Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 167, no. 1 (2011), pp. 130-139 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100916 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294

Review Essay

Nathan Porath The terrorist insurgency in the South of

Zachary Abuza, Conspiracy of silence: The insurgency in Southern Thailand. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2009, xvii + 293 pp. ISBN 160127002x. Price: USD 12.00 (paper- back).

Duncan McCargo (ed.), Rethinking Thailand’s southern violence. Singapore: NUS Press, 2007, x + 225 pp. ISBN 9971693623. Price: USD 22.00 (paperback).

United Kingdom [email protected]

Since the start of the millennium, Thailand has seen the resurgence of separat- ist violence in its pre-dominantly Malay-speaking southern-border provinces. Whereas it was generally thought that the anti-Thai insurgency that domi- nated much of the twentieth century had receded during the 1990s, sporadic acts of terrorist violence resurfaced during 2001 and subsequent years. The Thai government headed by (2001-2006) treated these sporadic acts of violence as the work of bandits. It was 4 January 2004 when the insurgency in the south took a new turn with a raid on an army barracks in the most southern province of Narathiwat. The protagonists separated the Thai Buddhists from the Thai Muslim soldiers and murdered them in cold blood. They also stole a large quantity of ammunition and grenades. While this was occurring, 22 schools were torched in different locations. This night of violence led the government to mobilize the Fourth Army Division of the south to the region and declare it under martial law. At this point, Thailand entered its own ‘war on terror’ characteristic of the George Bush years. The two books considered in this essay, although very different in approach, are the product of a certain political climate characteristic of this period but in radically different and interesting ways. Both focus on the insurgency as from 2004. In Conspiracy of Violence (hereafter Conspiracy), Zachary Abuza argues that the present insurgency is different from previous ones. He sees the differ-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access Book reviews 131 ence in its Islamic Jihadic overtones, which he warns us could take on (if it has not yet) an international profile through the involvement of Jemaah Islamiya and by extension, Al Qaeda. On the other hand, Rethinking Thailand’s southern violence (hereafter Rethinking) is an edited book providing many different insights into the insurgency of the south but still maintains that notwithstand- ing its militant Islamic expression, it is still an ethno-nationalist insurgency and a domestic problem of Thailand. One article in Rethinking (chapter 7 by Michael Connors) can even be read as a critique of the type of literature that characterizes Abuza’s own work, which he rightly says emerges out of ter- rorism studies (or terrorology) and is ‘security driven’. This genre of literature, which, as Thayer (2007) states, utilizes the ‘Al Qaeda centric paradigm’, focus- es on the search of Al Qaeda in Southeast . As the back-flap tells us, the author of Conspiracy is a leading specialist in Southeast Asian security issues and Militant Islam. Moreover, Abuza reveals his ‘security driven’ perspective on the last page of his conclusion, where he shows his concern not with the local population who may be suffering in this climate of terror, or the Thai government, but with U.S. policy makers, suggesting how they might best respond to the Thai situation. Connors (who mainly criticizes Conflict and ter- rorism in Southern Thailand (Gunaratna, Acharya and Chua 2005, another work in this disciplinary vein), claims that authors of this approach lack a grass roots understanding of the area, the political cultures and the local problems. By contrast, all the authors of Rethinking are specialists in Thai politics. The book itself (published in 2007) contains the proceedings of a workshop held in Pattani in 2005, when Thaksin was still prime minister, and is tinged with the intellectualist anti-Thaksin politics of the period. At times, Rethinking reads less like concern for the predicaments of the insurgency and the terror-ridden environment that it and martial law has brought to the lives of local people and more like a critique of Thaksin’s policies. For example, Pathmanand’s article provides a useful description of Thaksin’s hawkish policies. But his analysis would have been fair if he had combined the hawk- ish policies with some of the more dovish ones. In fact, the front cover reveals the anti-Thaksin perspective with its close-up photo of this prime minister rather than a photo relating to the south, although the book itself has many good photographs of soldiers and bombings and more. (Abuza’s book has a small photo of Thaksin giving a speech, with another larger picture showing a soldier protecting young Buddhist novices, and a third smaller photo of a Mosque’s roof with the Thai national flag waving in the wind). Rethinking does conclude with a postscript written by McCargo that brings the book into the post-Thaksin period. Hence Abuza uses the topic of the insurgency to search for the presence of Al Qaeda in the south of Thailand, while McCargo’s book emphasizes the insurgency to critique (fairly or unfairly) Thaksin’s premiership.

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In Conspiracy, Abuza rightly points out that the difference between this wave of violence and the violence of previous decades is that the insurgents use terrorist violence rather than guerrilla warfare tactics (p. 3). Because no one has come forward to claim the violence or put forward demands, Abusa calls it a ‘Conspiracy of Violence’. This silence suggests several things to Abuza. First, the perpetrators are not ‘a bunch of nihilist teenagers, bent on creating havoc (p. 5),’ but calculating political actors who use unclaimed vio- lence to magnify their power. Secondly, the silence also exemplifies internal cohesion, command and control. It is important for Abuza to show the profes- sionalism of these terrorists and he follows the Thai military’s own attempt to understand its enemy as forming highly organized and hierarchical cells among the local population. Because he uses the Al Qaeda centric-approach, Abuza gives the impression that the terrorist cells are formed by alienated people living hidden in the greater community that is generally indifferent or hostile to them and that there is very little support for them from the greater community on whom they prey. But this may not be accurate. Jerold Post (2006) has pointed out that there are two terrorist-type ideo- logical formations: one opposes the revolutionary terrorism of the parent’s generation, and the other supports it. The latter is usually the type found in ethno-nationalist struggles. Whereas Al Qaeda has all the dynamics of the revolutionary struggle that opposes the complacent values of the par- ent generation, the Malay insurgency is carried out in support of what it’s ideologues believe is the parent generation’s culture and values threatened by Thai. Abuza himself quotes one insurgent who claimed that they have cells in practically 80 per cent of the area’s villages. Many of these cells are in villages where people may sympathize with the insurgents. In many areas, Muslim villagers still harbour antagonism and resentment towards Thai. The Thai military thus strategically divided the area into three colour zones representing the degree of hostility towards the Thai state and support of the insurgents - red zones with a high percentage of insurgents and sympathiz- ers, yellow zones reflecting more mixed regions, and the safer green zones. As Tan Mullins short article (in Rethinking) reveals, people’s feelings in the area are that of fear, suspicion and confusion. Notwithstanding the differences in which they express their ethno-nation- alist cause, the ongoing appearance of insurgents during any given period may be understood as one aspect of the political-cultural fabric of the Malay- Muslim society’s response to Thai, Bangkok and its policies. Further, Abuza wonders why no one claims the violence. In fact, it is not the case any more that terrorists advertise themselves as they did in earlier decades. Hence, the insurgents can conspire to silence. It is already known that they are Malay Muslims who want the secession of the three southern provinces and parts of Songkla from the Kingdom of Thailand in order to create a Muslim State

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access Book reviews 133 of Patani. To my mind, the more aberrant violent acts do not emerge out of professional terrorist cells in an indifferent or hostile population scheming a terror publicity stunt through an act of violence. Instead, they might very well have been carried out by people encouraged by the atmosphere of terrorism already generated by the insurgents. Some of these killings are so politically senseless one wonders if they resemble ethno-religious hate crimes more than terrorism. Consider the numerous beheadings. Unlike the Iraqi beheading, which were public, symbolic, and intended for a global audience, the south- ern Thai beheadings (which were likely inspired by those in Iraq, as Abuza notes), were carried out after the murder and for no real reason (Southern Thailand 2005). Much of the violence is carried out in a spirit of opportunistic revenge. They might be the product of a Muslim youth problem within an atmosphere of terror rather than that of professional terrorism. Srisombop Jitpiromsri and Panyasak Sobhonvasu’s article in Rethinking focuses on the youth-problem of the area providing quantitative data on various issues relating to youth deviance and its relationship to the insurgency. They con- clude that ‘the ideology of the militants is no longer the somewhat romantic and low-key separatism of the past’. It has become something far more socially and ideologically complicated. Abuza’s book sometimes reflects what I can only characterize as ‘security- driven blinkers’ that shades his presentation, if not understanding, of Malay and Southeast Asian Islamic cultures. On page 129, for instance, he makes a very odd point for regional specialists. To push his argument forward that we should understand this insurgency in religious terms, he writes that studies that are reluctant to do so ‘fail to explain what is happening in the villages, such as the establishment of religiously based structures and the growing authority of religious leaders there’. He tells us that the insurgents have established a parallel state structure with Sharia courts in order to keep people out of the ordinary state judicial procedures and courts, a network of midwives, and private Islamic schools (p. 3). It is as though he is suggest- ing that these fundamentally Muslim Malay cultural and religious institu- tions are novel and the product of the Islamic revival of the late twentieth century and therefore signify the rise of militant Islam in the area. Further, the schools (pondok/ponoh) are not new institutions brought over by recent resurgent political Islam, nor is the religious leaders’ influence a new phe- nomenon. These schools are ingrained in the areas’ religious culture and the religious leaders have always held a prestigious position in society since the area converted to Islam. On the other hand, it would have been more accu- rate for Abuza to say that some of the religious teachers have been rework- ing the nationalist-separatist ideology into the language of Militant political Islam influenced by happenings elsewhere in the Islamic world, as Wattana Sugunnasil does in Rethinking.

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But this would not characterize all the teachers. Nor would it describe the knowledge and epistemological outlook of all of those Thai Muslim-Malay speakers educated in the Middle East who bring back recent epistemological developments in the Muslim educational world to the population, as earlier teachers had done. In practice, I suspect that Abuza recognizes this but it is his underlying ‘Al Qaeda centric approach’ that colors this more nuanced reality. Even the manifesto Berjihad di Patani (Holy War in Patani) which com- mands Malay-Muslims to fight ajihad against kufr Siamese state and hypocrite Muslims (munafik) who collude with Buddhists and the Buddhist state, has ideologically dubious origin. In writing about the authors of Berjihad di Patani in Rethinking, Connor tells us that this document had two authors, one of whom was a Kelantanese, the other a local Muslim teacher from Yala. He tells us that the Kelantanese author of the document was principally interested in money and not religion. While the Yala author had given himself up and joined the Thai government’s project of helping and reforming Muslim teach- ers who were once sympathetic to the insurgency. Nevertheless, as Sugunnasil (Rethinking) points out, even if the militant commitment of this document’s authors may be questioned, it nevertheless has had its ideological effects on local disgruntled religious youth as one copy was originally found on the body of one of the militants who went on a rampage on 28 April 2004 and was subsequently killed in the Kru Se Mosque massacre by state authorities. Chapter one of Conspiracy outlines the historical roots of the conflict, but is the weakest chapter in the book and is replete with historical errors. First, Abuza refers to the historical kingdom of Patani as Pattani (Thai spelling), and he also uses this spelling when he writes names relating to the insurgent groups as with ‘rumah Pattani’ (p. 17). As McCargo points out in the introduc- tion to Rethinking, any study of the conflict in the south must come to terms with the politics of language. He writes ‘using the double ‘tt –ed spelling … could be seen as expressing support for the existing political order in the region’ (p. viii). Although this is true, I would add the two different spell- ings designate not only different languages but very different things. The old kingdom of the area was Patani which governed the area of the present day Thai provinces of Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani and Southern Songkla. In Malay this area is called Patani and insurgents would use this spelling as it is the roman spelling of the name in their natal tongue. In modern Thailand, the town and the province is spelt in English, Pattani. Capturing the nuances of the spellings is a first step to understanding the political culture of the area. Abuza tells us that the Kingdom of Patani (not spelt by him in this way) converted to Islam in 1457. This year of conversion has become the myth of Patani historical studies. It was first put forward in passing by Che Man (1990), who quotes Teeuw and Wyatt (1970) and Syukri (1985); this date has been cited by many authors. However neither Syukri nor Teeuw and Wyatt

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access Book reviews 135 do provide any actual dates as there is no evidence when the Kingdom of Patani converted to this religion. The date that Teeuw and Wyatt reasonably speculate is sometime during the late fourteenth to the early fifteenth century. Some authors have assumed that Patani converted to Islam after Malacca but there is no evidence for this either. Further, all the evidence suggests that during this period Malacca was a threat to Patani. From the Hikayat we learn that Patani never saw the Malacca (and later Johor) kingdom complex as a superior order to it but at best a tolerated equal. Hence there is no reason to suppose that Patani would have followed Malacca. In this early period, Patani even aided Ayutthaya in an attack on Malacca. It is also important to make a distinction between the existence of Muslim communities from Pasai for example, living in Patani as religious minorities under a Buddhist Patani kingdom-state and the actual conversion of the raja and subsequently the expansion of Islam within his jurisdiction. What seems to be the case is that in the thirteenth century Patani was still a Buddhist kingdom and, as a tributary to Nakon si Thammarat, it was involved in the reconstruction of the Buddhist reliquary as were other Malay-speaking states (Wyatt 1994: 45), but by the early sixteenth century it was an established Sultanate. Until further evidence is available, we must simply admit that we do not really know when the Buddhist kingdom of Patani officially converted to Islam. It is therefore time that authors stopped giving this date unless they have convincing corroborating evidence for it. Abuza then tells us that the Kingdom of Patani included what is today Kelantan, Trengannu and Kedah. Again this is an historical error. These were separate Malay kingdom’s, which were paying tribute to Siam. He also affirms that the tribute system between Patani and Siam was instigated after the total conquest of the Malay Kingdom in 1789. In fact there was already a tributary system in place in the centuries before as evidenced in the Hikayat Patani. Another error he makes is when he tells us that during this period Thai officials tried to bring Thai culture and language to this area. Neither Ayuthaya nor nineteenth century Bangkok interfered with cultural or reli- gious matters of the area. The religious and cultural problems started in the twentieth century with Siam/Thailand’s policies of political incorporation and cultural modernisation. Bringing the historical narrative up to the twentieth century he errs again when discussing the rise of the first movements in the area and the fatal Dusun Nyior violence that occurred on the 28 April 1948. First, in his map of the genealogy of the separatist movements (which he calls Thai separatist movements rather than Malay, thus denying these movements their ethnicist identity), he places Gambungan Melayu Patani Raya (GAMPAR, Association of Malays of Greater Patani) in the position of the first movement then fol- lowed by an arrow leading to Patani’s People Movement (PPM). GAMPAR

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access 136 Book reviews falls within the time period of early to mid 1940s and PPM of the late 1940s. Whereas it is true that GAMPAR was formed by a group of Patani elite exiles meeting in Kelantan during the 1940s, it does seem, if we follow the account Nik Mahmud (2008), that these exiled elites were first working through PPM and only officially formed GAMPAR after the arrest of Haji Sulong who was the leader of PPM in Thailand. PPM was not necessarily a separatist organiza- tion. It was a civic group for the welfare of the Malays of the region. In 1947, Haji Sulong served the Thai-government representatives visiting the area a seven point petition that called for internal political cultural and religious autonomy. PPM never publicly called for secessionism. It was only after Haji Sulong was arrested in January 1948 on the charge of treason (for which he was later acquitted but instead convicted for libelling the government), that the Patani elites in Kelanatan formed GAMPAR as an official civic non-bellig- erent organization calling for full secessionism either through independence or irredentism with the Malay states. Again Abuza errs when discussing the Duson Nyior violence which occurred shortly after Haji Sulong’s arrests. According to Abuza, it was Haji Sulong who led the Dusun Nyior rebellion (p. 15). Abuza simply follows an error made by Gunaratna, which Connor picks up on in his own critique of this author (p. 162). Although Abuza rightly tells us that Haji Sulong was already arrested in January of that same year the Haji had nothing to do with the rebellion. Chaiwat Satha-Anand (Rethinking) describes the Dusun Nyior event and discusses it in relation to state violence, social memory and monuments. Here Satha-Anand tells us that on the Malay side, the event was headed by Tuan Haji Abdul Rahman from Perak and may have erupted due to a total misunderstanding on behalf of the Thai authorities who were quick to suppress what they thought was a rebellion. Following the arrest of Haji Sulong and fearing a rebellion, the government sent police reinforcements to the area. At the same time, a large group of Malay villagers had congregated on a hill in order to carry out magical rites of protection against communists. The police thought they were rebelling and fired at them. This led the Malays to think that the government sent the authorities to murder them. They took to their defence and fought the police. The estimated result was about 400 vil- lagers had lost their lives as did 30 policemen (p. 18). Abuza could have ben- efitted from a careful reading of Connor’s critique of Gunaratna and Chaiwat Satha-Anand’s chapters. In Conspiracy the confusion continues. In the early 1960s, the first belliger- ent separatist movement emerged, the Barisan Nasional Pembabasan Patani (BNPP, National Liberation Front of Patani). Abuza’s map places the develop- ment of BNPP on an arrow pointing out of PPM. BNPP did not form directly out of PPM but out of GAMPAR. According to Abuza one of the people who formed BNPP was the son of the last Sultan of Patani. Although he does not

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access Book reviews 137 give his name, it would seem he is referring to Tenku Mahydeen. Tenku Mahydeen was the head of GAMPAR and had passed away in 1954, a number of years before the formation of BNPP. Mahydeen, who was the son of the last raja of Patani, wanted to achieve his goals through constitutional means and kept GAMPAR within this civic framework and kept the more militant factions in check. It was only after his death that some members with a more militant outlook could form a belligerent group. This new organization (BNPP) was formed by Tengku Abdul Jalal and the son of the now deceased Haji Sulong, Wan Muhammad Amin. Abuza further confuses BNPP with GAMPAR when he tells us that the former had factions that favoured independence, factions that favoured integration with Malaysia and factions that favoured autonomy with Thailand. Again this characterizes the period prior to the arrest of Haji Sulong and not BNPP, which was a full scale separatist movement with a mili- tary wing of fighters trained to hassle the Thai authorities. When discussing the 1970s and 1980s, again we meet his ‘security blinker’ approach when he writes that the military was careful not to antagonize the local population (p. 23). To say this is not only to deny the extra judicial killings and the various security measures and fears that it brought, but to make meaningless the Thai government’s 2007 public apology to the Malay- speaking Muslims of the area for the wrongdoings of previous governments, including those of Thaksin’s. It is from Chapter 2 when the book comes into its own, In this chapter Abuza discusses Thailand’s position in the global ‘war on terror,’ review- ing the moments when Al Qaeda representatives are known to have passed through Thailand or used it as some kind of base. The chapter tends to read like a security bulletin warning of possible future Al Qaeda/Jamaa Islamiya involvements in the country. Nevertheless, it provides some very interesting information. For example, Abuza tells us of a secret base opened up by the American security services in Thailand, which was used to interrogate high level Al Qaeda suspects. Abuza follows Duncan McCargo’s own argument in Rethinking in rela- tion to the general background of political problems that were occurring in Thailand and its effect on the south in the immediate years prior to the erup- tion of violence. Basically, McCargo argues that in order to consolidate his own power, Thaksin dismantled a working system and intelligence order that connected everybody from civil society to the military right up to the mon- archy’s own network. Thaksin disrupted what McCargo calls the Network Governance of the country that extended into the Network Monarchy. In the process, Thaksin dissolved two very important government agencies (SPBAC and the 43rd joint civilian police and military task force) which not only collated information about the south but also served as a forum for pub- lic complaints against official corruption and violence. By abolishing these

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access 138 Book reviews agencies, a lot of intelligence was lost and confusion occurred. This argument was already around in the Thai Newspapers. But there is no reason to assume that the violence would not have erupted as it did even if these agencies were still intact. What is more likely the case is that in early 2004, the terrorists did not expect the government’s knee-jerk response of mobilising its southern military division of the south to the area. Along with subsequent policies, this escalated violence and intensified terror in the area. Abuza also asks the question ‘who is behind the attacks?’ He analyses all the various possible separatist groups and concludes that BRN-coordinate, a faction of the original BRN of previous years, is probably the organisation behind most of the attacks. Authorities already suspected this organisation and it was already made publically known as the possible culprit. Although Abuza affirms the official consensus, he does provide some useful updated information on the recent developments of the various terrorist/separatist organisations in the area. At times Abuza also seems to take the high ground when discussing the Thai counterinsurgency. He tells us that it has been a total failure, but he does not provide us with a measuring rod of how a suc- cessful counter-insurgency would proceed. One even gains the impression that his ‘security blinkered approach’ is willing to forfeit the check on human rights abuse against the local population. For example Abuza tells us that on a number of occasions in 2005-2006 the authorities failed to act against villag- ers who kidnapped state personnel in different locations. He puts the blame on poor command and disorganisation and failure to act. In fact, the policy at the time was to hold back when many villagers were congregated in a public space. The authorities were instructed to respect the villager’s presence and negotiate with them instead. In the events Abuza refers to, the Thai authori- ties were reluctant to take up immediate force against the villagers. A possible attack on the villages could have led to a massacre and this would have raised the issue of human rights against the Thai counter-insurgency. The human rights issue had become prominent in the Thai counter-insurgency policies in the post-2004 Tak Bai years, putting checks on the authorities approach to the area. It would seem the authorities were now being careful not to have another Kru Se Mosque massacre and Tak Bai tragedy on their hands. (For a description of some of these events see Porath 2011). To conclude then, these two highly informative books are very much the product of the political climate in which they are written. Unlike some of the earlier literature on the southern border provinces, which defined the sub-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access Book reviews 139 regional field within Thai studies (but not Malay studies), these two works will remain period books. In spite of its weakness, Abuza’s book forces us to think about the insurgent crisis in the south in a different way from previous studies and therefore is important for regional specialists. But general readers might be led astray by errors and by its ‘security blinkered’ approach. Both books are clearly written and will be of interest to Southern Thai studies, Thai politics, Thai/Malay studies, violence in and terrorology.

References

Che Man, W.K. 1990 Muslim separatism: The Moros of Southern Philippines and the Malays of Southern Thailand. New York: Oxford University Press. Gunaratna, Rohan, Arabinda Acharya and Sabrina Chua 2005 Conflict and terrorism in Southern Thailand. Singapore: Marshal Caven- dish Accademic. Nik Mahmud, Anuar 2008 The Malays of Patani: The search for security and independence. Bangi: School of History and Strategic Studies, National University of Malaysia. Porath, Nathan 2010 ‘Civic activism through other means: Terror-violence in the south of Thailand’, Terrorism and Political Violence 22:581-600. Post, Jerrold M. 2006 ‘The psychological dynamics of terrorism’, in: Louise Richardson (ed.), The roots of terrorism, pp. 17-28. New York/London: Routledge. Southern Thailand 2005 Southern Thailand: Insurgency, not jihad. N.p.: International Crisis Group. [Asia Report 98.] http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher, ICG,, THA, 4291a0764,0.html (accessed 21-3-2011). Syukri, Ibrahim 1985 History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani. Translated by Conner Bailey and John N. Miksic. Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies. [Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series 68.] [Originally published as Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani] Teeuw A. and D.K. Wyatt 1970 Hikayat Patani: The story of Patani. The Hague: Nijhoff. Two vols. [KITLV, Bibliotheca Indonesica 5.] Thayer, Carlyle A. 2007 ‘Insurgency in Southern Thailand: Literature review’. www.scribd.com/ doc/179650033/Thayer-Insurgency-in-Southern-Thailand (accessed 10- 4- 2010).

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