestions made in an eagerly awaited report by the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), a 48-member body of respected statesmen, parliamentarians, activists and academics, to solve the escalating violence in this predominantly Buddhist country.

”(The NRC) implies that so far too much emphasis has been placed on state security and the safety of the state personnel, and not enough attention has been focused on the security of people,” wrote Surin Pitsuwan, a former Thai foreign minister and a member of country’s Muslim minority, in Wednesday’s ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper. ”It is time to shift gears, otherwise the South will continue to burn.”

The NRC report is ”potentially a milestone in a long and now very ugly conflict,” said Chang Noi, a columnist in ‘The Nation’ newspaper, on Monday. ”The root causes lie in the lousy economy and the unjust treatment by the state … because the state has treated the far south as a cesspit in which to dump the worst officials in the nations.”

The 132-page report, which went through nine drafts, was the culmination of an initiative to study the root causes of violence in a region dominated by fear and distrust and suggest solutions. The NRC was set up in February last year by the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, currently heading a caretaker administration, and given the licence to pursue its task independently.

The NRC’s report called for the creation of an unarmed ”peace force” led by the army, but having in its ranks the police and civilians, and stressing dialogue between the government and Malay-Muslims involved in the insurgency. And rather than recommend autonomy for the three Malay provinces – which had been an issue that had dogged NRC since its inception – this body called for a new administrative centre and a development council to enable the southern communities manage some of their pressing concerns, such as managing natural resources.

The NRC did not sidestep the sensitive question of religious and cultural identity that has been at the heart of violence in the South going back decades. The Malay-Muslims – who speak Yawi, not the Thai language of the majority, and are adherents of Islam, not the Buddhism of most Thais – have long complained of discrimination due to the forced assimilation policies of Bangkok. It has meant the Muslims having to give up some traditions and being denied using their own Malay dialect in the school system.

The three southern provinces where Muslims make up over 80 percent of the population were once part of the Muslim Kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known. Since the 1940s, the Muslims have mounted resistance against the Thai state – including attacks by Muslim separatist groups in the 1970s – in a quest for autonomy.

To ease the bitterness rooted in history, the NRC wants the mother-tongue of the Malay-Muslims declared a working language, including use in official situations, permit the introduction of Shariah, a code of laws specific to Muslims, and promote respect and diversity of the area’s unique culture.

”This is an important step to deal with the South. There has always been concern about a nationalist backlash and it has been avoided,” Chris Baker, a British academic who has authored many books on Thai politics, said in an IPS interview. ” The multi-cultural debate cannot be ignored.”

Shortly after the report was released last week, a leading Muslim member on the commission told reporters that the violence – where over 3,000 attacks on civilians and property have been recorded in all of 2004 and 2005 – has resulted in the close relationships between the local Muslim and Buddhist communities coming apart.

The attack on Jooling Pankamnoon, a 24-year-old Thai-Buddhist school teacher who was beaten unconsciously by Muslim villagers angry at recent arrests by the police, was an example of this emerging ethnic divide, said Chaiwat Satha-Anand, the NRC’s research director and an academic in peace studies at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. Jooling has been in a coma since being set upon on May 1 in a Narathiwat village.

”Apart from a failed state, you are looking at failed communities- to protect itself,” said Chaiwat. ”This erosion of relationship between the Buddhists and the Muslims is serious.”