THAILAND: Thaksin Chooses Softer Option for Troubled South

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 1 2005 (IPS) - Finally, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has found virtue in a softer and conciliatory approach to quell an escalating insurgency in the country’s predominantly Muslim provinces in the south.

He used a rare joint session of Thailand’s parliament and senate to unveil this new strategy, consequently marking a break from the hardline position he had advocated since the latest round of violence flared up in that restive region in January last year.

”Most of what had occurred did not warrant the use of heavy weapons,” the prime minister told 700 MPs and senators from both houses on Thursday, the second day of a historic debate to find a resolution to the violence in the south.

In opening the sessions on Wednesday, Thaksin urged lawmakers from across the political spectrum to place faith in ”compromise and abandon prejudices for the sake of reconciliation.”

The government will stress on preventive measures that are acceptable to the beleaguered Malay-Muslim minority in this predominantly Buddhist country in responding to the violence attributed to suspected Muslim separatists.

That would mean putting on hold the military operations of an estimated 35,000 Thai troops in the southern provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, which have been under martial law since last year.

”Defence Minister (General) Thammarak Isarangkura na Ayudhaya and Interior Minister (Police General) Chidchai Wannasathit would together work out a plan to remove troops from the frontline duties and re-assign them to development projects and safety protection,” the English-language daily ‘Bangkok Post’ reported on Friday.

This week’s joint session of lawmakers – the first since 1992, when Thailand’s last military regime gave way to the forces of democracy – was triggered by the high death toll in the provinces that share a border with Malaysia.

Close to 700 people have died due to the violence from attacks by largely unknown assailants against soldiers, the police, civil servants, village headmen, teachers and even Buddhist priests.

The deaths also included over 100 Muslim youth who died during bloody clashes with Thai troops in April last year, among whom were 32 Muslim militants who were gunned down by Thai troops while they took refuge in a historic mosque in the province of Pattani.

In October last year, 78 Malay-Muslim men and boys died due to suffocation in military custody following a protest of some 1,300 people in the southern town of Tak Bai. A further seven Muslims were shot dead by Thai troops while they were protesting.

Thaksin’s change of heart coincides with a move by the government to appoint a National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), a 48-member independent body comprising highly respected Muslim activists from the south, academics, parliamentarians, human rights advocates and government officials.

Foremost among the new commission’s goals is to lay the groundwork for peace-building measures in the violence-torn region.

”The situation is getting worse daily and the earlier methods of the government, using force, was not a success,” Fakruddin Boto, a senator from the Narathiwat province, told IPS. ”Those policies were oppressive and people lived in fear.”

He welcomed Bangkok’s latest stance, saying ”this is the last chance we have of finding a peaceful solution.” Yet he felt it premature to applaud, since he had to judge how the verbal assurances could translate into action.

To win the hearts of the Malay-Muslim minority, the Thaksin administration has even reached out for help from a renowned body of Muslim theologians in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country.

This week, the head of that group, Nahdlatul Ulema (NU), held meetings with religious leaders in southern Thailand to seek remedies for the continuing bloodshed. ”The military and security approach will not work, but a comprehensive way through economic and social justice will,” Hasyim Musadi, the leader of NU, which has a membership of some 40 million Islamic teachers, told reporters here at the end of his visit.

And in an appeal to end discrimination in the south, he urged Bangkok to ”place all the rights of the Thai people at the same level.”

The Malay-Muslim minority in southern Thailand make up about 2.3 million of this South- east Asian nations 64 million population. These Muslims, who also speak a different language than the Thai of the majority and have a different culture going back centuries, have complained of discrimination due to their ethnic distinction.

Complaints of economic deprivation, too, have been levelled against the Thai state, a fact borne out by Narathiwat having almost a third of its population below the poverty line.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Thailand’s south witnessed outbursts of separatist violence waged by groups who wanted to carve out a region that belonged to the kingdom of Pattani a century ago. The five southern provinces that were under the Pattani monarchy were annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.