Southern Discomfort: Thailand's Insurgency Enters Year Five

By Zachary Abuza

Narathiwat, Thailand. Friday, 4 January, marks the 4th anniversary of the start of the insurgency in Southern Thailand. To date, more than 2,700 people have been killed, 8,000 wounded. There have been more than 850 bombings, and many more failed or aborted bombings, including six bombs on New Year’s Eve in the border town of Sungai Golok, that wounded 32. There have been more than 600 arson attacks, including well over 250 schools. Militants have assassinated nearly 1,400 people. The death toll includes 133 soldiers, more than 150 police, nearly 1,300 civilians, roughly 70 teacher, five monks, 210 headmen/local officials, and more than 40 government officials and civil servants. Militants have beheaded more than 35 people, and there have been almost twice the number of attempted or botched attempted decapitations. The arson attacks on schools and murder of teachers has led to the shutdown of the education system in the deep south for months at a time. Buddhist communities have been cleansed from the countryside.

By June, at the peak of the violence, an average of five people a day were being killed, making the conflict in southern Thailand the single most lethal conflict in Southeast Asia. In late June, the Thai military, in response to attacks with larger IEDs that were killing a record number of Thai soldiers, launched its own “surge,” Operation Southern Protection, and has stepped up a more aggressive counter-insurgent campaign.

Without a doubt, the daily rate of killing has fallen by half. Yet the “surge” is problematic for two main reasons. First, rather than assigning troops from the 1st and 3rd Armies (which hail from different regions of Thailand) to augment 4th Army troops spread across the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani and Songkhla, the plan is to assign each army a province. Thus the newly deployed troops will have no local operating experience, network of contacts or any language skills. Even with the increase in the number of troops, they are barely visible in the south, confined to barracks and rarely out on patrol.

Second, the military has stepped up an aggressive campaign of arrests, roughly 2,000 in 2007, alone, but the violence continues. While some militants are clearly being detained, as evident in the decline in violence, mass arrests are usually counter-productive, and are fodder for the militants. Most of those arrested are released after 28 days due to insufficient evidence, often exacerbated by poor cooperation and intelligence sharing amongst the police and military. The insurgents often recruit those who are released. Few if any leaders have been detained in these sweeps.

Other problems involve the rampant use of poorly armed and trained, and often very ill disciplined paramilitary forces. They have appalling human rights records, often kill innocent civilians, but yet, their deaths are not a cause for alarm by the Thai Army brass, they are cannon fodder.

Yet the real problem in countering the insurgency has been the government’s unwillingness to confront the true nature of the militants. For years they were dismissed as drug dealers, criminals, doped up teenagers. August bodies such as the National Reconciliation Commission refused to label the militants as either secessionists or religiously motivated. The 19 September 2006 coup leader, general Sonthi Boonyaratglin, refused to see any religious ideology in the insurgency.

Analysts have often noted that no group has publicly claimed responsibility or stated their position or goals. They do, but in a very primitive manner: leaflets. The leaflets fall into several broad categories: threats to the Buddhist community, often to leave the region - either collective or individual; “Beware of harm” documents addressed to the Muslim community, outlining what they have to do to not get killed or in trouble with the militants; directives to village headmen; reportage of facts that reveal violence towards the Muslim community by security forces that go un-reported in the Buddhist-centric national media; and editorial cartoons. These leaflets routinely state their goal of establishing an independent Islamic state (Pattani Darulislam), their vehemently sectarian agenda, and their desire to establish Islamic institutions. But few bother to collect or analyze these leaflets, and few Thai officials take them seriously.

While analysts such as Peter Chalk, have noted that the insurgents have failed to get a broader base of support from the local population, such analysis ignores two key points. Of course they haven’t tried to win a broader base of support from the local community. They are Islamist militants, who seek to cleanse their community of shirk, bida, and murtad leaders who hold back the implementation of the sharia. Only then will the Muslim community be strong enough to take on the Thai state. To date over 55 percent of their victims have been fellow Muslims. They are more Islamist than their constituency and are systematically eliminating political rivals or moderates who seek accommodation with the Thai state. At the same time, they seek to destroy secular institutions and force people, often at great inconvenience, into parallel social networks that they control. They are not Maoist insurgents trying to establish a broad united front.

Second, despite the fact that the insurgents do not have mass support, neither does the Thai state. Their abusive policies, mass arrests, reliance on death squads, overt protection of Buddhists but not Muslims and overall failure to prevent the violence, has alienated the local population. They get little meaningful support from the local Muslim community that identifies itself first and foremost as Malays or Muslims than they do Thai. People in the south have little trust or faith in the Thai state.

And sadly, even with the restoration of democracy with last month’s elections, there is likely to be any change in the south. For one thing, the violence remains geographically contained, in the south, and the Bangkok-centric political elite cares little of what happens outside of the capital. During the election, no party made the south a prominent issue or came up with any new ideas or policies for ending the insurgency. Second, the south remains one of the two strongholds of the opposition Democrat Party (the other being Bangkok). With the likely government run by the People’s Power Party (PPP), the reincarnation of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai Party which was disbanded in May 2006, there is likely going to be much in the way of bipartisanship. The PPP’s victory in the polls was a humiliation for the military, which sought to invalidate Thaksin and the legacy of the Thai Rak Thai. The PPP has pledged to not punish the generals for the September 2006 coup, and will likely continue to let the military run its campaign in the south without much political interference.

The Thai insurgency remains the most violent conflict in the region, with no end in sight. It remains a low priority for Bangkok, the locus of inter-agency infighting, and an intelligence failure. The conflict clearly has the potential to grow both in scope and lethality as it enters year five.

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