Change In Mindset: Thai Opinion

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EDITORIAL

Change in mindset

The Nation

Needed in Bangkok to deel with South

More spending on security will not get the desired results unless government aims to resolve roots of the conflict

This past week, Thailand's southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat went through some scary moments as insurgents rocked various areas with grenade and roadside bomb attacks and machine-gun fire.

The spate of attacks forced the police to beef up security during the New Year holiday season. In real terms, it will just mean more checkpoints and more uniformed security details out on the streets. Most of them will be just standing there looking and directing traffic or chatting with their colleagues. Seemingly, the security details are just going through the motion, killing time, waiting for the next shift to relieve them.

Nobody seems to know when an insurgency attack will happen and the possibility of it being in their immediate area of responsibility. So everybody goes about their daily lives as if everything is normal. It is hard to think or act otherwise because the region is not besieged. Life goes on in spite of the fact that nearly 5,000 people have been killed since January 2004.

There does not seem to be any real incentive for the security and policy planners to come up with something bold and visionary. No one seems to want to rush to the scene, say soldiers on the front line, because they are afraid of the follow-up bomb, normally bigger than the one that lures them to the scene.

Many soldiers dispatched to the region and posted in the remote outposts said they have learnt not to expect much from the locally hired security details. They are from the region and so are their family. The insurgents are willing to tolerate their locally hired security details as long as they don't openly confront them.

Indeed, no one could expect people to put their lives on the line for the state for a few thousand baht a month. Moreover, inter-agency rivalries continue to plague the working of security details in the region.

This is the sad reality of Thailand's southernmost provinces which is plagued by a deadly insurgency. Besides, no one really works together; local Malay-Muslim residents do very little in terms of helping the military and the police in hunting down the insurgents.

In Bangkok, political leaders always put on a brave face, insisting that there is unity among all the government agencies. It would be unthinkable politically to say otherwise.

But that is our problem. Our policy planners cannot seem to think or say otherwise because they are afraid that they will lose some of their political capital.

And so they continue with what they have on hand - an emergency law that has failed to curb the violence but tends to add more to the locals' anxiety because of the leeway the law grants the security officials.

During the Communist insurgency, Thai national leaders eventually understood that they have to employ "non-military" means to end the conflict once and for all. That was three decades ago. The Thai Communists were able to reintegrate back into society because they were essentially Thai people.

Malay separatists, whose armed movement went under about the same time as the Communist did, never ceased to be Malays. In other words, Patani Malay separatism as an ideology never really went away. In the 1990s, a new generation of Malay-Muslims was being groomed from where the previous generation had left off. Today, we are seeing what they are made out of.

Before we even talk about a solution to this conflict, we must first acknowledge the ethno-nationalist nature of the separatists. It is too easy to brand them as misguided youth embracing the false teachings of Islam and taught "wrong history".

If we cannot see them for who they really are - ethnic Malays with a different set of dreams, identity, myth, cultural and historical narrative from that of the rest of the Thai state - then we can forget about talking about a solution.

And as long as we are stuck in this mindset and mentality, we are just fooling ourselves and our friends in the international community. Despite all the money the military and the government have spent on security and development, the violence continues unabated.

Our policy-makers like to think that local Malay residents are ungrateful, hence their unwillingness to help the authorities. What we don't want to tell anybody is that the local Malay Muslims share the same sentiment and historical mistrust of the state as the insurgents.

-- The Nation 2011-12-26