Good Intention Is Not Necessarily Good Policy: Thai Opinion

[webfact]

EDITORIAL

Good intention is not necessarily good policy

By The Nation

In order to end the insurgency in the deep South, the Thai state must first understand how it is viewed by the Malay-Muslim people who live there

Deputy Prime Minister Kowit Wattana was lost for words after suspected militants set off two motorcycle and one car-bomb in the border town of Sungai Kolok in Narathiwat. He had thought the security situation in the deep South was improving.

Besides the blitz in the border town, this past week has seen a truck with five paramilitary rangers come under an ambush attack, and a police officer and a state defence volunteer shot at point blank range inside a mosque in Yala's Tambon Budi during last Friday's weekly prayer session.

The two Muslim officers were subordinates of the late Police Colonel Sompien Eksomya, the veteran officer who spent four decades posted in the deep South. He was killed by a roadside bomb in March 2010. Local Muslim villagers greeted - or celebrated, to be more accurate - his death by slaughtering about 100 goats. If Sompien's death tells us anything, it is that the perception gap of the conflict between the Malays in the deep South and the predominantly Buddhist society of the rest of Thailand is as wide as ever.

Like the other so-called "security tsar" before him, Kowit doesn't have the will or the courage to say that the root cause of the conflict is not about young Muslim men getting caught up in the "wrong history" or embracing a "distorted teaching of Islam". Few will dare to go near the issue of the historical grievances of the Malays towards the Thai or Siamese state.

Yes, abusive practices, torture and extrajudicial killings are problematic, but these are offshoots of a bigger problem - one that centeres on historical mistrust and grievances. Besides the failure to see the arrogance of the attitude - a Buddhist hierarchy telling Muslims that they are practising wrong Islam - what the Thai state should be doing is trying to understand the historical narrative that drives Malay-Muslims, generation after generation, to take up arms against the Thai state.

After they understand this, they need to find a comfort level with the Malays. If negotiating that peace with the Malays of the deep South means acknowledging that mistakes were made in the past, so be it. If it means admitting that the deep South was once a Malay homeland that was invaded and annexed by the Siamese, so be it.

But instead of exploring the issue of legitimacy, government after government stubbornly continues with the same outdated explanation. Never mind that the security officers and innocent civilians are being killed day after day.

One of the biggest mistakes of our policy-makers is to equate good intention with policy. Thai government officials and diplomats, especially when speaking to foreign governments, love to talk about the government's generosity towards the Malays, but say nothing about the culture of impunity - the extrajudicial killings and other forms of abuse by the security forces, or the fact that the money has done virtually nothing in terms of improving the social standing of the Malays or improving their livelihoods.

But after seven years of being attacked relentlessly by Malay-Muslim insurgents, one wonders how our security planners and diplomats can hold their heads up. Instead of going back to the drawing board and rethinking the approach to this conflict, successive Thai administrations continue to do the same things where previous administrations left off. Their emphasis may be slightly different, but fundamentally it's still a two-pronged strategy that centres on two agendas: a military operation aimed at crushing the insurgency, and massive development aid that actually does little to improve the well-being or status of the people whose hearts the state is trying to win over.

We don't seem to understand that all the money in the world won't change the nature of the conflict if the local people still see the state as an occupying force and themselves as colonial subjects.

We can kill all the militants operating on the ground, but sooner or later, as recent history has shown time and again, a new generation will surface and take up arms.

It's not too late to rethink this conflict. And instead of telling the world how ungrateful the Malays in the southernmost provinces have been to the Thai state, perhaps we should start asking them about their grievances and how they really feel - and base the solution on the answers received.

-- The Nation 2011-09-20

[pisico]

One of the very, very few OP in The Nation without the political agenda that is churned out to please the "usual suspects" in Faranglandia.

The assessment of the situation in Pattani (all the southern provinces annexed by Thailand of the former Malay Sultanate, Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat) is factual and sensible.

If published in Thai, the same OP will not be received warmly by the Thai population at large.

It is not part of the idiosyncrasy at any level of the Thai food chain to admit wrongdoing, much less publicly.

First and foremost in the agenda is the saving of face at all cost.

Recent history of events is full of such examples in which egregious behavior on the part of the government in commercial transactions, political decisions, hostile conflicts with their cousins, the Khmer, have never been acknowledge by Thais as errors in judgement or mistakes even when the International Courts have found the Thais at fault. Remember the ephemeral Suthep?

It boils down not only to Thai good, Farang bad.

It is always: Thai is right, others are not.

[whybother]

One of the very, very few OP in The Nation without the political agenda that is churned out to please the "usual suspects" in Faranglandia.

The assessment of the situation in Pattani (all the southern provinces annexed by Thailand of the former Malay Sultanate, Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat) is factual and sensible.

If published in Thai, the same OP will not be received warmly by the Thai population at large.

It is not part of the idiosyncrasy at any level of the Thai food chain to admit wrongdoing, much less publicly.

First and foremost in the agenda is the saving of face at all cost.

Recent history of events is full of such examples in which egregious behavior on the part of the government in commercial transactions, political decisions, hostile conflicts with their cousins, the Khmer, have never been acknowledge by Thais as errors in judgement or mistakes even when the International Courts have found the Thais at fault. Remember the ephemeral Suthep?

It boils down not only to Thai good, Farang bad.

It is always: Thai is right, others are not.

That's right. Praise the article for not having a political agenda ... and then bring out the political agenda.

How long have the problems in the south been going? When did it start getting worse?

Edited September 20, 2011 by whybother