Published on June 27, 2005 - Credit should go to Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon for bringing up the ongoing violence in the three Malay-speaking southernmost provinces at the recently concluded Asia-Middle East Dialogue, which brought together academics and government officials from nearly 30 Muslim countries.

That Thailand was willing to discuss the topic that the country’s political leaders have insisted all along is a domestic issue suggests that Thailand is becoming more confident with its handling of the situation.

Three months ago, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra admitted publicly that the heavy-handed approach was not working and that the government would employ a softer approach to deal with the unrest in the Malay-speaking region. Violence only breeds violence, he said.

While civil society and the Muslim community welcomed the government’s change of heart, the government is still showing a willingness to grasp at oversimplified explanations rather than attempting to resolve some of the issue’s obvious complexity.

Like others in the government, Kantathi suggested that the ongoing violence was the work of a handful of mad mullahs bent on using religion to achieve some undefined political goal.

And like other officials, the foreign minister conveniently ignored the complexity of the long-standing problem of assimilation facing the ethnic Malays and the country as a whole.

No Muslims in the three southernmost provinces have complained about a lack of religious freedom. They have complained that their Islamic heritage and the proud history of the Pattani Sultanate are not being recognised.

The government should not take the resistance against assimilation personally, however. The South’s rejection of outside influences is not aimed at ethnic Thais alone. Arabs and Indian Muslim missionaries have been kept at bay by the local community and their tok kuru, or religious teachers, who have devoted much of their lives to preserving their own local Islamic heritage.

But after more than 650 deaths over the past 18 months, Thai government officials and policy planners still hang on to the idea that eventually the ethnic Malays in the deep South will be “Thai-ised” in the same manner as the ethnic Chinese, Lao, Mon and Khmer, etc.

It was assumed that pouring money into development and other community projects would be enough to win the hearts and minds of the local community, though this has not been the case.

The bombings and assassinations have continued unabated. To many locals, the state agencies that they so despise are just getting a taste of their own medicine.

For the record, not one group has come out publicly to claim that it is behind the spate of violence that erupted 18 months ago. All the available information about this generation of separatists has come mainly from insurgents who have been captured by security forces.

We are still far from achieving any sort of breakthrough in understanding the motivation and structure of the insurgency.

A manual found on the body of a participant in the disastrous April 28, 2004, raid on southern police posts and information gleaned from the interrogation of suspected insurgents suggest that this generation of insurgents is motivated mainly by revenge. And so they take up arms against the state.

Tok kuru and academics in Pattani have warned the government not to make the manual that surfaced after the April 28 attacks out to be more than what it is – an organisational pamphlet designed to arouse the hatred of the insurgents. What is most important is that there is no theology in it and so it cannot be considered a religious manuscript.

And yet government officials went out of their way to play up this manual as a “distorted Koran” and suggested that this was the source of the violence in the region.

The problem with oversimplifying the problems in the deep South is that doing so tends to turn many Muslims off, particularly the kind who would like to work with the state but are disgusted by the futility of the government’s efforts and the official refusal to think outside of the box.

An example of the sort of project that is putting off so many Muslims is the state’s official portrait of the model Muslim citizen, or “moderate”, as the government likes to say. The idea is to hold up a model for the country’s Muslims to emulate. This model isn’t catching on – no one wants to be seen as a “Muslim Uncle Tom”.

Muslim leaders have spoken out against the senseless killings and bombings that have taken place. What’s irritating to state officials is that these men have also spoken out against the state for its handling of the locals, especially the questionable tactics of the security agencies.

Unlike two decades ago, when the Malay separatist movement was at its peak, today’s security forces are facing a new generation of insurgents whose motivations aren’t always easy to grasp. The security forces’ heavy arms are meaningless when a roadside bomb goes off or an officer is shot point blank in broad daylight and no one sees a thing.

It is sad that no one has been able to produce a demographic breakdown of the new insurgency. No one can say for certain if the killers are common criminals, devout Muslims killing in the name of God or Malay nationalists looking to liberate Pattani from the invading Siamese.

One good thing for Thailand is that no one believes that the violence in the South is connected to the global jihad movement, though it is generally agreed that the resurgence of Islam worldwide has given the local movement a more religious flavour.

The desire to reduce the complex problems in the South down to the misuse of religion reflects poorly on the government’s will to get to the bottom of the root causes. What is needed is some serious soul-searching on the government’s part and a willingness to innovate and think creatively.

Don Pathan