It takes two to tango. Why the coup in Thailand may not lead to an improvement in the insurgency

By Zachary Abuza

One of the justifications for the Thai coup was Thaksin’s mishandling of the Southern insurgency, which has claimed some 1,700 lives in the past two-an-a-half years. The general chafed at the political interference of Thaksin and his deputy Chidchai, their rotations of generals, failed policies, and blatant dismissal of the National Reconciliation Council’s findings. People looked to General Sonthi, himself a Muslim, to solve the insurgency. With Sonthi there should be three steps to improving a dismal situation:

First, there will be more consistency in personnel and policies. Counter-insurgency takes time and will not be resolved when leaders are constantly shuffled.

Second, Sonthi will implement many of the findings of the National Reconciliation Commission. While they alone will not quell the insurgency, they will go a long way in improving relations with the restive Muslim majority in Thailand’s deep south. The Muslims severely mistrust the government, and without improved cooperation, human intelligence will remain abysmally poor.

Third, Sonthi has announced that he is willing to negotiate with insurgents. The problem here is that there is no one to negotiate with. Warring sides only negotiate only when there is nothing else to be gained by fighting. That is clearly not the case with the insurgents. There have been no meaningful arrests, their network is in tact, their technical proficiency and experience are improving by the day, they can attack at will, and the government’s policies continue to alienate the population. They have nothing to gain from negotiation. Only the old, exiled leaders of PULO, living abroad in Europe have expressed any interest in negotiating, though they control none of the insurgents. Offers to negotiate are simply leverage their exceptionally weak hand.

The empirical evidence bears this out. Though there were no attacks in the first two days after the coup, right now they are launching attacks at their pre-coup rate (which were some of the highest in the course of the insurgency). A review of some of the larger attacks in the week since 23 September:

• Four police were wounded in a bombing in Pattani
• A bomb placed in a Buddhist temple in Yala killed a soldier on guard
• A 10kg roadside IED in Narathiwat killed three including one soldier and severely wounded five others.
• In separate attacks, gunmen killed three in Yala and one in Pattani
• In one shooting, a 10Kg bomb was left, and set to go off when police came to investigate, though it was defused

In post-coup Bangkok, everyone expects changes in government policy towards the insurgency; and in that vain, assumed that it will lead to changes in the insurgent’s tactics and operations. What if in their analysis, nothing has changed: one set of elites has simply replaced another set of elites? And with everything going their way in the insurgency, what do they have to gain by stopping and negotiating?

In other news, the US government announced that they had imposed sanctions on the Council on Democratic Reform that will impact some $24 million in security and counter-terrorism assistance to Thailand. Thailand is a major non-Nato ally and diplomatic partner. It has played an important role in the US "war on terror" following the 11 September 2001 attacks, including the capture of Hambali in August 2003 and serving beriefly as a "black site" for the interrogation of some highlevel al Qaeda detainees.

TrackBack