Three Years after the January 2004 Raids, the Insurgency in Southern Thailand Is Building Momentum
By Zachary Abuza
On 4 January 2004, a group of armed men raided a Thai army camp. The group had planned the attack well and knew exactly where the camp’s armory was. They were equipped with acetylene torches and bolt cutters; in all they made off with more than 300 M-16s, small arms, ammunition and other weaponry. It is the date most commonly used to start the current manifestation of the insurgency in Thailand’s restive south, dominated by Muslim Malays. In actuality the insurgency began several years earlier, in 2001, but at a low enough level to be considered routine criminality.
The government of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra blamed the insurgency on drug addicts and criminals. Only a year earlier, he had declared that the Malay insurgency had been defeated and transferred authority for the deep south from the Army to his former colleagues in the Royal Thai Police (RTP). He dissolved the two key institutions that were responsible for maintaining law and order, providing governance and dispute adjudication. The police, notoriously corrupt in Thailand, were ill-equipped to deal with the south, more concerned with consolidating their authority over smuggling and local crime rackets. The army withheld their human intelligence network hoping that the police would fail in their mission; eager to muscle back in when martial law was instated in early-2004.
Insurgency is not new to southern Thailand, but the post-WWII generation of insurgents had been defeated by the mid-1990s through a variety of means: effective uses of amnesties, development projects, security cooperation with Malaysia, good counterinsurgency tactics, and the country’s vast economic growth. But the unrecognized reason was that the insurgents were so woefully divided over ideology, goals, and tactics that they could never cooperate. The Thai’s could defeat one splinter group at a time. What Thai security officials concede now is that Islamists were disgusted with the insurgency’s demise, and retreated to the mosques and madrassas, where the insurgency incubated for a decade. In early-2004, the Thai security forces were caught with their pants down. They rounded up the usual suspects of the previous generation, unaware that the insurgency was primarily being run by two groups they never considered threats: the Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Coordinasi (BRN-C) and their youth wing Pemuda, and the Gerakan Mujihidin Islamiya Pattani (GMIP). The government’s missteps in early-2004 further alienated them from the community. The attack on the 14th century Krue Se Mosque in which 33 militants had retreated and the Tak Bai massacre in October 2004, in which 78 unarmed protestors died of asphyxiation in the back of army lorries, led to a rapid decline in cooperation from amongst the Muslim community and open hostility towards government forces. Thaksin’s bullhorn diplomacy and allegations led to bilateral relations with Malaysia spiraling out of control.
What is new about the current conflict is the level and degree of violence, the Islamist agenda of the insurgents, and their unprecedented degree of cooperation and coordination. To date no group has taken any credit for attacks, nor have they publicly stated their goals or platform. The situation is not improving, and now entering its fourth year, there is a question of whether the Thai government can salvage anything. Right now, they are losing the south and 2007 will be a critical year.
My entire analysis of the current situation is in the attached Acrobat file.