Drinking the Cool-Ade in Bangkok

By Zachary Abuza

Earlier this week, the head of Thailand’s police region 9 was quoted in the press as saying that the number of violent incidents in the first 6 months of 2006 compared with those of the first six months of 2005, had gone down from 300 to 200. I don’t know where he gets his data from or what he counts as “violent instances,” but its clear he’s not reading the papers.

The number of people in those two periods of time that were slain actually increased from 185 to 253, a 17% increase. Roughly 42/month or 1.4/day. I should note that my death toll figures tend to be very conservative: I only take down what is reported in the press, and not everything is, and second, many who are wounded and later die in hospitals are usually not noted in the papers. And even with my very conservative data, the trend is not good.

There were 172 people killed in assassinations in the first months of 2006 compared with 132 in the first half of 2005; 129 bombings in 2006 (including 74 small bombs in a period of 4 days) and 124 in 2005; 151 arson attacks in the first half of 2006 versus 124 in the first half of 2005.

To date more than 1,300 people have been killed since January 2004. While low in comparison with Iraq, this is not a small and inconsequential Islamist insurgency.

Although the Thai government says the situation has improved, the violence has reached the peak that it hit in May-June 2006. The insurgents’ ability to strike at will and in coordinated fashion has improved. On the one hand, the government claims they are making significant arrests, on the other, almost no one in leadership positions has been arrested and at the same time, the government has been forced to increase its estimate of the number of insurgents to some 3,000. Intelligence remains poor and inconclusive. The government continues to randomly target individuals in ways that alienate them and drive them into the arms of the insurgents.

The government has really offered nothing more than a military solution. And yet, we are unlikely to see any change of strategy or policies on the government at least until the 15 October elections. I think that one of the reasons for this is that the security forces have not been dying in significant numbers: only 45 or so soldiers and roughly 100 police have been killed. The vast majority are civilians (local headmen, teachers, civil servants, rubber tappers, etc). If the insurgents were better trained and skilled, and were ably to target the security forces more effectively you might see some changes in policies.

What is most galling is that the Prime Minister, err, the acting Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, believes he is no longer accountable. He recently refused to comment on the attacks, saying he was no longer in charge of policy in the South, now that overall policy had been delegated to General Sonthi. Yet, the insurgency erupted during his tenure.

The Thaksin government continues to refuse to acknowledge the fundamental religious overtones of this conflict, though it is clear that the insurgents are successfully imposing a harder line version of Islam in the region, and cowering the population into submission. To date, over 60 percent of civilian casualties at the hands of the insurgents have been fellow Muslims. This goes beyond simply killing assumed government informants; they are trying to impose a cultural hegemony over the population.

While the government continues to assert that this is purely a domestic insurgency, the recent arrest of an Indonesian (Sabri Amiruddin), and the assertion that the Indonesian-linked RKK is behind the attacks makes it clear that greater regional factors are at work.