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THAILAND: Coup Leader May Heal Rift With Malay-Muslims

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 27 2006 (IPS) - Even as he gives shape to a political agenda in the Thai capital, coup leader Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin has reason to worry about the troubled southern provinces along the Malaysian border.

A week after tanks rolled into Bangkok, ousting the government of prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the Malay-Muslim insurgency in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani shows little signs of abating. Since Sep.19, two civilians have been killed by gunfire, four policemen were shot at, two police stations and a military outpost stormed and a school set on fire, according to reports.

Such signs of violence-as-usual come despite the euphoria and the hopes that greeted the junta in Bangkok. A view expressed days after Thailand’s 18th coup was that Sonthi would be the ideal candidate to help usher in peace.

The main factor that fed such a belief was the fact that Sonthi himself is a follower of the Islamic faith in this predominantly Buddhist South-east Asian country and could quickly build rapport with Thailand’s largest religious minority that is concentrated in the violence-torn three southern provinces.

What was unsaid, but relevant, is that the conflict in the south – which has taken the form of an ethnic conflict between a heavily centralised Thai-Buddhist state and the Malay-Muslim minority – is not about religion. Rather, it stems from the southern minority having little space to openly practice their culture, including the use of their language Yawi, a Malay dialect.

The use of Yawi has been banned in public schools, has been stopped as a working language in the local bureaucracy and is not given space in the independent media.

Sonthi, is not a member of the Malay-Muslim community that has been living in that region for centuries. He belongs to one of the smaller pockets of Muslims that exist in central and northern Thailand and include Chinese Muslims, Indian Muslims and Cham Muslims from Cambodia.

Consequently, people IPS spoke to are not as sanguine about any immediate magic that the junta leader can wield in the south – although many welcomed the ouster of Thaksin.

”His being a Muslim is one thing, but what matters is if he has influence with the separatist groups in the area. I think he has little influence with them,” says Arafen Thaipratan, a medical doctor working with a group monitoring human rights violations in Yala, the Young Muslim Association of Thailand. ”So little has changed in our lives since the coup because we are still living under martial law.”

A Thai-Buddhist peace activist working in Narathiwat also struck a similar note of caution. ”We will have to wait to see what the new government’s policy to the south will be,” Souriya Tawanachai, of the Flowers and Paperbirds For Peace Foundation, told IPS. ”Things are still not clear.”

Where the 59-year-old Sonthi scores over Thaksin, rest on two statements he has made since being appointed Thailand’s first Muslim army chief last year. In late April, the soft-spoken general went on record to reveal a disturbing side of the southern conflict – that ‘blacklists’ were used by local authorities to arrest Malay-Muslim males suspected of being linked to the violence. Among them was a list with 300 names where ”people have been arrested and killed, many under questionable circumstances,” a Thai newspaper reported at the time.

In the weeks before the putsch, Sonthi, who was given complete control by Thaksin to quell the insurgency, made a public appeal for reconciliation. He called for talks with the Malay-Muslim insurgents – a request that was shot down by the Thaksin administration, which had labelled the militants as ”terrorists.”

”They are sufficient reasons to win trust, but Gen. Sonthi will have to do more to win greater acceptance, like saying that they will reinvestigate all the human rights abuses that have taken place,” Sunai Phasuk, Thai researcher for Human Rights Watch, the global rights lobby, told IPS. ”A conducive environment will also have to be created for the people in the south to share their grievances.”

The trust Malay-Muslims had towards the Thai army was shredded after two clashes in 2004. In April that year, local community leaders accused the army of using excessive force to attack Malay-Muslim militants who had taken refuge in a historic mosque in Pattani after an assault on security posts. Thirty-five militants were killed.

In October 2004, 78 Muslim boys and men died in military custody due to suffocation after being arrested for being part of a demonstration outside the police station in the southern town of Tak Bai. None of the three senior army officers who were found guilty of ”negligence” following an inquiry have been prosecuted or faced other disciplinary measures.

The on-going violence comes after relative lull of almost 10 years. Over 1,400 people have been killed, including civilians and government officials and troops, since it began in January 2004. On the Saturday night before the coup, militants struck a tourist area, detonating six bombs, which killed four people and injured dozens. The next night, militants burnt school buildings and a daycare centre and destroyed several vehicles.

The violence is rooted in decades of cultural and economic injustice the Malay-Muslims say they have been subject to after Siam, as Thailand was then known, annexed in 1902 the three southern provinces that had been part of the Muslim kingdom of Pattani. Separatist battles have been waged by Malay-Muslim rebels against the Thai state since the 1960s in reaction to Bangkok’s heavy-handed policies towards this minority.

Thaksin’s policies in the south following his first election victory in 2001 have been blamed for triggering the new round of conflict. ”He revamped the security in the south, which was under the command of the army, giving it to the police,” Prof. Thanet Aphornsuvan, at the history department of Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said in an IPS interview. ”The police are notorious for its corruption and abuse. It is beyond reform.”

And once the violence began, Thaksin’s response through tough security measures, including imposing martial law and an emergency decree, ”worsened the situation,” making it an ”us-verses-them conflict,” he added. ”The political space for the locals to air their concerns was also narrowed, because the sense of ‘Thainess’ under Thaksin was reduced to the religion and language of the majority.”

Peace in the south can be restored if the army ”opens up the definition of Thainess to accommodate the local language to participate in the national dialogue,” he stressed. ”What we want is to open up the box. Once there is openness, understanding will come.”