Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–September 2010, pp. 5–12
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One country, two conflicts: a simmering insurgency on the southern border, and several rounds of violent clashes in the capital city, a thousand kilometres away. But Thailand’s two conflicts may have more in common than meets the eye. Both reflect the unravelling of Siam’s nineteenth-century form of rule – the domination of royal Bangkok over the untamed hinterlands, and the substitution of internal colonialism for European empire.
The small Malay state of Patani, today wracked by insurgency, was formally incorporated into Siam only in 1909, and relations with Bangkok have been troubled ever since. During the 1960s and 1970s, separatist resistance to the Thai state was led by armed groups, especially the Patani United Liberation Organisation and Barasi Revolusi Nasional. In the early 1980s the government of Prem Tinsulanond successfully co-opted the Malay Muslim elite, including much of the separatist leadership, into a social compact that dramatically reduced levels of violence. But in the early years of the twenty-first century that compact began to unravel. A resurgence of violence was symbolised by a bold attack on an army base on 4 January 2004, and worse was to follow.1 To date, more than 4,200 people have died in what David Kilcullen argues is the world’s third most intensive insurgency after Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the world knows virtually nothing about it. The Thai government has done a wonderful job of talking down the conflict, but an expensive security response – including the deployment of around 40,000 troops from all over the country to the region – has failed to quell the violence.
After a dip in the number of incidents in 2007–08, serious attacks are on the rise, including the systematic targeting of vulnerable groups such as school teachers.3 Much of the violence is carried out by young militants aged around 17–25, known as juwae, who operate in small cells. After recruitment and training, these units function largely without direct orders in a shadowy, anonymous and extremely decentralised movement. Not all of the violence is committed by Muslims against Buddhists: as in Algeria and other civil conflicts, the militants expend considerable energies on disciplining their own side, targeting munafik, or those who collaborate with the ‘infidel’ Thai state. At the same time, government forces have engaged in the abuse, torture and even extra-judicial killing of Malay Muslims suspected of involvement in the insurgency.
Trained in conventional warfare and with little history of combat, the Royal Thai Army has struggled to respond effectively to the violence. Successive governments have tried to address the conflict through parallel talk of ‘reconciliation’ (samanachan), a term first popularised by the 2005–06 National Reconciliation Commission (chaired by former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun, with the distinguished physician and social activist Dr Prawase Wasi as vice-chair). Reconciliation is an essentially royalist construct, which starts from the premise that all Thais are bound together by a shared sense of identity predicated on the pillars of ‘nation, religion, King’. According to this thinking, the natural condition of Thais is to live in harmony ...
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Duncan McCargo is Professor of Southeast Asian Politics at the University of Leeds. His most recent book, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell, 2008), won the inaugural 2009 Bernard Schwartz Prize from the Asia Society of New York.
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