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