Making sense of the muddle in the South

By Supalak Ganjanakhundee,  Don Pathan

Armed Forces supreme commander General Chaisit Shinawatra has never been so honest about his shortcomings.

In a recent interview on Radio Thailand, the military chief admitted candidly that one year after Muslim insurgents had decided to take their fight directly to the country’s security forces when they raided an Army battalion in Narathiwat, he still doesn’t know what they want.

Chaisit pointed to the ongoing upsurge of violence that over this past year has expanded from traditional targets – police and military officers – to innocent victims, including students and local villagers. Other “soft targets” – such as noodle shops, school buses and small eateries and street vendors – have also been caught up in the violence.

“I see no reason for them to attack innocent targets, nor do I understand what they hope to gain,” Chaisit said. “I don’t detect an ideology in any of this.”
One reason why Chaisit and government security planners cannot understand their adversaries, say analysts, is that they have failed to acknowledge the magnitude of the resentment of the local Muslim community in the Malay-speaking South towards the state. Likewise, they have failed to recognise the new political context in which the militants are working.

Unlike in previous decades – when separatists were positioned in remote hills and carried out their fight through the actions of conventional warfare – members of the new generation see themselves as holy warriors inspired by religion and fuelled by age-old anger towards the state. Their preferred method seems to be drive-by assassinations of security officials and their informants, though security officers have also blamed them for the recent spate of bomb attacks on restaurants frequented by government officials.

Despite the obvious changes in the style of the militants’ activities, the government has continued to respond in a very conventional manner. In the aftermath of the January raid, for example, the Thai-Malaysian border was sealed off and much of the three southernmost provinces were placed under martial law. About 4,000 troops were mobilised to the restive region with loosely defined rules of engagement permitting them to carry out search-and-destroy operations, and if necessary, shooting to kill. But one year later, these short-term measures have more or less become the norm. While the government boasts about its progress, security officials are still being assassinated on a daily basis, while innocent bystanders are quickly becoming the targets themselves.

Unable to come up with a new way of thinking and not knowing what to make of the bits and pieces of information they have obtained through interrogation and intelligence sources, security planners continue to deal with the violence the only way they know how – with brute force, as seen in the April stand-off at the Kru Se Mosque and the mass deaths during and after the Tak Bai incident last October.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s all-or-nothing attitude towards the problems in the Muslim South have placed Thailand in a bad light in the eyes of the international community, while locally the Tak Bai tragedy has pushed many resentful locals into the arms of the insurgents, said a former Barisan Revolusi Nasional member.

Internally, rivalries among security agencies have taken their toll on the overall efforts to bring peace and stability to the region. The latest humiliating episode ended in the transfer of assistant police chief Lt-General Wongkot Maneerin because he stated that the current structure had given the military too much power.

But disputes between the military and the police are only the tip of an iceberg, and such quarrels are seen as an integral part of Thailand’s bureaucracy because of its overlapping duties and unclear divisions of labour.

Indeed, just about every security agency and office has established some sort of presence in the Malay-speaking South, but their mandate and operating procedures are still very unclear, resulting in some serious loggerheads between individuals and their respective agencies.

Last year a report from the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) alleging that the police had been carrying out extrajudicial killings of Gerakan Mujahideen Islam Pattani members resulted in a group of police kicking down the door of the NIA office in Narathiwat.

Moreover, reports about the leader of the separatist Bersatu group, Wan Kadir Che Man, wanting to return to Thailand and work with the authorities on reconciliation have split the country’s top brass into two camps.

Aware that the Thais can be unforgiving in the face of any challenge to their notion of Thailand’s sovereignty and national identity, Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh has started lashing out at those who have supported the idea of Wan Kadir’s return. The issue has become so heavily politicised that it has had to be taken off the state’s agenda indefinitely to avoid further embarrassment.

Another cause of dispute within the intelligence community concerns a well-known Middle Eastern-trained cleric, Ismail Lutphi Japakiya, the rector of the Islamic College of Yala.
Certain sections of the intelligence community have gone out of their way to identify him as the Thai link to certain international terrorist organisations, while a number of Muslims and non-Muslims alike see his orthodox and puritanical outlook on Islam as promoting instability. Chavalit has repeatedly made public references equating Lutphi’s puritanical approach – commonly referred to as Wahabiism – to extremism.

Some feel that putting too much pressure on Lutphi could invite unwanted complaints from the governments of Muslim countries and mullahs in the Middle East, who have been very generous with his education projects in southern Thailand.

Regardless of the attempts by certain parties to single Lutphi out, the country’s political elite still seeks his endorsement for all kind of activities.

The cleric continues to lend his name to various organisations under the title of consultant or adviser to these organisations’ boards. The verdict, it seems, is still out on what kind of man Lutphi should be made out to be, as well as on whether the country’s security agencies will ever be able to sing to the same tune.