Thai Authorities Struggle to Understand a Conflict They Have Been Fighting for Decades

A string of deadly standoffs with Malay rebels strains an already shaky peace process.

Monday, September 13, 2021 / BY: Don Pathan

In May 2021, Thai security forces were in a three-hour standoff with two Malay-Muslim separatist insurgents in a small remote village in the southernmost border province of Yala. As they stood their ground, the two combatants made video calls to family and friends to bid farewell. Someone began recording one of the calls on another cellphone. Soon, footage of the two men, who were killed in the operation, was circulating on social media. 

The video and outpouring of support jolted security officials whose stated goal is to win the hearts and minds of the local Malay Muslim population. The officials wanted to know if the two insurgents had deliberately pursued their own deaths as a publicity stunt and if the making of video calls would be the start of a new strategy in the conflict.

Days later, a similar situation arose in the Bacho district of Narathiwat province. Outnumbered and outgunned, four insurgents tried to fight their way out of a standoff with security forces. One escaped, one was killed and two were arrested. Then, in late June 2021, security forces surprised two insurgents in a pre-dawn raid on a seaside resort in Pattani province. Again, authorities attempted to convince the insurgents to surrender, using a village imam speaking through a loudspeaker, and again, the combatants opted to fight to the death.

 

Bullet holes pock a house in Krong Pinang, a village in southern Thailand’s Yala province, where two insurgents spent the last hours of their lives before being killed during a standoff with government forces three days earlier. (Photo by Don Pathan, May 7, 2021)

The Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), the separatist movement to which these insurgents belonged, resurfaced in mid-2001 after a decade of relative quiet in a historically contested region of southern Thailand where most of the two million residents identify as Malay and reject the government’s policy of assimilation. Although the BRN is negotiating peace with the Thai government and its powerful military wing is exploring “nonmilitary means” to advance its cause, this streak of deadly standoffs has strained an already tenuous peace process. While the BRN called a unilateral cease-fire in April 2020 in response to the health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a relentless Thai military operation eventually forced the combatants to once again take up arms.

A Homegrown Insurgency

Many in the Malay-Muslim community in southern Thailand have long considered self-determination to be a sacred value. Unlike the previous generation of Malay nationalists and guerillas, thousands of whom trained in the Middle East and North Africa during the 1980s, the current generation of insurgents is homegrown. Today’s fighters are quite pious — they observe religious practices, including fasting and praying five times a day. In death, they are buried as shahid, or martyrs, in line with Islamic tradition. But BRN leaders refute comparisons to extremists associated with the Islamic State group (ISIS), al-Qaida or Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).

BRN leaders also refute suggestions that their combatants planned attacks with the express intent to die. While these combatants are unwilling to be captured alive, death has never been the central part of their plan. Rather, their decisions to fight to the death are driven by their fear of abuse and exploitation at the hands of Thai security forces if captured alive. Thai officials often parade combatants who have surrendered before the media, branding them as having been “misled” by the rebels. Observers and relatives of the dead insurgents say the thought of being humiliated by state personnel helps make the choice of fighting to the death that much easier.

From the look of it, the Thai government will go to great lengths to deny the BRN legitimacy — be it through a relentless assault that forced the combatants to break their unilateral cease-fire to denying them their human dignity by forcing the surrendered to recant publicly or turn on their former comrades. What the government does not see, say residents in this region, is that such actions are counterproductive. “They may have killed two insurgents but their handling of the aftermath inadvertently strengthens the BRN’s popularity and recruitment,” said one resident in Krong Pinang district, the scene of the May gunfight, on the condition of anonymity.

Jihad in the Making?

Although the BRN maintains that the conflict is an ethno-nationalist struggle, there is always a concern that the insurgency will tap into the global jihadist movement in which religion becomes the banner of struggle. So far, transnational jihadist groups like JI, al-Qaida, and ISIS have not made inroads in southern Thailand. Nevertheless, the incursion of radicalism in the Mindanao region of the Philippines and the emergence of JI cells in various pockets of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the early 2000s are all cause for concern that outside radical ideas could penetrate Thailand as well.

The JI operatives behind the 2002 Bali bombings visited southern Thailand at the height of the movement to seek out potential partners in the region. While these JI cells — most of them were in Indonesia, some in Malaysia and at least one in Singapore, but none in Thailand — have largely been crushed, the global war on terrorism is still far from over. Although transnational jihadism has yet to take root in southern Thailand, fear that it could is not irrational, and a longstanding conflict such as the one involving the BRN creates opportunities for foreign and local jihadists to flourish.

The Prospects for Peace Are Bleak for Now

The conflict in southern Thailand is unlikely to be resolved militarily or via peaceful negotiations in the near future. The fluidity of the BRN’s chain of command makes it difficult for Thai security forces to penetrate and defeat the movement. Cells are organized somewhat independently, and decisions to attack are largely made at the cell level unless the operation requires coordination. These factors help explain why southern Thailand has continued to smolder despite 18 years of constant military presence and operations. Additionally, for much of the past two decades, Thailand has been embroiled in a political crisis that has hampered conflict resolution in the far south.

Although the BRN’s leadership finally agreed to come to the table in January 2020, the pace of peace talks has been slow. The BRN lacks cohesion — the movement’s military wing has expressed concerns about direct negotiations with the Thai government. This has put additional strain on the BRN negotiators to demonstrate that something good can come out of the process. Likewise, successive Thai governments and the military have never been united on a policy for the far south. Government negotiators are caught between the politics of the government of the day and the powerful military that launched two coups in 2006 and 2014. Furthermore, the Thai army has historically opposed negotiations with the separatists as they do not acknowledge the Malays’ grievances, and the government has opposed too much external involvement out of concern that mediation or foreign assistance to the BRN could enhance the rebels’ legitimacy.

Recommendations for How to Get to Peace

A growing number of policymakers suggest that it is time for Thailand to abandon its zero-sum mentality and permit outside help to build the capacity of negotiators on both sides of the conflict. The BRN is eager to work with international organizations and foreign governments as that would help enhance its legitimacy. Such engagement would also provide it opportunities to learn more about international norms, the Geneva Conventions and humanitarian law. However, there remains a question as to who could fill this role and to what extent the Thai government and army would accept outside involvement.

Malaysia is currently “facilitating” the peace talks, but Kuala Lumpur is more of a stakeholder in this conflict as the country shares a common and porous border with Thailand. Kuala Lumpur may respect Thailand’s territorial integrity but there is a great deal of sympathy for the Patani Malays from the Malaysian citizens. As the designated “facilitator,” Malaysia has to tread carefully, as an unexpected incident has the potential to sour bilateral relations. For example, BRN rebels attacked Thai troops, killing one, in early August 2021 in Tak Bai district on the banks of the Kolok River, which marks the official border between Thailand and Malaysia. The rebels were seen in CCTV footage crossing over from the Malaysian side of the river to carry out the attack.

The United States should be concerned about the potential for radicalism to arise in southern Thailand. Thailand’s position as a treaty ally of the United States and a major non-NATO ally makes it, and the Western hotels and embassies within it, a legitimate target in the eyes of global terrorists. The fact that there are many international organizations and countries in Southeast Asia with experience in countering violent extremism may provide an effective starting point for more international actors to offer assistance. 

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security analyst.

https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/09/thai-authorities-struggle-understand-conflict-they-have-been-fighting-decades 

Thailand: Could One of Asia’s Deadliest Conflicts Be Coming to an End?

After decades of conflict, the government and southern rebels take tentative steps toward peace.

Tuesday, September 7, 2021 / By: Don Pathan

Thailand’s southernmost region is home to one of Asia’s longest-running armed conflicts. A separatist movement that emerged in the 1960s sought to carve out the Muslim-majority region as an independent state. Levels of violence have oscillated over the course of the conflict, with the most recent insurgency arising in the early 2000s. Despite decades of protracted armed conflict, there is recent cause for optimism.

A growing number of officials are talking about the need to move beyond conflict management to conflicttransformation in order to focus on the root causes of the insurgency. Moreover, government and rebel peace negotiators as well as the Malaysian facilitators of the negotiations are exploring ways to move beyond confidence-building measures and take up more concrete, substantive issues.

The Roots of the Conflict

The conflict is deeply rooted in historical tensions and mistrust. This Malay-speaking region, known as Patani, came under Siam’s control in 1785, following its defeat. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Buddhist-majority Thailand (then Siam) has aggressively pursued a policy of assimilation, which Malays reject as an infringement on their cultural and religious identity. Many in this community hold that the region belongs to the Malay people and that the community has a moral obligation to liberate it from invading Siamese/Thai forces.

As international support for the insurgency, particularly from Arab countries, waned in the post-Cold War era, violence in the region fell. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, combatants put down their weapons and returned to their villages, while the movement’s leadership remained abroad, taking up asylum and citizenship in foreign countries. Thai policymakers wrongly assumed that the absence of violence meant peace had been attained. But the Malay cultural-historical narrative of liberation continued to persist in the region.

A new generation of fighters surfaced in mid-2001 with regular attacks on Thai security outposts. The insurgency shifted into high gear in January 2004 after dozens of combatants raided an army base and made off with more than 350 weapons. The incident prompted official acknowledgement from Bangkok of renewed insurgency in the region as Thai officials could no longer deny the political underpinning of the attacks. The government responded by sealing the border, placing several districts under curfew and deploying a large number of soldiers to the region. Since then, more than 7,000 people have died from insurgency-related violence.

Thailand’s Response to the Insurgency

Thailand’s counterinsurgency operation has involved a two-pronged approach of development and security. Both have failed to win hearts and minds as neither addresses the root causes of the insurgency. The conflict is essentially about rejecting Thailand’s policy of assimilation and the Patani Malays’ quest for independence. Militants on the ground continue to enjoy support from the Malay Muslim residents, particularly those living in remote villages. Over the years, successive Thai governments have quietly approached neighboring countries and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) to mediate the conflict. None successfully generated meaningful traction, as talks were mainly held with exiled former armed separatist leaders who no longer controlled the combatants on the ground.

As for the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), the armed group that controls virtually all of the combatants on the ground today, independence continues to be a sacred value and nonnegotiable goal. For years, the atmosphere was not conducive to peace, as neither side was willing to make concessions. As a country that has never been colonized, Thailand never seriously considered ceding territory over which it claims sovereignty. But in January 2020, nearly two decades after the arms heist that kicked off the current wave of the insurgency, the BRN and the Thai government decided to come to the table for talks facilitated by Malaysia. The two sides held two face-to-face meetings, focusing on technical issues, and exploring confidence-building measures. Then COVID-19 hit the region in March 2020 forcing the discussion online.

Rebels’ Leap of Faith

The peace initiative that was launched in January 2020 rests on a shaky foundation. The BRN’s powerful military wing is not convinced that the atmosphere is conducive for a formal negotiation. Moreover, it is also concerned that the movement will abandon its moral obligation to liberate the region. In late 2019, talk of a split in the BRN was rampant until a group of young political activists from The Patani, a political action group seeking self-determination in the region, convinced the BRN military wing to reconsider. Although critical of this latest peace initiative, the president of The Patani, Artef Sohko, feared that division of the movement would cause violence to escalate and risk greater harm to civilians. Artef urged the BRN’s leaders, and particularly the military wing, to take the moral high ground and explore new ideas to advance their cause, particularly through nonmilitary means. These suggestions led to two major announcements.

On February 19, 2020, representatives of the political and military councils of the BRN signed the “Deed of Commitment for the Protection of Children from the Effects of Armed Conflict” with Geneva Call, an INGO that works with armed groups around the world on rules of engagement and other humanitarian issues. In March 2020, the region became a hot spot of the COVID-19 pandemic when hundreds of people became infected after a group of Muslim missionaries returned from Malaysia and Indonesia with the disease. In response to a request from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres for a global cease-fire during the pandemic, the BRN in April 2020 announced a unilateral cease-fire to allow medical personnel and aid workers full access to the area to carry out humanitarian efforts to combat the pandemic.

While the BRN received some quiet praise from the international community for its overtures, the Thai army was not amused. Rather, the Thai army responded with serious force, sending out helicopters, drones and long-range reconnaissance patrols. It was a stern reminder to the BRN that nothing comes easily in this historically contested region. Moreover, the peace initiatives lacked the support of the then army chief Gen. Apirat Kongsompong who viewed the insurgents as nothing more than criminals.

Prospects for Peace

Though history suggests one should not bet on peace, there are reasons for optimism. Apirat retired last October, ushering in new leadership that appears to be more amenable to the peace negotiations. Additionally, the BRN’s military wing is exploring “nonmilitary means” to advance its cause. That does not mean the peace process is secure. The BRN’s military wing has yet to be convinced that there is much to be gained from the peace process, but it is willing to give the negotiators time to prove them wrong.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to derail peace efforts, negotiators from both parties were able to maintain momentum by adapting to an online forum. The platform has proven to be somewhat awkward for the BRN negotiators who would rather discuss sensitive issues, like the cease-fire during the recent Ramadan holy month, in a face-to-face setting. Artef warned that one should not expect too much from the BRN negotiators as they do not have significant influence over the combatants. They risk making themselves irrelevant if they do anything that antagonizes the military wing, he said.

BRN and Thai negotiators are currently at a crossroads, trying to transition from confidence-building measures to a forum in which more substantial issues can be discussed. The pandemic response presents an opportunity for cooperation, as both sides recognize the need to encourage residents, particularly the Malays, to sign up for vaccinations. Separately, a growing number of senior Thai government officials in and around the policy arena are starting to talk about the need to embrace conflict transformation, a peacebuilding theory that goes beyond conflict resolution and conflict management to focus on the underlying conditions that give rise to conflict in the first place.

Whether the current or future governments in Thailand will have the political will to explicitly identify the social structures and dynamics causing the conflict and be courageous enough to reshape them remains to be seen. But the fact that the two opposing sides are finally talking to one another, even on a shaky foundation, suggests that there is hope for peacebuilding initiatives in this restive region after all.

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security analyst.

https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/09/thailand-could-one-asias-deadliest-conflicts-be-coming-end 

Annual Threat Assessment from S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) 2001

Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses (CTTA) – Volume 13 Issue 01

A PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM RESEARCH (ICPVTR)

Kumar Ramakrishna, Unaesah Rahmah, Jasminder Singh S/O Bilveer Singh, Mahfuh Bin Haji Halimi, Nur Aziemah Azman, Kyler Ong, Don Pathan, Amin Saikal, Shanthie Mariet D’Souza

04 January 2021

Full Report: https://www.rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/icpvtr/counter-terrorist-trends-and-analyses-ctta-volume-13-issue-01/#.YKcp930zY1t 

(Page 40-45 for Southern Thailand conflict/insurgency)

THAILAND

Don Pathan

While a tentative but rare ceasefire announced at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic had briefly raised hopes for an enduring peace in Thailand’s insurgency- stricken deep south, Malay-Muslim militants and Thai security forces continued to engage in limited conflict for much of 2020. The Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN’s) signing of a “Deed of Commitment” with Geneva Call in March, in which it committed to protecting children in conflict in line with international human rights norms, was widely viewed as an attempt to raise the movement’s international profile. Yet, it has so far failed to put the country on a path to peace. The appointment of a new Army commander in October, following an annual military shuffle, could give the stalled peace process a new impetus. However, it remains unclear how the anti-regime protests, that have bedevilled the Thai capital Bangkok, could impact the government’s security response and, in turn, peace prospects for the slow-burn Southern Thailand conflict. 

Full Report: https://www.rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/icpvtr/counter-terrorist-trends-and-analyses-ctta-volume-13-issue-01/#.YKcp930zY1t 

Video of Insurgents’ Final Hours Strikes Chord in Thai Deep South

Don Pathan
BenarNews
Krong Pinang, Yala, Thailand

Time was running out for the two separatist fighters – and they knew it.

Bullet holes riddled the corrugated metal wall of the house where they hunkered down during their final hours.

In this photo taken on May 7, 2021, bullet holes pock a house in Krong Pinang, a village in southern Thailand’s Yala province, where two insurgents spent the last hours of their lives before being killed during a standoff with government forces three days earlier. (Don Pathan/BenarNews)

Dozens of Thai government security personnel had surrounded it after the men inside shot dead 27-year-old Nopparit Sukson, a member of the Thai paramilitary forces. His body lay meters away on a forested slope at the edge of Krong Pinang, a village in Yala, a province in Thailand’s troubled Deep South.

An imam had been called in to persuade the combatants to surrender; a third man had already done so. Soon after, he a military press release would quote him as saying that his two former compatriots had been involved with drugs.

The two men holed up in the house had decided not to surrender. Instead, they began making video calls.

Speaking casually, they asked friends and family members how their day went, as if this were a regular conversation instead of a farewell call, according to people who spoke to the pair, who were killed in a gunfight with Thai security forces on May 4.

Ilyas Wo’ka, 32, and Ridwan Cheksoh, 31, also asked for forgiveness, or ma-af, an important concept in Islam and a common request among friends and family, especially during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk.

They told people whom they telephoned not to worry about authorities tracing the call, because they would make sure to destroy their phones and SIM cards.

But someone began recording one of the calls on another cellphone.  Soon, footage of the two men was circulating on social media – albeit with no accompanying sound.

Different versions proliferated, with stirring music added in, along with captions like “the martyr’s last smile” and alleged final messages exhorting the “people of Patani” to keep fighting “the colonizers from Siam.”

In the footage, the men – one holding an AK-47 – appear remarkably calm, smiling and laughing, providing a rare glimpse of fugitive combatants that, to some viewers, was humanizing.

“It’s not easy for people who choose to take up arms, to walk down this path, taking into account the hardship, life on the run, and perhaps imprisonment or death,” reflected Nualnoi Thammasathien, a journalist in Pattani, another province in the Deep South, after viewing the footage.

After a three-hour standoff, the men were shot dead as they tried to make a run for it by dashing up the hill toward deeper woods.

The local community deemed them martyrs and buried them as such.

Hundreds of thousands of baht were donated to the families of the two men within the first three days after their funeral, village elders and relatives said.

Student activists and residents stop by Ilyas' home to provide moral support, May 7, 2021 (Don Pathan)

Well-wishers, averaging nearly 1,000 a day, strolled through the dead men’s homes. The house where the two positioned themselves during the standoff, and the sites where they were gunned down, also drew visitors.

“The display of moral support to combatants killed by security forces is nothing new,” said Sukriffee Lateh, president of PerMAS (The Federation of Patani Students and Youth). “It’s just that this video call that went public generated so much sympathy and support from the local residents.”

Local people were no longer afraid to show their feelings, said Sukriffee, who led a group of about 15 college students to visit the gravesites and the families of the two deceased men.

Local residents sit at Ilyas Wo’ka’s gravesite, May 7, 2021. [Don Pathan/BenarNews]

The video and open outpouring of support jolted security officials, who wanted to know if the two insurgents were deliberately pursuing their own deaths as a publicity stunt, and if this would be the start of something new in the conflict.

Meanwhile, local people were outraged when ISOC-4, the military’s regional command, linked the two slain insurgents to the brutal killing on April 28 of three members of a Buddhist family in the Sai Buri district of Pattani province. An ISOC-4 press release gave no evidence; neither man was listed in an arrest warrant related to the incident, the local people said.

Sources wouldn’t say plainly how long the men had been members of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), the highly secretive armed insurgent group and the largest among rebel organizations in the border region.

Both had been on the run for about two years, but would often slip back home to visit family.

Ilyas did drugs as a teenager and spent time in prison in his early 20s, but came out wanting to learn more about his people and the predicament of this region, friends and family said. He had a wife and three children – aged eight, five and three.

Ridwan taught tadeka, weekly classes where young children learn about Islam and the Malay identity. He was single, and tried to call his father to say goodbye. A young cousin who picked up the phone became hysterical when she realized his situation.

The footage of their final moments seemed to strike a chord in Thailand’s Malay-speaking far south, in a way that the official BRN spokesman – who issues a YouTube video statement once or twice a year – was unable to achieve in almost two decades.

“The message to the Melayu people was clear: keep on fighting for independence,” said Asmadee Bueheng, an executive member of The Patani, a local political action group advocating the right to self-determination for the people of this region.

“This is a challenge for the current crop of political activists who would like to see a political settlement with the Thai state through non-military means,” Asmadee added.

The next round of peace talks between the government and the BRN, had been tentatively slated for late May.

But on May 4, the day of the standoff at Krong Pinang, Malaysian facilitator Abdul Rahim Noor stated that the two sides could not agree on whether the next meeting should be held in person or virtually, and therefore it would be postponed.

Meanwhile, an informal video dispatch from the front lines gave unexpected resonance to what otherwise would have been just another killing in the low-grade separatist conflict that grinds on year after year.
___________________

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security analyst. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.

https://www.benarnews.org/english/commentaries/far-south-view/insurgents-thailand-deep-south-05142021140045.html

https://www.benarnews.org/thai/commentary/th-far-south-view-05142021220330.html (Thai)

https://web.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=107089054874560&id=106911808225618&_rdc=1&_rdr 

Deep South Peace Talks Could Resume in May

Commentary by Don Pathan
Bangkok

The first full-fledged peace talks in more than a year between Thailand and southern Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) rebels could take place as early as mid-May, according to sources from both sides – but a Ramadan ceasefire is not in the cards.

After technical-level talks in February between Bangkok’s Peace Dialogue Panel and BRN representatives, Thai negotiators suggested that both sides observe a ceasefire during the fasting month, which begins this week.

IED attack against Thai security forces in Rangae District, Narathiwat, May 2007. 
Phto by CHAIWAT PUMPUANG

But BRN’s delegates said negotiators prefer to talk about any truce when the two full delegations meet again face to face, a government source said.

Thai and BRN negotiators publicly launched their talks in Kuala Lumpur in January 2020, and met once more in early March of that year before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the negotiations. The two sides planned to resume talks in Malaysia’s Kedah state in November but had to call off the meeting because of a spike in COVID-19 cases then in the country.

Successive Thai governments have spent years trying to convince the leaders of the BRN, the armed separatist movement behind much of the violence in the Malay-speaking southern border region, to come to the negotiating table.

Eight years ago, for a brief moment, there was optimism all-around as the government of then-Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra launched a formal peace process. BRN sent a couple of representatives but their intension was to derail the process, which they succeeded in doing.

In January 2020, Thai negotiators got what they wanted all along – to come face to face with real BRN representatives, who brought with them a mandate from the Dewan Pimpinan Parti (DPP), the rebel group’s secretive ruling council of elders and its highest decision-making body.

On the surface, it seemed that the Thai side had made a breakthrough. But nothing is as it seems in Thailand’s far south.

Strains within BRN

Even today, the mandate BRN negotiators received from the ruling council rests on shaky ground, as the military wing has yet to rule out breaking away from the organization.

It has continued to question the logic and merit of coming to the negotiating table – after belatedly learning that preliminary peace talks had started in late 2019.

The talks began as a series of secret meetings in Indonesia and Germany between the two sides, from September to November 2019. The Malaysian facilitator and BRN’s military wing were kept in the dark about these meetings, which were facilitated by a European NGO.

BenarNews broke the story about the Berlin Initiative in mid-November 2019. Malaysia was upset and so was BRN’s military wing – to the point that they considered leaving the movement.

To patch things up with Malaysia, the Thai Peace Dialogue Panel and BRN negotiators came together in Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 20, 2020, to launch the current peace initiative, which was billed as a new beginning.

But fighters in the field became even more agitated when the so-called political wing told them that a series of secret meetings with the Thais were part of BRN’s diplomacy.

For the past 18 years, the current generation of fighters had been told that “liberating” Patani was a moral obligation.

More than 7,000 have died in violence since 2004, a majority of them Malays. Some were killed in gunfights with government security forces; others by insurgents who suspected them of spying for Thai security agencies.

Innocent bystanders have been caught up in the violence. Some were deliberately targeted as one side tried to rip into the hearts and soul of the other side. Activists on the ground – groups like The Patani and PerMAS – tried to bring some degree of civility to the conflict by promoting international norms and rules of engagement.

Among activists, talk of BRN splitting up is troublesome because of fear that the conflict could become more violent as a result, with the possibility of greater harm to civilians.

‘Non-military means’

In January 2020, the BRN signed a Deed of Commitment for the Protection of Children from the Effects of Armed Conflict with Geneva Call, an international NGO that works with armed non-state actors to promote rules of war.

Three months later, the BRN implemented a unilateral ceasefire to allow medical personnel and government officials a free hand to work in containing the COVID-19 outbreak in the far south.

Quiet praise from various quarters and members of the international community for these moves led BRN’s military wing to rethink its approach toward the armed struggle. In November 2020, the wing expressed interest in learning more about “non-military means” to advance their cause.

It is not clear how the Thai side will respond to this move. Many Thai government agencies, especially the army’s top brass, do not like the idea of BRN getting any sort of legitimacy and recognition, internationally or locally.

As for the peace process, the way ahead is not at all clear. Thailand is concerned that the BRN is not serious, and is using the platform of peace talks to buy time and gain international recognition.

BRN militants say they could make the same argument: Thai negotiators have a mandate to talk, but not to make any concessions. Discussions with the rebels under any government have never moved beyond the confidence-building stage.

The challenge for Thai negotiators is how to keep the talks going, to move beyond mere “shop talk,” without upsetting political and military leaders who never liked the idea of talking to the enemies in the first place.

As for the BRN’s elders and the small band of negotiators, justifying a return to the table – that is to say, convincing the military wing that something good will come out of all this – is getting harder by the day.

But as long as the rebels’ military wing is interested in exploring “non-military means” to advance their cause, then there’s hope that the peace process can last in its current shape and form.

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security analyst. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.

https://www.benarnews.org/english/commentaries/far-south-view/talks-possible-04122021135026.html

(Thai translation) https://www.benarnews.org/thai/commentary/th-deepsouth-commentary-04122021185537.html