The Terrorist Insurgency in the South of Thailand

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 Thailand 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 (paperback). 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 Thaksin Shinawatra (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 notwithstanding 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 terrorism 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 Asia. 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 terrorism 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 hawkish 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. Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:24PM via free access 132 Book reviews 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 violence 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 parent 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-nationalist 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 southern 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.

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