Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand's Deep South 9789812304650

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Acronyms
Executive Summary
Introduction
Endnotes
Bibliography
Project Information
List of Reviewers 2006–07
Policy Studies Previous Publications

Citation preview

Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South

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Policy Studies 29

Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South Marc Askew

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Copyright © 2007 by the East-West Center Washington Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South by Marc Askew East-West Center Washington 1819 L Street, NW, Suite 200 Washington, D.C. 20036 Tel: (202) 293-3995 Fax: (202) 293-1402 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.eastwestcenterwashington.org Online at: www.eastwestcenterwashington.org/publications The Policy Studies series contributes to the East-West Center’s role as a forum for discussion of key contemporary domestic and international political, economic, and strategic issues affecting Asia. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center. This publication is a product of the East-West Center Washington project on Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia. For details, see pages 81–96. The project and this publication are supported by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. First co-published in Singapore in 2007 by ISEAS Publishing Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Road Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] Website: ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Askew, Marc. Conspiracy, politics, and a disorderly border : the struggle to comprehend insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South. 1. Insurgency—Thailand, Southern 2. Government, Resistance to—Thailand, Southern. 3. Thailand, Southern—History—Autonomy and independence movements. 4. Thailand, Southern—Politics and government. 5. Thailand—Politics and government—1988– DS588 S7A83 2007 ISBN 978-981-230-464-3 (soft cover) ISBN 978-981-230-465-0 (PDF) ISSN 1547-1349 (soft cover) ISSN 1547-1330 (PDF) Typeset in Singapore by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed in Singapore by Seng Lee Press Pte Ltd

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Contents List of Acronyms

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Executive Summary

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Introduction

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Contested Truths: The Culprits and Causes of Thailand’s Southern “Turbulence”

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The Disorderly Border and the Plausibility of Conspiracy

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Plots, Interest Groups, and Separatists: The Events of January 4, 2004

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Crime, Influence, and Vested Interests: The Persistent Suspicion

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Red Herring or Precondition for Insurgency? The Disbanding of the SBPAC/CPM 43

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The Southern Crisis as Political Capital: The Democrat Party Assault on Thaksin and the Thai Rak Thai Party

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2001–2003: Critiquing Thaksin and Protecting Southern Muslims

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Marc Askew 2004–2005: The Democrat Riposte—Thaksin as the Cause of the Southern Crisis

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Conclusion

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Endnotes

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Bibliography

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Project Information: Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia

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• Project Purpose and Outline

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• Project Participants List

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• Background of the Conflict in Southern Thailand

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• Map of Southern Thailand

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Policy Studies: List of Reviewers 2006–07

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Policy Studies: Previous Publications

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List of Acronyms AFSC BERSATU BRN BRN-C CPM 43 DP DPSBPAC ICG ISOC JI NIA NGO NRC NSC PERMUDA PIN PULO RKK

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Armed Forces Security Center Barisan Bersatu Kemerdekaan Patani (United Front for Patani Independence) Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front) BRN-Coordinate Civilian-Police-Military Command 43 Democrat Party Democrat Party Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center International Crisis Group Internal Security Operations Command Jemaah Islamiyah National Intelligence Agency nongovernmental organization National Reconciliation Commission National Security Council “Youth” (movement) Khruekhai Khao Pratcharatsadon (People’s Intelligence Network) Patani United Liberation Organization Runda Kumpulan Kecil (small armed guerilla force)

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Marc Askew SBPAC SBPPC SBPPPC TRT

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Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center Southern Border Provinces Peace-Building Command Southern Border Provinces Peace Promotion Command Thai Rak Thai Party

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Executive Summary Since early 2004, the escalation of violent events in Thailand’s Muslimdominated southern border provinces—dubbed variously by commentators, according to their assumptions and focus, as “insurgency,” “unrest,” “conflict,” or generalized “violence”—has opened a veritable Pandora’s Box of discourses aiming to identify the culprits and causes, discourses that identify domestic, international, historical, and political/ideological dimensions. By early 2007, some nineteen hundred deaths had been sustained not only in the three Muslim-majority provinces, but in districts of adjacent Songkhla Province and the city of Hat Yai as well. The majority of the victims have been civilians, and over half of them Muslims. Despite the ousting of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) from power in the coup of September 2006, and reconciliation efforts of the new government under Surayudh Chulanont, the killings and attacks engulfing the borderland show little sign of abating. This monograph reviews and interprets in depth some key themes in the discourses surrounding the causes and culprits of the violence in Thailand’s southern border provinces, using Thai-language texts and several specific events as entry points and illustrations. The key themes are summarized in terms of (1) conspiracy, (2) the disorderly state and border, and (3) political contestation. Some of these themes have not been fully explored in contemporary discussion, especially among Western

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Marc Askew commentators, and much of the Thai-language material used here (both public and classified) has not been adequately treated to date. The monograph begins with an outline of some key paradigms informing representations of the southern border problem in Thailand. It then focuses on three topics that surround the struggle to identify the character and causes of the “fire in the south.” First, this study addresses the prominence of a number of conspiracy theories that purport to uncover groups and networks behind the violence, particularly one highly problematic intelligence report about the raid and arms theft at the Narathiwat military camp on January 4, 2004—the event generally viewed as marking the beginning of the current wave of violence. This follows with a consideration of other conspiracy frameworks which claim that the killings and bombings have been engineered, in whole or in part, by vested interest groups rather than by ideologically inspired separatists. Such rumors and theories range from suspicions of sophisticated planning by powerful clandestine cabals to belief in more prosaic, small-scale patterns of collusion among nonideological interest groups seeking to disguise the violence as separatist-related. These conspiratorial models are a dominant feature of explanations of conflict in Thailand (and particularly the borderland), where groups are known to manipulate events behind the scenes. It is not suggested here that the grand conspiracy theories have any credence or validity; however, what their circulation does bring into relief is the tangible reality of the labyrinthine and disorderly borderland. This disorderly borderland—a product of predatory officialdom, corruption, and crime—is a critically important problem, and I argue that addressing this long-established state of affairs is one key precondition for reducing periodic turbulence and vulnerabilities in the borderland. Second, this study focuses on arguments that have identified Prime Minister Thaksin and his policies as a key cause of the southern disturbances through the dismembering of an institutional apparatus on the border that formerly guaranteed a level of equilibrium and dialogue between the state and Muslim communities of the border provinces. There are some problematic elements in standard arguments concerning the significance of the dissolution of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) in 2002, a multifunctional agency dealing with state-society mediation in the Muslim-majority provinces as well as with intelligencegathering. Drawing on a number of Thai sources and interviews, this study

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border points to some of the flaws in the claims that, prior to its dissolution, the SBPAC had been effective in intelligence-gathering, arguing that the SBPAC had been already weakened under previous governments, and that there was a longer-term weakness in intelligence capacity prior to the advent of the Thaksin government—a weakness that prevented agencies from detecting the emerging new insurgent patterns of the 1990s that exploded in 2004. Third, this monograph considers the party-political uses of the southern crisis by the opposition Democrat Party (DP). It shows how this party, threatened by the electoral onslaught of the TRT and lacking any convincing policy-based alternative at the national level, successfully defended and extended its critical southern electoral base in 2005 by demonizing Thaksin and his party. In doing so, the DP deflected attention from its own historical culpability (when in government in the 1990s) in allowing the borderland to remain an intractable “other country” within Thailand. There are many interacting dimensions at play in the current crisis in Thailand’s south, and this study does not claim to treat comprehensively all of these. Rather, the themes and documents selected here aim to bring into relief some less well-treated but important issues that have shaped various discourses about the character of Thailand’s southern “problem.” This monograph aims to add to existing scholarly discussion by highlighting how interpretation has been framed by political contestation during the Thaksin era. It also points to the importance of considering the disorderly state and border as a generic condition that reflects much about critical weaknesses in Thailand’s state and society.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border

Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South The aim of this monograph is to interpret a number of themes (drawn from a variety of documents, debates, and commentaries) that have emerged in the context of the struggle to define the nature of the persistent and enigmatic “insurgency” prevailing in Thailand’s Muslim-majority southern border provinces. Who are the perpetrators? Why is this happening? Why now? When will it end? Who is responsible for its persistence and escalation? What is to be done to end it? Struggles to answer these questions have emerged and taken shape in response to a new form of militant Islamic network-based insurgency that has imbricated itself into an already complex, unstable borderland that combines vulnerable ethnoreligious sensitivities and competing power groups, both state and nonstate. It is an insurgency that thrives on key weaknesses in the dysfunctional Thai state apparatus, and its character is easily disguised because rumor has long been the currency of knowledge in the labyrinthine southern borderland. The explosion of violence there has stimulated considerable debate on longdeferred and unresolved problems surrounding the cultural-linguistic rights of the borderland Malay Muslims. Arguments raised by Muslim intellectuals

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and elites about these issues are vitally important, and they pose a challenge to incorporate genuine diversity into Thailand’s state-society fabric. But it is unclear just how these identity issues help explain the foundations and dynamics of the current insurgency, especially in the light explosion of violence of new conciliatory policies since the change in government following the coup of …has stimulated September 2006.1 The intensity of debate considerable debate and the polarization of discourses that burst forth in Thailand from 2004 are a direct result of the twin impacts of (1) changes in the world political environment ushered in by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., and (2) Thailand’s own polarized internal politics. The competing representations of Thailand’s southern “turbulence” (khwam mai sangop) from 2001 to 2006 have been profoundly shaped by domestic political contests and Thaksin Shinawatra’s project to restructure politics and the state under the rule of his Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT). Significantly, Thaksin’s inability to convincingly define and control the violence in the Muslim-majority south proved to be his first major policy failure, which arguably presaged his subsequent political decline.2 A considerable literature of uneven quality and varied emphasis has been generated in Thailand and among foreign commentators that attempts to unearth the factors at play in the current insurgency, its persistence, and the groups perpetrating the violence (see, e.g., Connors 2006). In Thailand, discussion and argument incorporates, among other factors, (1) historical dimensions of the Muslim predicament in the south; (2) issues of cultural and linguistic rights; (3) flaws in state policy, past and present; (4) the role of clandestine state violence; (5) the relative significance of Malay nationalism versus Islamic militancy in motivating insurgents and assuring levels of support; and (6) the power dynamics underlying Thaksin Shinawatra’s governance. Not surprisingly, the foci of such literature and debate have been shaped by specialists’ disciplinary frameworks and assumptions, as well as by the deeply political stance of local protagonists in the struggle to define the actual “problem” prevailing in the south. Scholarship and investigations published in English include some important contributions by Thailand specialists that highlight the domestic political dynamics shaping the crisis during the Thaksin period (see McCargo 2006; Ukrist

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border 2006), yet much material remains unconsidered by most foreign analysts and commentators. In Thailand most commentators, especially academics (who position themselves as public intellectuals), are firmly wedded to particular positions on the southern question (see Kaeow et al. 2006; Yusuf and Schmidt 2006), and as a result there have been few critical interrogations of causal discourses (but see Srisompob and Panyasak 2006, and among journalists, Barun 2005 and Sathian 2005). This monograph adopts a critical stance toward some of the dominant representations of the “problem” of the south. It also isolates for closer analysis a selection of issues in the competing narratives that have emerged in Thailand about the causes and culprits of the current violence in the border provinces. These issues require greater attention in order to understand the full complexity of the southern crisis, as well as the irreducibly contested nature of representations of that crisis. To illustrate and investigate these issues, this study examines a variety of Thai-language documents and publications and draws on field observation and interviews undertaken by the author. It then summarizes these issues in terms of (1) conspiracy, (2) the disorderly state and border, and (3) political contestation. Why do conspiracy-related frameworks persist in explanations of the current violence? I argue that conspiracy theorizing reflects widely shared perceptions about how power is deployed in Thailand, particularly in the southern border provinces, which have long been the site of competing and overlapping vested interests that incorporate criminal networks, predatory and corrupt officials, and politicians, as well as separatist groups themselves. Rumor has long been the currency of knowledge in an environment where violent events have been staged and disguised. The first substantive section (The Disorderly Border and the Plausibility of Conspiracy) examines a particularly improbable conspiracy hypothesis from a secret intelligence document produced in the early weeks of the unrest in 2004. This document shows how intelligence was deployed in a highly political way during the Thaksin period, although I also argue that the document contains some key general truths about the labyrinthine character of the southern borderland that dispose actors to presume conspiracy. I then highlight more prosaic speculations about the role of the underworld and influential figures in the current insurgency, highlighting how such speculations buttress various arguments of protagonists in the debate about culprits and causal factors. Two points are brought into relief

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Marc Askew in this discussion: (1) that crime and militancy are intimately connected in the current insurgency, in common with insurgencies elsewhere; and (2) that, despite their differing emphases, all groups (whether academics, officials, or Muslim and a…disorderly borderland is Buddhist villagers) stress that a weak the foundation of southern and disorderly borderland is the foundation of southern Thailand’s Thailand’s…instability endemic instability: it is the product of the disorderly state itself, a problem that Thailand’s governments have long failed to effectively acknowledge and address. The second substantive section (Red Herring or Precondition for Insurgency?) discusses the politicized nature of discourses surrounding the southern crisis, showing how key issues have been deflected in these politicized discourses. A major contention of this monograph is that there has been considerable oversimplification in the arguments (both local and international) that assign principal responsibility for the explosion of violence to the policies of the Thaksin administration. I address the claims that the dissolution of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC), and especially its intelligence arm, the Civilian-Police-Military Command 43 (CPM 43), allowed militant organization to proceed unchecked and undetected. I argue that in terms of intelligence-gathering, the SBPAC/CPM 43 was already ineffective as an intelligence-gathering instrument, partly because of reductions in resources that began with the Democrat government in the early 1990s. The third analytical section (The Southern Crisis as Political Capital) focuses on the political uses of the southern crisis by the Democrat Party (DP), showing how, in the context of this party’s serious electoral failures, the emerging crisis from 2003 became a central platform from which it could gain important political capital to protect its southern electoral base from encroachment by the electoral juggernaut of Thaksin’s TRT. By demonizing Thaksin Shinawatra as the prime cause of the crisis, the Democrats offset their clear electoral disadvantages at a national policy level, and in the 2005 national elections succeeded in both protecting their regional electoral base and snatching the majority of seats formerly held by the Muslim Wadah (unity) faction in the three border provinces. To its credit, the DP also developed an array of policies addressing the religious,

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border educational, and cultural concerns of the southern Muslim elites. Nonetheless, the question must be asked: why hadn’t these been proposed when the Democrats were in government during two terms in the 1990s? Clearly, former Democrat-led administrations have not effectively dealt with the patterns of influence and other factors making for continued turbulence in the southern borderland. Moreover, apart from stridently criticizing Thaksin’s policies and advocating broad policy change from 2002 to 2006, the Democrats have been just as befuddled as everyone else about the character of the new insurgency engulfing the south. The multiple understandings of Thailand’s borderland crisis have arisen from differing positions among key groups on questions of security and the prerogatives of ethnolinguistic identity. Many long-deferred issues pertaining to ethnic difference, governance, and endemic disorder in the borderland have been brought into stark relief and compounded by the twin impacts of (1) Thaksin Shinawatra’s governance, and (2) the new pattern of insurgency shaped by the ideology and confrontations generated by a new world politics. This poses a critical challenge on many fronts for the new post-Thaksin government and is unlikely to be resolved in the short term. The underlying theme of this monograph is that more critical and nuanced attention needs to be applied to the often-simplified causal narratives surrounding the southern crisis. Contested Truths: The Culprits and Causes of Thailand’s Southern “Turbulence” Since the onset of concerted attacks in January 2004, and continuing for three years into early 2007, the violence in Thailand’s southern borderland has shown no sign of abating, despite the ousting of Thaksin by military coup in September 2006. Over this period many groups have tried to identify the culprits of the current violence, determine proximate and longterm causes of the unrest, and proffer solutions. From the beginning, interpreting khwam mai sangop (turbulence, disturbance, absence of calm) and its instigators in the south’s Muslim-majority borderland has resisted containment to the specialized sphere of security analysis and counterinsurgency policy discussion. This section outlines the divergence of interpretation among various actors that has emerged since 2004. The unexpected and violent raid on the Fourth Development Battalion’s Narathiwat army camp on January 4, 2004, and simultaneous attacks in the three Muslim-majority border provinces, had been preceded by two

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Marc Askew years of increasing violence, featuring attacks on police posts, arson, and organized weapons thefts that were variously attributed to maverick state officials, bandit gangs, and underworld networks. Over the same period, southern Muslim sentiment was being mobilized in response to the perceived ant-Islamic “war on terror” led by the U.S. since the September 11, 2001 attacks. In short, there was already a “fire in the south” (Fai Tai) identified as burning for at least two years before 2004, responses to which shaped the nature of contention about the character of the escalating violence that began in January of that year. That a kaleidoscope of definitions of the southern border problem emerged during the turbulent year of 2004 is hardly surprising, there was already a given the confusing cluster of events. What began in “fire in the south” early January as a case of arson and violent arms theft soon developed a new and macabre face with the decapitation of Buddhist monks later that month. There followed in quick succession acts of abduction and suspected murder by the police (notably of the prominent Muslim lawyer Somchai Nilaphaichit on March 12) and coordinated attacks on police posts by young Muslim men on April 28, the scale of which shocked authorities and stunned the country. The April attacks stimulated a controversial military/police response that resulted in the killing of more than one hundred militants (mostly lightly armed) and the storming of Pattani’s revered Krue Se mosque. This pushed commentators for a time toward considering internationally sponsored jihadi-terrorism as a key factor behind the violence, although Thaksin continued to claim that vested interests, spurred into reaction by his war on drugs, were manipulating events. At an operational level, the military/police response of April 28 was a clear victory over insurgents, but it was a public relations disaster (Bunkrom 2005: 200–13; Rung 2005: 136–37). Thailand’s government found itself struggling to comprehend an insurgency that could not be identified in the organized form of earlier movements, with their identifiable leaders and permanently armed bands. The groups undertaking continued attacks did not present a set of negotiable demands, like the far more visible separatist movements in the Philippines and Indonesian Aceh, nor did they reveal any clear organizational identity or leadership. An older exiled separatist leadership of the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO) and Barisan Bersatu Kemerdekaan Patani (United Front for Patani Independence;

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border hereafter BERSATU) attempted to capitalize on the situation, but it has since become clear that there is no direct connection between them and the groups perpetrating attacks. The tragic events at Tak Bai in late October 2004 (with the deaths of 78 arrested demonstrators during transit to an army camp in Pattani) increased domestic and international indictments of the Thai state as a key perpetrator of the violence and an intrinsic part of the southern “problem.” Represented by government detractors as a massacre rather than an inept military/police response to calculated provocation, the Tak Bai events boosted insurgents’ propaganda that the Malay Muslims of Thailand’s borderland provinces were a persecuted minority threatened with religious and cultural extinction. While the big publicized events of 2004 pointed to an insurgency that many claimed was provoked by Thaksin’s wrong-headed policies and military-centered responses, the developing character of the violence from 2005, which increasingly encompassed civilians (Muslim as much as Buddhist), highlighted a militancy of unprecedented shape, determination, killing methods, and organization.3 The identity of The identity of the the perpetrators of bombing attacks and “daily killings” is still debated, though several shadowy perpetrators of bombing militant groups are implicated (such as the attacks…is still debated BRN-Coordinate; a guerilla group known as Runda Kumpulan Kecil, or RKK, with its leaders believed to be trained in Indonesia; and a broad youth network, PERMUDA).4 By early 2007, after thousands of suspected insurgent attacks, only 136 perpetrators had been prosecuted.5 Police and military authorities have proved unable to effectively protect civilians and most officials (especially school teachers) from attack by the mysterious assailants. For the last three years, different actors and constituencies have been engaged in a contest to represent the character and meaning of the southern violence, and there are varied stakes at play. This contestation has arisen and persisted in part because (1) political fortunes have been at stake on all sides (e.g., the DP opposition found it convenient to offload all responsibility for the southern crisis to the TRT government’s policy mistakes); (2) a vocal knowledge community of “engaged” pro-civil-society academics has advanced its own pre-prepared answers to the causes of “the problem” (i.e.,

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Marc Askew lack of genuine development opportunities, participation, and empowerment for local communities); and (3) southern Muslim elites have adopted the role of cultural guardians and see the crisis as raising a host of longunresolved issues about Malay Muslim identity and their needs and rights within the Thai socio-political order. Thus differences of emphasis about the causes of the borderland violence have arisen and persisted because of the varied political, professional, ideological, and ethnoreligious positions, or optics, of the actors engaged. The optics of these actors have inevitably resulted in a differential defining and prioritizing of causal factors, while these discourses also reflect the unfolding of events and trends in policy, violence, and victims over the period 2004–2006. A rough delineation of the actors in the representational drama is presented below, but note that the discourses of some groups converge, and there have been maverick views expressed within most of these groupings: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Thaksin and his inner circle of ministers, military/police The Democrat Party opposition Professional military men (including former generals) Thai academics, public intellectuals, civil society activists Human rights and other special interest groups (e.g., Lawyers’ Association of Thailand) Southern Muslim elites (academic, religious, political) The Thai news media, especially journalists focusing on opinion/ analysis/investigative reporting The Thai Buddhist public Ordinary people of the borderland, Buddhist and Muslim (frequently evoked in discourses)

A summary outline of key paradigms and themes on the question of the causes and character of the current turbulence is suggested here. Note that some of these representations aim to determine “root causes,” while others address proximate causes, and that some have circulated in classified documents and have not been fully publicized.6 The Draconian and Short-sighted Thaksin State This paradigm identifies Thaksin’s leadership and policies as the primary factor enabling unrest to escalate. Critics argued that extrajudicial killings

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border associated with Thaksin’s war on drugs campaign of 2003, and the kidnappings and murder of religious leaders in the Muslim south during this period, had provoked hostility and dissatisfaction in the Muslim south. Together with this, Thaksin’s dissolution in 2002 of the SBPAC and CPM 43 had removed a critical mediating and intelligence-gathering apparatus, and thus had allowed militant separatist activity to get out of control. A heavy-handed military approach to the emerging violence from January 2004 onward (reflected in the imposition of martial law) had led to mistreatment and further extrajudicial killings of borderland Muslims. This hardline approach was reflected in the response to the attacks of April 28 and the brutal treatment of protesters at Tak Bai on October 25, 2004. This portrayal of the Thaksin state as chief offender was shared by Bangkok intellectuals, civil society and human rights advocates, southern Muslim leaders, and the Democrat Party, which relied on this paradigm in its election campaign against Thaksin’s party in the south in early 2005. The Marginalized Southern Muslim and the Hegemonic Thai Buddhist State This representation can be paired with the “draconian state” paradigm above, and was evoked in both proximate and historical terms. The view that southern Muslims had been unfairly victimized and suspected as terrorists was embodied in TRT minister Chaturon Chaisaeng’s proposed peace plan of March 2004 (shelved by Thaksin) and in the statements of Thailand’s Human Rights Commission. The historical dimensions of the emerging insurgency as a reflection of the long-term cultural and linguistic marginalization of southern Muslims by the Thai state was represented in the arguments of various Muslim intellectuals and public figures (such as the Democrat politician and former academic Surin Phitsuwan) reported in the press and published in academic commentary. It was also embodied in the analysis and recommendations of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC, whose membership incorporated prominent southern Muslim intellectuals and peacemaking advocates) publicized in June 2006. Banditry, Underdevelopment, and Manipulation Thaksin’s key paradigm, loudly voiced from 2002 and throughout 2004, defined unrest in the borderland as a product of underworld collusion with maverick politicians and interest groups. It was based on the assumption that ideologically driven separatism was a spent force in the border provinces.

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This was the key justification given by Thaksin for the disbanding of the SBPAC in 2002 and the mainstreaming of development and judicial processes. The main task in the south was to address economic and educational deficiencies. Despite Thaksin…defined unrest in the overwhelming evidence of an embedded and militant-based borderland as a product of insurgency by 2005, Thaksin had only underworld collusion mildly shifted this position to one depicting Muslim youth being manipulated by underworld figures. Notably, Thaksin’s diagnosis reflected dominant representations of border instability in the press and among Muslim politicians and southern academics prior to the election of his government in 2001. Security, Loyalty to the Nation, and the Firm Military Hand Although the nature of the insurgent groups in the first months of 2004 remained a mystery, key military commanders were adamant that a firm, military-based counterinsurgency approach was needed, despite complaints by southern Muslim leaders and civil libertarians that martial law and powers of summary search and arrest were unjustified breaches of human and citizenship rights. To such commanders, the military crackdowns on April 28 and October 25 were regrettable but necessary measures, given that militants were clearly waging war on the nation. Sidelined for his role in the Kru Se mosque killings, General Panlop Pinmanee defended his actions as a necessary response, given the attackers’ violent intentions (Panlop 2004). His stance was supported by many Thai Buddhists, though such views were not widely produced in the press. While the Tak Bai killings generated a wave of outrage against heavy-handed military responses, a less well-recognized popular response has been sympathy for government officials in the south, reflected, for example, in email chat rooms and series of pocketbooks that criticize academics and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for underplaying the tribulations of innocent victims of violence.7 Popular nationalist responses were demonstrated in the gathering of the right-wing Village Scouts in Bangkok following the Tak Bai events. In late 2005, after further murders of monks by militants, senior Buddhist clerics in Pattani protested against what they viewed as the lenient approach of the NRC toward the perpetrators.

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Plots and Collusion Arguments that the violence has been fomented and perpetuated by pragmatic interest groups were not restricted to Thaksin alone. There have been persistent suspicions (among ordinary villagers, Muslim advocates, military commentators, and intelligence figures) that collusion among interest groups has caused, or otherwise contributes to, the ongoing violence. During January 2004, some intelligence reports (such as the PIN document discussed in a later section below) claimed that the Narathiwat arms raid had been planned by politicians aiming to undermine Thaksin’s governing party. Such grand conspiracy theories are implausible, but they reflect the politicized Credible evidence… nature of intelligence operations at the time. More prosaic suspicions of underworld interest or highlight[s] the role involvement persist, to help explain the continuing of criminal groups violence and the inability of the state to identify culprits. This view underlies the refusal of the NRC report of 2006 to attribute the violence to separatists alone. Credible evidence does highlight the role of criminal groups, yet suggests that they are an integral part of the militant networks and their support base, not a manipulating agent (for which see later discussion). Resurgent Separatism Beginning with the Narathiwat arms raid and continuing through the following years, there have been problems in identifying the perpetrators of violence, the nature of their organization, or their objectives. Among government ministers and military commanders, no authoritative portrait was forthcoming during 2004, except a broad consensus that separatists were involved. Explicit in Democrat Party criticism of Thaksin’s dismantling of the SBPAC and the CPM 43 was acceptance of the fact that separatist groups were a permanent feature of the Muslim south but could be managed and contained by appropriate monitoring and the maintenance of dialogue with Muslim communities, as they claimed they had achieved when in government in the 1990s. Although Thaksin remained equivocal about separatism in his public pronouncements, his newly appointed advisor Kitti Rattanachaya (former commander of the south’s Fourth Army Region, 1991–1994) was adamant that the disturbances represented a carefully laid separatist plan that had been in operation for a decade. As Fourth Region Commander, Kitti had consistently emphasized the ongoing activities of

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Marc Askew the highly factionalized separatist groups in the south. To Kitti, events vindicated these earlier claims, and his press statements and publications during 2004–2005 portrayed a well-established, network-based coalition of largely religious-driven separatist groups (based on four levels: hardline leadership, armed forces, youth in the religious schools, and a united front of ordinary supporters) that had been developing for at least ten years without detection by intelligence agencies because it was shielded by the Muslim Wadah faction politicians and religious leaders, and barely visible to southern-based intelligence groups weakened by budget cuts over those years (Kitti 2004; Kitti 2005). Elements of Kitti’s portrayal of a decade-long development of militant networks appear to have been vindicated by subsequent findings and an admission by Wan Kadir Che Man (former leader of BERSATU) that development was continuous— although the role of a seven-stage strategy for planning and implementing insurrection, unearthed in 2003, is debatable. The Lawless and Neglected Borderland While there are clear differences in the assigning of long- and short-term causes for the current violence, there is a broad consensus that some key problems facing the border provinces have never been genuinely addressed by Thailand’s governments. The weakness and disorder of the borderland is a prominent theme in discussion, though not well acknowledged in foreign coverage of the southern crisis. Southern Muslim advocates argue that corrupt officials and influential figures have been in control of the south for too long, and have often used separatism as a cover to disguise their activities. Military figures and police officers also acknowledge that a weak local administration has permitted crime and influence to grow unchecked, while politicians at all levels have pursued their agendas at the expense of ordinary people, supporting corrupt and underworld networks for their own benefit. The Disorderly Border and the Plausibility of Conspiracy This section describes and interprets a variety of conspiracy-related theories that have been advanced to explain the origins and persistence of the current violence, drawing on a number of documents and other sources. Here “conspiracy” refers to causal models of various scales, extending from “grand” theories (which link the overall pattern of events to the secret

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plotting of a few hidden masterminds) to more prosaic models (based on suspicions of collusion of various interest groups with militants, and encompassing forms of manipulation or financial enticement). I argue that such conspiracy approaches are plausible to various actors because they represent a way of comprehending the hidden operations of power that are characteristic of conflict in Thailand. The first conspiracy theory considered is a patently outlandish set of allegations about a Democrat Party plot behind the Narathiwat arms raid of January 4, 2004. It is included for consideration not because it offers any empirical guide to determining the perpetrators but because, despite its major flaws as an explanation, it contains some key truths about the disorderly border itself. The next section considers arguments about the involvements of interest groups in the ongoing violence, and how suspicions of manipulation inform accounts of the violence. I argue that the engagement of interest groups and crime rings in the current violence is demonstrable but should be considered an integral part of the insurgency and its networks, in common with other insurgencies in the contemporary world. During the first half of 2004, in the wake of the Narathiwat arms raid of January 4, some foreign terrorism specialists paid serious attention to this possibility of underworld involvement (e.g., Holt 2004), but following the attacks of April 28, commentators’ interest tended to focus on radical Islam, separatism, and the extent of international sponsorship. Yet in Thailand, among various accumulating evidence…identifies commentators as well as ordinary ideologically motivated insurgents people of the southern borderland, there are persistent suspicions that as the key perpetrators a mix of criminal groups, local and national politicians, and state officials is involved in promoting the violence, despite accumulating evidence over the last three years that identifies ideologically motivated insurgents as the key perpetrators. Why is such a view so durable and persistent? The answer is to be found in the disorderly character of Thailand’s state-society complex and in the history and character of illegality and informal power structures in the southern borderland. In light of repeated instances of arson and sabotage conducted in the south by clandestine groups (including the police and military) over the past decades, the widespread suspicion that much of the current violence

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Marc Askew has been instigated by such groups is logical rather than eccentric. The much-used Thai expression srang sathanakan (create a situation) highlights a long-established pattern of conflict in Thai society whereby groups foment events in such a way as to implicate other groups and obscure their own identity. Intimately connected with this pattern is the persistent appearance and suspicions of a meu sam (third hand): the metaphor expresses the reality of multilevel manipulation and dissimulation among planners of violence and public disturbances. Rumors of conspiracies and “third hands” are a natural corollary of this embedded technique of conflict in Thai society because conspiracies are, ultimately, believable. During 2001–2003, Thaksin’s oft-cited assertions that separatism was defunct and that violent attacks in the south were primarily the work of criminal gangs and corrupt officials certainly reflected his lack of informed intelligence, together with his deliberate “can-do,” publicityoriented technique of defining all national problems as easily solvable by means of economic development or social order maintenance (an attitude fostered, some say, by his police training). But Thaksin’s diagnosis also reflected widely held local judgments of the pervasiveness of crime, official corruption, underworld and clandestine political influence on the southern borderland.8 It is easy to criticize Thaksin’s judgments in hindsight with our current knowledge of the role of the new insurgent networks, but it should be remembered that Chuan Leekpai, when leader of the previous DP-led government, had pronounced similar judgments. Interviewed in early 1998 in connection with border disturbances in that year, Chuan remarked: “There are various elements involved. There are bandits, common criminals, hired gunmen, narcotics traffickers, as well as elements of separatist movements.”9 “Banditry” has been a common representation used by governments (particularly colonial governments) to delegitimize movements of resistance to their rule. Yet the widespread presence of criminality, corruption, and extortion in southern Thailand is undeniable—specifically its role in financially sustaining a wide range of networks, from separatist groups to extensive, multilayered political networks and interlinked circles of officials. In the early months of the violence, so widespread was local familiarity with the strength of informal political influence, criminality, and official corruption that surveys and intelligence reports (such as the PIN document discussed below) revealed that many ordinary southerners believed that

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border the arms raid and associated events had been staged by interest groups. And shortly before his abduction by police on March 12 while acting as defense counsel for Muslims arrested for the January 4 raid, the prominent Muslim lawyer Somchai Nilaphaichit, no friend of the Thaksin government, gave his assessment: “There are many aspects to the problem in the south: some concern politics and some are about criminality as found generally in other regions.”10 Just days after the April 28 events were shifting the paradigms of analysis toward the themes of international terrorism and jihad-inspired separatism, Thaksin opined that the militant youths involved in these attacks “had been used by people wanting to expand their influence in drugs and contraband.”11 This claim might easily be interpreted as the prime minister’s attempt to save face in the light of his earlier assessment of criminal-inspired unrest in the south. Yet there were other commentators who seriously considered the possibility of criminal involvement: in mid-2005 the journalist Don Pathan, who maintained extensive informant sources in the south, gave his own view: “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.”12 The following subsections consider how the enduring reality of the disorderly and labyrinthine border is reflected in the circulation of rumors and conspiracy-based accounts of the current violence. Plots, Interest Groups, and Separatists: The Events of January 4, 2004 To illustrate something of the character of the disorderly border and the disorderly state in the south, I draw here on an intelligence document that was passed to me by a confidential source in February 2004. This document (see next paragraph) lists numerous names and networks among police, the military, politicians, and criminal groups. It claims that the January 4 raids were engineered by a key Democrat politician, in concert with a number of associated phuak (cliques, close-knit networks) among military figures. Their aim was to prevent Thaksin’s ruling party from gaining ground in the Democrat’s southern electoral base, and to expand simultaneously Democrat control in the areas controlled by the Muslim politicians of the Wadah faction, who had joined with Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party in 2002. The raid was allegedly engineered to appear to be

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Marc Askew separatist-inspired, to cast suspicion on the Wadah group and to promote their destruction as a political network in the border provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala. Another conspiracy outlined in the document centers on the prominent Pattani Muslim politician Den Tohmeena and his alleged role as a key figure in the BRN-Coordinate separatist organization. Though the PIN document claims that the BRN-C was planning an uprising, it maintains that the BRN-C was not responsible for the January 4 arms raid. Verifying the numerous linkages and motivations attributed to these overlapping groups is impossible, and most of the report’s claims are implausible. However, I suggest that the document, while fanciful in its conspiracy charges, is nevertheless valuable in highlighting the labyrinthine patterns of informal authority, corruption, and influence that pervade the southern provinces. It also demonstrates the highly politicized nature of intelligence reporting during this period, when Thaksin was determined to oust political opponents from the Democrat Party stronghold of the south. Entitled Patibatkan Cho Airong–2547 (The Action at Cho Airong– 2004), this document is a 97-page report compiled by a group identifying itself as the Khruekhai Khao Pratcharatsadon, or “The People’s Intelligence Network” (hereafter PIN). The title includes the name of the district in Narathiwat where the raided military camp is located. The source who provided me with the document claimed at the time that this group of intelligence operatives was comprised of former members of the Communist Party of Thailand in the border provinces who had maintained a wide range of connections useful for intelligence-gathering on insurgency and illegal activities. Internal evidence confirms that the writers are former communists. My source also emphasized that the report had been commissioned to be sent directly to the highest level of government so as to avoid scrutiny by senior military and police officers who might have been implicated by the intelligence it contains. This is plausible because the report names numerous police and army officers, as well as a number of southern Muslim politicians in Thaksin’s ruling Thai Rak Thai Party (the Wadah faction Muslim politicians of the former National Aspiration Party). Internal evidence indicates that the report was delivered in early February 2004, several weeks before it was passed to me. As indicated later, this report evidently reached the desk of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security Affairs, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, but it was never fully publicized, and only

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border a brief, doctored version finally appeared in Chavalit’s published memoirs in mid-2005. The PIN document begins with an introduction that proposes a framework for identifying the groups responsible for the arms raid and school burnings of January 4, 2004. The events of January 4, it states, constitute an example of a problem that has developed over a long period in the southern border provinces, a problem that combines “the social psychology of a part of the population who are determined to establish an independent State of Pattani,” together with other forces, or “third hands,” who foment events to disguise their own political agendas and conflicts: This document compiles and analyses information from many sources from which we can summarize that no matter which group carried out the action, they are always actions of the military aiming to gain political advantage. These actions always need forces within the local area and forces outside, connected together from earlier alliances and joint actions between them. Each time in the past there has been a person behind these events who has political objectives that differ from the way they are made to appear. (emphasis added)13

There follows a section that presents brief descriptions of disturbances in the southern border provinces from 1993 to 2003, with claims to identify the perpetrators of these actions. The writer(s) report on the burning of 36 schools in August 1993, which was never fully explained by the then Democrat-led government. They note a contrast between the police reports, which claimed that separatist groups were responsible, and the suspicions of local Muslim villagers that separatist groups had been hired by state officials to burn the schools and thus disguise their own involvement. This is followed by descriptions of a number of events, including: arms heists from depots in Yala Province during 2002 and 2003, reporting local villagers’ views that the guns had disappeared long before the actual raids; and armed attacks on police and military posts by gunmen in May 2002, when captured gunmen admitted to receiving payment. To reinforce the point that these events were the disguised efforts of state officials with political agendas, the document quotes a statement from the then Minister of the Interior (Purachai Piamsomboon) in March 2002 that the perpetrators of such actions were government officials.14

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Marc Askew The next section of the document describes the events of January 4, 2004, followed by details of attacks and killings up to the end of that month for each day. Although by the third week of January the violence

Table. People’s Intelligence Network (PIN) document “Action at Cho Airong–2004,” ca. late January–early February 2004, 97 pages Introductory summary, followed by: List of events—school burnings, shootings, and bombings 1994–2001 List of events—the Yala arms raids 2002, 2003 List of events—“The Action at Cho Airong–2004,” pp. 3–15 1. Historical origins of the Muslims in the four provinces 2. Intelligence on the action at Cho Airong from the public in three border provinces 3. Intelligence from informants in the Upper South 4. Intelligence sources in Bangkok Clandestine forces in the lower southern region 5. Clandestine forces aiming to establish an independent Pattani State 6. Clandestine forces of the police in the lower southern region 7. Clandestine forces of General “Kitti Rattanachaya” 8. Clandestine forces of DP politician “Thepthuak” 9. Den Tohmeena and the Pattani State 10. Clandestine forces in Surathani Province 11. Clandestine forces in Ranong Province 12. Clandestine forces in Phuket Province (blank) 13. Clandestine forces in Phanga Province 14. Clandestine forces in Chumphon Province 15. Clandestine forces in Nakonsithammarat Province (blank) 16. Clandestine forces in Songkhla Province (blank) 17. Clandestine forces in Krabi Province (blank) 18. The people behind the planning of the Action at Cho Airong, 2004 19. The foundation of the problem of the four provinces in southern Thailand 20. Directions for solving the problem

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border was clearly changing in character, with the murders of Buddhist monks, the writer(s) persist with the interpretation that the events have been engineered by clandestine networks of government officials controlled by a “third hand.” Reports by police that separatists were behind the events are contrasted with other reports by the PIN’s informants that the action was engineered by the clandestine forces of a leading Democrat Party politician of Surathani Province (“Thepthuak,” the nickname of prominent DP leader Suthep Thuaksuban) in concert with local groups. It is claimed that Thepthuak was employing his clandestine networks (comprising military and police) to engineer events to provoke state forces into crushing Den Tohmeena’s local support networks in the border provinces, which are alleged here to be based on a firmly entrenched and expansive BRN-C separatist network. Thepthuak’s alleged plan was to pave the way to consolidate Democrat Party political control and his own economic influence (through control of illegal trade) in the border provinces.15 The PIN report records various assessments of the January 4 events from informants in the three provinces, defined as “the public”: local villagers, Muslim academics, and some close associates of key figures in the army and police. A number of eyewitness accounts from Muslim rubber growers in districts where schools were torched is assembled to suggest that the arsonists were likely to have been Thai Buddhists of military and police background, and that in some cases district headmen (kamnan) may have cooperated. Specific details are intermeshed with broader assessments from informants, combining stories of past school burnings, weapons thefts, and murders of police accomplices. Other informants in Narathiwat villages reported that Thai volunteer rangers (Thahan Phran) had engaged in school burnings at earlier times, and it was widely believed that two volunteer ranger units stationed in Narathiwat and neighboring provinces were involved in the January 4 events. Sources claimed that two corpses of Muslim men from Yala found in Narathiwat on January 10 had been murdered by rangers because these men knew of the rangers’ involvement. Local informants in Cho Airong District believed that a proportion of the weapons (mainly M-16 assault rifles) stolen on January 4 had in fact been stolen much earlier by elements of the Thai military and sold to separatist forces in Aceh, having been transported from Satun Province to the Malaysian state of Perlis, and from there to Sumatra.16 Two general interpretations of “the people behind the January 4 events” are presented (in a subsection of “2. Intelligence on the action at Cho

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Marc Askew Airong,” in the Table above), based on information gleaned from operatives in the field: (1) that the attack was the combined work of three groups, comprising Muslims of southern Thailand affiliated with BERSATU, armed members of “Mujahideen Malaysia” (Kampulan Mujahideen Malaysia), and government officials with allegiances to the Democrat Party phuak, and (2) that it represents the work of a large movement among groups connected to a former high-ranking commander in the south’s Fourth Army Region (Kitti Rattanachaya). It is alleged that this officer clique has intimate links with the southern Democrat Party, and that they are the same groups that staged the still-unsolved 1993 school burnings. Regardless of differing details about the exact identity of the plotters referred to by the PIN’s informants, the writer(s) emphasize that “every source reports that the public in the area believe that government officials, or former officials, are behind all these events, both past events and this one.”17 A following subsection, based on the opinions of intellectuals and Muslim academics in the border provinces, alleges the involvement of highand middle-ranking police acting in concert with criminal groups and local kamnan, with the complicit knowledge of a group of southern Democrat Party politicians (nine of these are named). One police colonel who formerly worked in Yala Province is said to be maintaining a clandestine force of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, diesel fuel smuggling, and gun running. This officer, in turn, has links with the gangs of other police. Another officer in the town of Yala oversees a protection racket that extorts a regular income (kep kha khum khrong) from Sino-Thai traders. The same officer earlier maintained an extortion racket in Narathiwat, where he used separatists linked with PULO to assist in his endeavors in return for his protection. The PIN’s sources maintain that these police gangs are directly or indirectly connected with Democrat politicians, in particular with Thepthuak.18 According to the PIN’s informant reports on local gossip, Thepthuak had arranged for ten teams (drawn from his police-linked and vote-canvasser networks) to travel south from his province to burn the Narathiwat schools. Thepthuak allegedly hired each team for 500,000 Baht and spent a total of 5 million Baht funding the operation.19 A following section of the report alleges that General Kitti Rattanachaya assisted in planning the attacks of January 4. This interpretation is largely based on informants’ claims of Kitti’s association with the school burnings of 1993, which they argue were engineered by him through two lower-

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border ranking generals, with the aim of gaining an increase in the Fourth Army Region’s budget and a promotion for Kitti to the rank of regional commander when he discovered the arsonists.20 This is a patently ridiculous claim since Kitti had been Fourth Army Region commander from 1991! This group allegedly utilized a number of prominent separatists well known to Kitti to stage the school arson attacks of 1993. Kitti allegedly planned to have a number of the Muslim separatists killed to ensure that his involvement in the arson attacks was never revealed, but they fled overseas. Some of these claims concerning Kitti derive from informants close to one of the separatists, named Rusman, who was involved in the 1993 arson. Rusman was murdered at an internet café in Yala shortly after the January 4 attacks in 2004, allegedly on Kitti’s orders. The report goes on to cite informants’ arguments that Kitti was involved in planning the January 4 raids because he aspired to gain a position as chief security advisor to Prime Minister Thaksin, although why he should make such an effort to occupy a largely honorary position is not explained.21 The basis for the PIN’s allegation of Kitti’s involvement and motivation is flimsy. Kitti did indeed gain appointment as a special security advisor to Thaksin in the week following the January 4 attacks, but his strongly held view that the unrest was a well-planned, separatist-inspired insurgency was not taken seriously by the prime minister and his urging that negotiations be initiated was ignored. Frustrated with Thaksin’s lack of interest in his proposals, Kitti resigned in late 2004 and focused on publishing his own assessments of the unrest and making comments in the press.22 The weight of detail in the PIN report is centered on an outline of various “clandestine forces” in the south and the border provinces, including military/police networks, Thepthuak’s phuak, and Muslim separatists supported by politicians (sections 5 to 17 of the Table). Here I focus on the alleged separatist planning of Den Tohmeena and politicians of the Wadah faction.23 A description of former and current separatist organizations and their leaders is provided, with most attention given to BRN-C, a separatist organization that emerged from the late 1980s under the leadership, it claims, of Den Tohmeena (son of the famed Haji Sulong), formerly Member of Parliament and leader of the Muslim Wadah faction in parliament until 1996. It is claimed that Den maintains a range of clandestine activities aimed at simultaneously promoting his local prominence and nurturing separatism, notably through his patronage of Islamic schools.24 The writer(s)

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Marc Askew emphasize that BRN-C is the most powerful clandestine organization in the border provinces, and judge that within two to three years (i.e., by 2006–2007) it will have the political and military capacity to engage in a major campaign. Through a new organization that the writer(s) name “New BERSATU,” Den is coordinating with other separatist groups. They emphasize that shortly after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, a conference was held among these groups, under the aegis of New BERSATU, to commence operations to achieve an independent Pattani state by following a “1000 day plan,” organized in seven stages. They conclude that there are now two years remaining for this plan to be implemented.25 They detail the separatist networks of Den and other Wadah faction politicians, specifying Den’s elder brother Amin (now deceased, 2003) as a key BRN-C official who has worked closely with leading teachers at the Thammawitthaya Foundation School in Yala, where students have been secretly recruited.26 The BRN-C membership includes the Wadah faction politicians Ariphen Uttrasin and Najmuddin Umar, as well as Ariphen’s brother Romali. The BRN-C separatist network has doubled as a political machine to maintain votes and benefits for the Wadah group, and 40 to 50 percent of all TRT members in the three provinces are said to be BRN-C members.27 It is alleged that Den used his influence with Wadah politicians to push Thaksin into dissolving the SBPAC, so as to weaken state agencies on the border, a charge later made in public by a number of writers.28 Interestingly enough, Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, the leader of the Wadah faction from 1996 (“Wan Noor,” TRT Minister of the Interior from October 2002 to 2004), is not implicated in separatist activity. The document stresses Den’s declining influence since becoming senator (in 2000) and his growing conflict with Wan Noor on the question of separatism, which the latter supposedly does not support.29 Although it is a fact that Wan Noor and Den are now estranged, the PIN’s claim to their differing stances on separatism is entirely speculative: their rift had to do with Wan Noor’s reneging on an agreement for the periodic rotation of Wadah members in ministerial office. Despite all this detail on separatism, the writer(s) conclude that Den and the Wadah politicians were not involved in the January 4 attacks. Rather, the raid was orchestrated by Thepthuak’s DP/military-crony clique.30 Their claim is that the New BERSATU’s “1000 day–7 stage plan” for implementing a Pattani state (already discovered by Thai intelligence agencies in 2003) was interrupted and preempted by Thepthuak’s plot.31.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border The conclusion to the PIN document offers a classic Marxist structural explanation of the southern border unrest. Key internal factors are the structure of local social elites and the unbalanced economic foundations of society under capitalism. These have combined with particular conditions prevailing in the Deep South. Differences in religion, culture, and the reception and transmission of knowledge make the the PIN document offers a borderland prone to unrest, although the classic Marxist structural report claims: “These differences are not enough to prevent the two groups existing explanation together. History shows that Buddhists and Muslims have been capable of existing peacefully together for a long time.”32 The problem is that these differences are exploited by competing Thai Buddhist and Muslim elites. Ethnoreligious differences among elites are less important than a more fundamental conflict over controlling the means of production and exploiting the resources of the border provinces.33 Unbalanced economic development has combined with a conflict over resources led by government officials at both formal (classified here as “state authority–1”) and clandestine (“state authority–2”) levels to render the borderland perpetually vulnerable to conflict and disruption. To the PIN report writer(s), the overarching cause of unrest is the development and persisting power of clandestine state forces and their efforts to take illegitimate control of resources through the illegal economy: “It is a movement aiming at political advantage by exploiting the differences among ethnic elites and the international situation to obscure the real reasons for conflict.”34 The international situation has been generated by the conflict between American imperial designs on oil resources of the Middle East and the resulting consolidation of Muslim opposition to this. This global conflict has been assimilated into southern Thailand’s Muslim provinces and is being used to reinforce the separatist agendas of groups there. Overlaying this ideological dimension of southern unrest and tension is the domestic political conflict between the governing Thai Rak Thai Party and the Democrats. The Democrats, voted out of office in 2001, are bent on protecting the power and interests of their extensive phakphuak (clique networks) in the region.35 The PIN report of early 2004 is a questionable document based on an incomplete assemblage of fragmentary data and rumors, tied together by a

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Marc Askew speculative conspiracy theory aiming to discredit the Democrat Party. Many suspects are identified, but causal connections and motivations are inferred more than demonstrated through the logic of conspiracy. The report is unable to delineate clearly the intersection between The PIN report…is a networks of officials, the Democrat phuak, and Muslim separatists in planning and questionable document executing the January 4 raids. However, there are other ways to read this document. It represents an analysis of the earliest phase of the current “fire in the south,” and it is understandable that the compilers linked the arms raid and the school arson with earlier events of a similar type. Also, it represents the typically politicized character of intelligencegathering in Thailand. In this case it supports the idea that the violence is being provoked by Thaksin’s political enemies and is clearly geared to supporting the government. But more than this—and for all its faults—the PIN document highlights the vulnerability of the borderland to manipulation by interest/criminal networks and their role in perpetuating disorder, a suspicion that persists among ordinary people of the border communities (both Muslim and Buddhist) as well as key protagonists in the struggle to define the character and origins of the problem of the south. Notably, suspicions that the January 4 arms raid had been staged by a “third hand” were voiced publicly by a number of writers during that year, using the apparently unsolved mystery of the 1993 attacks as an explicit precedent (Mansoor 2004: 48; Sathian 2005: 55–58). In the light of accumulated intelligence, it is now evident that the January 4 attacks were undertaken and planned by militant networks (Nanthadet 2006: 57–60). The repeated citing of the 1993 arson as a precedent to prove that January 4 was a case of “creating a situation” (srang sathanakan) is an example of how rumor takes on a life of its own. During the 1990s Kitti Rattanachaya repeatedly argued that these attacks had been undertaken by a splinter faction of PULO (New PULO) as a protest against the truce talks between the mainstream PULO and the military. Yet other officials and “informed sources” continued to argue that they had been staged by disaffected supporters of the military clique of the coup-leader Suchinda Kraprayoon to destabilize the then Democrat government.36 In mid-2005, the leading former separatist figure Wan Kadir Che Man announced in an interview that the 1993 arson had been

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border committed by “militant groups” engaged in long-term armed separatist struggle, a statement that vindicated Kitti Rattanachaya’s earlier diagnosis.37 Despite this revelation, however, some southern Muslim advocates continue to insist that both the August 1993 and the January 4, 2004 attacks were staged by officials.38 Elements of the PIN report’s conspiracy theory concerning maverick political/military interest groups were made public a year and a half after its production. They appear in General Chavalit’s political memoir, The Last War. Ghost-written by Bunkrom Dongbangsattan working under Chavalit’s instructions, The Last War was published in June 2005 in an effort to resuscitate Chavalit’s tarnished reputation following a lackluster performance in 2001–2004 as deputy prime minister for security affairs (Bunkrom 2005). The PIN-generated conspiracy idea is presented in the form of an extensive official memo, together with general commentary, in chapter 14 of the book (entitled “School Burnings for Secret Budgets/Politics”). This memo is dated January 27, 2004 and is stamped “Top Secret,” but with the names of groups and individuals blanked out in marker pen. It reproduces very closely the claims of the PIN report that the arms raid was the work of a group aiming to discredit the Thaksin government, destroy the reputation of Wan Noor, and undermine the voting bases and networks of Den Tohmeena and Najmuddin Umar. Information that ten teams were organized to undertake the raid matches the PIN report details on the teams organized by Thepthuak’s lieutenants, and confirms that the PIN report had indeed been scrutinized by government intelligence analysts and seen by Chavalit (Bunkrom 2005: 137–39). A journalist reviewing Chavalit’s book focused on the claims of this intelligence memo and dismissed its contents as a “wild theory.” He rightly queried the plausibility of this conspiracy theory, pointing out that the plotters’ alleged aims had already been achieved by 2005 (Wan Noor lost his position as Minister of the Interior during 2004 and the Wadah faction lost all seats in the February 2005 election), yet the unrest still had not eased, so how could this anti-Wadah conspiracy argument explain the ongoing border turbulence?39 This criticism is a telling one. Chavalit’s text does not reproduce the charges that the Democrat “Thepthuak” had been a planner, and the names in the reproduced memo are carefully blacked out. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that Chavalit’s purpose in using the document publicly was less to prove the theory’s veracity than to provide an outline of the wider

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Marc Askew problem of state officials’ corruption, political and interest group influence, and illegal activity. This problem, he argues, is the foundation (pheunthan) of borderland conflict and instability (Bunkrom 2005: 130–33). After Chavalit’s memoir of mid-2005, the PIN report’s particular grand conspiracy theory did not appear in any further public documentation. Nevertheless, suspicions of Wadah politicians were widespread in government intelligence circles and were voiced by some opposition Democrat politicians in parliament. All the Muslim politicians named in the PIN report (Den Tohmeena, Ariphen Uttrasin, and Najmuddin Umar) were suspected of being involved in separatist organizations and the January 4 arms raid; however, the actual charges against them were not anticipated by the PIN.40 The Wadah politicians had been under surveillance by security agencies from as early as 2002, and the PIN’s allegations were nothing new.41 Moreover, certain individuals connected to the Wadah politicians who were sought by police in 2004 has been under suspicion by the previous Democrat government during the late 1990s.42 A warrant was only issued for Najmuddin Umar, who was charged with funding militant groups through the PUSAKA Muslim educational foundation (founded in 1994) of which he was chairman.43 In proclaiming his innocence, Najmuddin struck out at the police with his own conspiracy allegations, which curiously echoed elements of the PIN report’s conspiratorial logic: he claimed that a senior policeman and two politicians were the masterminds behind most of the violent incidents rocking the south—including abductions of local Muslims—with the complementary aims of destabilizing the Thaksin government, discrediting the Muslim Deputy Prime Minister Wan Noor, and maintaining their power in the region. Charges against Najmuddin Umar were dropped in 2005 for lack of evidence.44 Aside from the highly questionable grand conspiracy theories alleging the culpability of the Democrats and Wadah politicians, a more persistent and widespread conspiracy framework concerns “vested interests,” who are believed by many to be fueling the violence for pragmatic benefit. As highlighted below, such suspicions reveal how the realities of the disorderly state and disorderly border have created conditions in which these suspicions, based on a deeply entrenched lack of trust in officialdom and other powerful figures, help people comprehend the causes of violence in the context of a clandestine, network-based insurgency in which rumor plays an important strategic role.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border Crime, Influence, and Vested Interests: The Persistent Suspicion From mid-2004, the center of gravity of most domestic and international commentary and analysis moved to emphasizing militant Islamic-driven separatist insurgency as the driving force of the disturbances. Nevertheless, the idea that the violence can be traced to underworld schemes to control territory—or to a cluster of smaller political turf wars and conflicts—is still, by early 2007, embraced by a variety of groups, including a number of high-ranking military officers, southern academics and intellectuals, some local intelligence operatives, and many ordinary southerners (both Buddhist and Muslim). This section briefly outlines the character of illegality and influence in the southern borderland, and then considers how it features in differing arguments about the nature, causes, and perpetrators of the violence in the south. In common with Thailand’s other border zones straddling Burma and Cambodia, the southern borderland is a weakly regulated interstitial space that is a major site for a range of illicit and illegal activities in which elements of the military and police are actively engaged (see Battersby 1998–1999). The southern borderland remains highly problematic for the Thai authorities. It is a site that hosts numerous activities ranging from drug running to people and arms smuggling. These activities are tied to Malaysian and Thai crime syndicates and networks of Thai the southern borderland bureaucrats, and they are facilitated by official corruption on both sides of the border. Despite is a weakly regulated periodic arrests of officials in the south interstitial space (especially border customs officers, on charges of collusion in drug and people smuggling), the sporadic attempts of Thai authorities to regulate illicit cross-border movements and transactions (largely in response to international pressure) are themselves undermined by corrupt officials linked to powerful groups of “influential figures” who have a vested interest in keeping the borderland porous and malleable. National-level politicians have played a key role in facilitating and protecting illegal trading in arms and goods, utilizing their connections when in government and their webs of phuak at the provincial level (Pasuk and Sungsidh 1994; Pasuk, Sungsidh, and Nualnoi 1998).

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Marc Askew In addition, these networks have been embroiled in what was, before the outburst of unrest, a lucrative tourist industry centering on the sex trade. Various interest groups have benefited from rent-seeking, such as the police who demand regular payments from the many brothel keepers of the tourist-oriented border towns and settlements in Betong (Yala), Dan Nork and Hat Yai (Songkhla), and Sunghai Kolok (Narathiwat) (see Askew and Cohen 2004, Askew 2006b). Others have been sustained by drug sales connected with major discotheque venues, as well as gambling dens that flourish throughout the region, many of them patronized by local- and provincial-level politicians. Violence is a characteristic feature of the southern borderland, which also reflects a broader Thai phenomenon. The illegal economy of the south, linked with political groups and their allied networks, is highly competitive and rife with violent turf wars. Hired gunmen (meubeun) are employed to enforce compliance or eliminate opposition. Overlaying this is the prevalence of murder as a technique used among businessmen and local politicians (often the same group) to eliminate political rivals, a pattern generic to Thailand. Although the The illegal economy of the southern provinces resemble much of the rest of the country—and south…is highly competitive particularly other border areas—in and rife with violent turf wars patterns of illegality, competition, and violence, these patterns are made more intractable there by ethnoreligious differences and the enduring residues of earlier separatist conflicts. Thus separatist insurgents (whether lapsed, dormant, or active) have played a role at various levels. For example, in 2003, a member of the Gerakan Mujahideen Islam Pattani killed by the police in Pattani was identified as a key player in arms smuggling to the Aceh separatists.45 Reports by an investigative journalist in 2002 that separatist radicals found it easy to train on the Thai side of the border by paying protection money to Thai politicians, soldiers, and gangsters are entirely plausible, despite the expected denials by officials.46 Overlaying this pattern of violence is the established system of extortion prevailing in the thinly settled and densely forested areas of the borderland. In Yala, Sino-Thai rubber plantation owners have for decades been resigned to paying protection money to gangs—ostensibly for “taking care” of their properties—since the time when communist bands exacted “tax” for their

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border sustenance.47 District- and provincial-level officials and police have never been able, or willing, to reduce effectively the pervasiveness and strength of illegal and influence networks. For some, this is because they are themselves involved in illegal activities; others cannot do much because they know their delinquent colleagues are protected by superiors or powerful politicians; still others, however conscientious, are simply too intimidated by the power of particular criminal networks and gangs to do anything more than reach temporary accommodations and agreements.48 During 2004 and 2005, a number of former military men (such as Thanapol Boonyopatham, Harn Leenanond, Kitti Rattanachaya, and Chavalit Yongchaiyudh) highlighted the significance of crime and influence networks in weakening the borderland. These veterans of former counterinsurgency operations accepted that the current border violence was primarily the work of a sophisticated clandestine network of radical Islamic-inspired insurgents embedded in local communities. However, they also stressed that this crisis revealed how society and state on the borderland had been profoundly undermined by corruption, crime, and influence networks connected to local and national politicians.49 In July 2005, during a televised exchange with Anand Panyarachun, head of the newly established NRC, Thaksin reaffirmed his interpretation of the southern unrest voiced in May 2004: namely, that although Islamist ideology was clearly a force motivating Muslim youth to engage in violent, separatist-motivated insurgency, it was “influential figures” and their drug rings that were playing a major role in funding and manipulating these groups behind the scenes.50 Thaksin’s claim might be treated as an effort to salvage credibility by presenting a modified version of his pre-2004 declaration of the southern “problem” as fundamentally one of “banditry” and disorderly vested interests. He was, in effect, proposing a conspiracy theory that depicted the unrest almost as a sham insurgency manipulated by venal interest groups, not ideologues. According to him, the war on drugs—a centerpiece of his campaign to discipline, cleanse, and develop the nation—had provoked a reaction among entrenched groups on the border that were now exploiting a number of key social deficits in the Muslim south, including inadequate economic development and education. Reports during 2005 did suggest that underworld and clandestine interest groups were somehow involved. Only a month after Thaksin’s statement, narcotics control officers and military figures in the south argued that there was “clear evidence” that

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drug gangs were paying Muslim youth to undertake attacks and murders, apparently with the objective of spreading fear and weakening surveillance of their trafficking operations.51 Later in the year, a number of key Muslim drug traffickers with connections to separatist groups were arrested, and police judged that there were ten drug-trafficking rings financially supporting southern insurgents’ operations to the level of 200 to 300 million Baht annually ($US5.8 to 8.7 million).52 In mid-2006, police identified a major drug dealer in Narathiwat as a key organizer in a wave of 60 bombings that month.53 Yet despite the fact that investigations have demonstrated a connection between drug-generated funds and those conducting the killings, agreement on the respective role of underworld groups in attacks—in terms of personnel, planning, and motivation—has not emerged. One widespread interpretation (particularly among ordinary villagers) is that drug-generated funds have been used by underworld forces to hire Muslim youth to undertake attacks for the promise of money and/or drugs. It is also maintained (a more likely scenario) that drug trafficking is an integral activity maintained by the insurgent networks themselves, following a trafficking is an common pattern in other parts of the world integral activity (Sullivan 2005). This is Kitti’s view, which emphasizes that all the various culprit groups identified as political, influence, and underworld networks are subsumed by a militant-separatist insurgent network (Kitti 2005: 86–87). The boundary between militant separatism and criminality in southern Thailand has always been shifting and blurred (Croissant 2005: 25–26; ICG 2005: 6ff ). Aside from a focus on drug rings, there is also a common view that much of the killing is generated by political and personal disputes—a persistent interpretation that is encouraged by: (1) the style of many of the killings (drive-by shootings); (2) continued uncertainty about the identities of gunmen, bombers, and arsonists; and (3) the characteristics of their victims, who have included many local politicians. The persistence of popular speculation about the role of personal conflicts, political interests, and the underworld in the violence highlights that fact that no authoritative, adequately documented and fully publicized analysis of underworld-separatist interconnections has so far been produced. It is not surprising, then, that different protagonists in the politics of the

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border southern “problem” accord the underworld of interest groups a varied importance in the disturbances: some argue that interest groups are the central instigators and provocateurs, while others maintain that underworld groups are supplementary, not central, players in the violence. Judging by a classified intelligence summary circulated by the National Security Council (NSC) to senior officials in mid-2005, it appears that by this time there was some consensus in the highest ranks of Thailand’s intelligence apparatus that underworld interests and political/personal agendas were contributing to the violence. Eleven pages in length, this summary (entitled “The Development of the Groups of Disturbance Instigators”) pays most attention to tracing the ten-year development of clandestine Islamist separatist networks in the border provinces, though a half-page section is devoted to “Coordination and Cooperation with Political and Influential Groups.” This section claims that throughout the past, intelligence and security agencies have consistently found that violent events in Narathiwat, Pattani, Songkhla, and Yala have been instigated by four groups for particular reasons: 1. Disturbance instigators (klum ko khwam mai sangop, i.e., separatists), who engage in violence for purposes of creating situations (srang sathanakan) to reduce trust in the authority of the state, put pressure on state officials, and spread fear as part of their subversive activities; 2. Political groups at both national and local levels, for purposes of maintaining political bases and reducing support for political opponents; 3. Influential groups involved in illegal activities, including drug trafficking and arms smuggling (klum itthiphon), that are competing among themselves for control, taking revenge on officials, and creating situations in order to effect the transfer or promotion of selected officials; and 4. Personal conflicts such as those prevalent in other regions of the country, although these are not numerous. After this itemization of groups, the section concludes with the judgment that: “Considering the preceding period [i.e., from early 2004] we see that at present, in June 2005, there is an intimate interconnection between the

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Marc Askew disturbance makers and these groups, since it has been found that some people apprehended and identified as perpetrators have backgrounds in all four groups.”54 What is distinctive about this brief portrayal is that while criminals and politicians are implicated in the southern violence, they are not depicted as manipulators of separatists, as advanced by Thaksin in the same period. Violent acts committed by influential figures, political rivals, and feuding individuals appear to be a palpable component of the ongoing violence, but their relative contribution to the overall level of killings is not possible to calculate, leaving much room for speculation. Some sources postulate that there is an overlap in membership among separatist-insurgent, criminal, and political interest groups; others presume that such groups are distinguishable from ideologically motivated insurgents. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this criminal-underworld/competing-interestgroup theme has been used to buttress arguments that assign different emphases to the causes and nature of the southern problem. Thus the NRC, in both its draft of October 2005 and its final report of June 2006, justifies its stress on addressing generalized violence and structural factors— instead of isolating separatist groups for treatment—largely because its key members argue that numerous groups are perpetrating violence and the separatists are only one group among the perpetrators. This scenario supports the NRC’s overall peacemaking prognosis that multidirectional violence is the problem (or, rather, “disease”) to be addressed, that southern Muslims are victims of numerous injustices, and that the long-term solutions (or “treatments”) lie in rectifying inequities, imbalances, and injustices (cultural, environmental, economic, and legal; see NRC 2005: 11–12, NRC 2006: 14–16). The NRC’s emphasis on the plurality of violent actors reflects the opinions of some key southern Muslim intellectuals and academics, who defend this view by highlighting the continuing failure of the authorities to identify and apprehend the great majority of culprits. Some of them are also reluctant to accept the view that the Narathiwat arms raid of January 2004 and later coordinated attacks were the work of separatists, in some cases arguing that if separatist forces truly possessed such a high level of organizational and military capacity, they would have taken over the three border provinces by now. Interestingly, these conclusions coincide with the interpretations of the PIN document discussed earlier: namely, that for

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border many years numerous conflicts over resources (political and economic) between various powerful groups have been staged in the border provinces and blamed on separatism as a cover.55 The long-established reality of the disorderly state, and of The NRC’s [report]…reflects the influence and crime networks in the southern borderland, underpins opinions of some key southern the continuing doubts of some Muslim intellectuals prominent southern Muslims (in intellectual, civil society, and political circles) that separatist insurgents are the key driving force of the violence consuming their region. Interpretations that claim an important role for interest groups, criminal networks, and government officials in the current violence have continued to be voiced in recent months. In late August 2006, a new peace initiative was announced. It was fostered by the Armed Forces Security Center (AFSC), an independent unit under the military’s Supreme Command Headquarters. The initiative aimed to bring together former leaders of and sympathizers with insurgent groups to express their opposition to the current violence. A trilingual booklet (in Thai, Yawi, and English) was distributed to explain the initiative, commencing in its first paragraph with the following unequivocal assertion: The continued violent situation in the three southern border provinces is caused by such groups as rival political groups, regional influential/interest groups, separatist groups and narcotics groups.56

This summary of the “groups perpetrating violence” (klum kokhwamrunraeng) prefaces the main rationale for the peace initiative: that despite these various “ill-intentioned” groups, the great majority of the population (who are bearing the brunt of this violence) are against this violence. What is the basis of this claim about the plurality of violent groups, and what are their linkages, if any? Queried by this author about these points, Lt. General Vaipot Srinual, commander of the AFSC, noted that his judgments were based on intelligence data (presumably military intelligence agencies). His view was that in “lower-level actions” (arson, vandalism of

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Marc Askew road signs, and drive-by shootings) unemployed and drug-addicted youth were employed, and these individuals could also be members of the entourages of influential people, local politicians, and ideologically inspired groups alike. They were brought together easily for particular tasks because they already knew one another and were formed into a loose organization mobilized through both self-interest and ideology. He went on to argue that the ideologically hardline leadership is quite content to use a variety of groups in its strategy because the movement “has a shortage of manpower and is unable to gain enough support among people in the provinces through its ideology.”57 Lt. General Vaipot’s view poses a dynamic that is the reverse of Thaksin’s claims made in 2004 and 2005 that influential groups were manipulating separatist and jihadist ideology: to Vaipot, it was separatist insurgents who were setting the agenda for the violence committed by varied and overlapping influence and interest groups, not the other way around. Vaipot’s diagnosis is an extension of the brief points made in the NSC summary of mid-2005, which highlighted overlaps among separatists, politicians, and drug runners, but it goes further because he assigns to separatists the key organizing role. This identification is used by Vaipot to reinforce his argument (emphasized in his peace project document) that the “root cause” of the problem of the south is a weak local government administration that has never been able to effectively address basic problems such as narcotics and crime, and has not served the population efficiently. The enduring problems that persist due to this weakness of the local state make the borderland highly vulnerable to exploitation by groups such as Islamist-inspired separatists. Vaipot’s theme of a weak state and disorderly border bears some similarity to the portrait of the PIN intelligence document, which emphasizes how clandestine elite interests (both Buddhist and Muslim) control the borderland and foment disturbances at the expense not only of the state but of ordinary Buddhist and analyses diverge on the question of Muslim villagers. At the same underlying structural causes time, Vaipot’s contention that separatists are only one (although apparently the most important) of the forces animating the continuing border violence comes close to the assessment of the NRC report; however, these analyses diverge

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border on the question of underlying structural causes, with Vaipot highlighting drug problems, unemployment, and administrative negligence, and discounting the relevance of cultural identity and language to the key dynamics underlying the violence. Vaipot was not the only figure commenting on the significance of influence networks and the drug underworld during August–September 2006. It is significant that, just when the timing and scale of coordinated attacks and bombings seemed to indicate that the violence was fundamentally a separatist-directed campaign, a book should appear which accords a major role to underworld forces and influence groups in the ongoing violence. Published in August 2006, the book Secret Action to Quench the Fire in the South is authored by Lt. General Nanthadet Meksawat, formerly deputy director of Thailand’s Center of National Intelligence Coordination (until his retirement in 2005; Nanthadet 2006). Nanthadet is highly critical of Thaksin and his government, and the book functions partly as a vindicatory memoir, stressing that his findings about the prevalence of militant Muslim youth networks in 2003 were ignored by leading officials. Nanthadet emphasizes that the current wave of violence dates from 2001, and that its escalation from 2004 has emerged from a convergence of global, national, and regional processes/events interacting on the borderland, including: 1. The effects of the globalization of Islamic militancy in the “war on terror,” which radicalized Muslim youth in the border provinces; 2. The violent responses of interest groups to the Thaksin government’s attempted suppression of drugs rings and influence networks; and 3. A dramatic expansion of insurgent networks and levels of violence, which grew in response to the government’s mistakes of 2004 (Krue Se and Tak Bai) and their skillful exploitation by insurgents’ propaganda in convincing local people that the state is committing the violence and is an enemy of Islam. Through 2002 to 2003, local and international events worked to bring about a heightening of suspicion and violence in the borderland, involving criminal groups, small bands of separatists, new Islamist militants, and state officials. Nanthadet notes that there was a significant mobilization and organization of militant youth groups in the Muslim south beginning

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Marc Askew in 2003, in direct response to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His intelligence at this time indicated the establishment of networks at the district (amphoe) level, supported by regular village-based financial support and guerilla-style military training of Muslim youth groups (Nanthadet 2006: 56). Beginning in January–March 2003, Thaksin’s controversial campaign against drug and influence groups, involving extrajudicial killings of suspected individuals, “woke up” the underworld groups, who began to promote networks of youth to use as a front line in committing assassinations and attacks on police posts. Nanthadet notes that a proportion of the killings taking place during Thaksin’s war on drugs and influence were in fact due to personal and political rivalries and score-settling, but police were often unable to identify killers, and this led to a profound erosion of trust in government officials among local people and corresponding suspicions that officials were the perpetrators (Nanthadet 2006: 41–43). By June 2003, ideologically inspired youth networks and criminal/interest groups had joined hands to contest state authority in the Muslim-majority provinces of the south, the cumulative result of this convergence being that the border provinces became an area “free of state control” (Nanthadet 2006: 41). Nanthadet argues that criminal/interest groups are playing a major role in funding the insurgency, with the basic agenda of protecting their own turf. While emphasizing the importance of militant Islam among the borderland youth, he does not reduce their activities to a simple process of manipulation by drug-running groups, as in Thaksin’s formulation of the dynamic. Indeed, contrary to other conspiracy arguments featuring clandestine interest groups, he argues, on the basis of his own investigations, that the January 4 arms raid was almost entirely the work of the new, young district-level separatist networks, whose decentralized and clandestine organization had escaped detection by Thailand’s government (Nanthadet 2006: 55–60). Nanthadet makes three important points. First, he emphasizes how the insurgents have benefited from low levels of trust in the state: these low levels of trust are a corollary of the dubious heritage of a disorderly state/ disorderly border, not only the legacy of the period from 2001 under Thaksin’s government policies. Second, due to the inability of police to apprehend and identify most of the bombers and assailants, distrust in the state among ordinary people has increased. As a result, the insurgents, who continue to cloak their identities in mystery, find it easy to spread the

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belief, through gossip and leaflets, that state officials are undertaking the killings of local people. Recent protests by villagers and demonstrators surrounding the death of a local imam in Yala (on November 3, 2006) highlight these pervasive suspicions in some communities.58 Third, while insurgents…benefited Nanthadet highlights the role of the rise of global Islamic militancy and world events from 2001– from low levels of trust 2003 in laying the foundations for southern in the state violence, he stresses that a critical long-term condition underlying the turbulence is the prevalence of predatory interests and corruption among groups of state officials who have long governed the borderland in concert with local underworld groups. Correcting and disciplining this maverick and disorderly governance on the borderland, he asserts, has never been genuinely undertaken by any former government (Nanthadet 2006: 8–9). It is worth noting that the general theme of the neglected and manipulated borderland has been voiced not only by military/intelligence figures such as Nanthadet, Vaipot (and also Kitti Rattanachaya), and highranking police in the south, but also by Muslim intellectuals/advocates such as Mansoor Sar-Lae, Nikraman Suleiman, and Worawit Baru (see, e.g., Mansoor 2004: 49–50). Some of the latter also accept the diagnosis that drug-addicted young Muslims are being paid by influential figures to conduct the daily attacks on innocent residents; moreover, they also acknowledge that the bulk of “influential figures” in the borderland are Muslim (comprising provincial-level politicians and village headmen), though insisting that they are protected by even more powerful and manipulative Thai Buddhist officials.595 The Thai Buddhist state is therefore at fault for the weaknesses engendered in local Muslim institutions, particularly a decline in traditional parental authority. This version of the “neglected border” thesis thus strengthens rather than dilutes Muslim advocates’ primary assessment that the Thai state is at fault for neglecting Muslim religious and educational institutions, thus leaving vulnerable Muslim communities prey to manipulation by evil interest groups. As already mentioned, there is still a deep reluctance among sections of the Muslim elite to accept the idea that a new generation

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Marc Askew of separatists is primarily responsible for the violence. Thus, a conspiracy theory that attributes the violence to manipulated and morally corrupted youth is linked to the theme of neglected institutions and helps to buttress the discourse of the victimized and abandoned borderland Muslims. These Muslim advocates see themselves as the cultural guardians of Pattani Malays. Their analysis of problems on the borderland—which focuses on cultural decline and the consequent imperative for linguistic, cultural-religious revival—does not appear to be shared by ordinary Muslims in the villages. Nor do Muslim villagers profess much interest in the history of Pattani, which these advocates and other scholars claim as an enduring popular “historical consciousness,” at least insofar as this writer and some other researchers have found in rural village-based investigations in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat.60 But this makes little difference to Muslim culture advocates’ claims to speak for the ordinary Malay Muslim, because they assert that they are in a better position to see the issues facing their brethren more clearly, and are duty-bound to lead. Given their long-held concerns about a “cultural crisis” among their people, fused with a strong awareness of this area’s fraught history, it is understandable that these advocates should consider the current violence to be one element in an ensemble of problems caused by the neglect, as much as the policies, of Thai governments.61 Among the range of conditions underlying perceptions of the current wave of unrest in Thailand’s southern border provinces, the long-established fact of a “disorderly borderland”—a borderland rent by intersecting interest groups feeding on an illegal economy, corruption, and ethnoreligious sensitivities—is paramount. The long-standing presence of the disorderly state as a foundational ingredient of borderland instability has made it easy for insurgent groups to exploit already low popular-trust thresholds and succeed in implicating officials as the perpetrators of attacks. In this environment, conspiracy theories that assign responsibility to different groups are an inescapable consequence, ensuring that varied emphases on the nature of the southern “problem” will persist. Red Herring or Precondition for Insurgency? The Disbanding of the SBPAC/CPM 43 In 2004, the southern crisis became a focal point for attacks on Thaksin’s government. This section examines the politicization of the southern

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question, interrogating some of the charges made against the Thaksin government, particularly by the greatest beneficiary of this politicization, the Democrat Party. In mid-2002, the Thaksin administration dissolved the long-standing assessments of the SBPAC’s Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) and function have been informed by its associated Civilian-Policerhetoric…as much as by analysis Military Command 43 (CPM 43), first established under the administration of Prem Tinsulanond in 1980. This was a combined security and development agency designed to alleviate instability and insurgency by addressing the multiple problems and needs of the borderland population; ensuring continuing contact and dialogue between Muslim leaders, communities, and the state; and monitoring criminal and potentially subversive activities. Numerous commentators have since charged that Thaksin’s disbanding of these agencies was a primary policy mistake and a direct cause for the rise of the current insurgency and the problems faced in combating it. There are, however, counterarguments suggesting that the SBPAC/CPM 43 were not capable of either detecting or addressing the factors behind the insurgency. More than a just technical discussion, arguments surrounding this question link with assumptions about the nature of the unrest itself and the groups behind it. I argue here that assessments of the SBPAC’s function have been informed by rhetoric and polemics as much as by analysis, and that these agencies’ various roles and effectiveness need to be more carefully evaluated. The SBPAC features as a central topic in General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh’s vindicatory political memoir, The Last War (Bunkrom 2005), published in June, several months after he announced his “retirement” from politics (he had been sidelined from his position as deputy prime minister for security affairs by Thaksin early in October 2004, prior to the Tak Bai disaster). Clearly an attempt to salvage Chavalit’s public reputation following the disastrous year of 2004, The Last War exposes the highly politicized nature of the southern problem and highlights some key contentious narratives that have been employed to explain the current unrest. Although it is a clumsily organized, repetitious, and rambling book, it draws on intelligence information available to Chavalit during his time

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Marc Askew in office; this information is consistent with classified documents (summaries and interrogation transcripts) that I have viewed, and thus some of Chavalit’s key assessments about the insurgency cannot be lightly dismissed. One of Chavalit’s central arguments is that Thaksin’s dissolution of the SBPAC and CPM 43 had no bearing on facilitating the expansion of the current border unrest, which is driven by new clandestine networks. He points out that after the large-scale surrender of Pattani separatists during 1982–1983, under the policy of “attraction” (Chavalit was a leading military figure at this time), the military capacity of the various factions of the separatist movement was considerably reduced and many of the remaining separatist bands degenerated into extortion rings, a trend that is confirmed in other documentation and intelligence. The decline in potency of the old separatist groups led “those with the authority to estimate the force of the movement” to conclude that these groups were no longer separatist in aim but simply comprised of “ordinary criminals” who did not constitute a political movement with irredentist goals. Using the benefit of hindsight, he points out that those analysts had forgotten that the militant religious leaders heading the movement still embraced separatist aims based on the ideal of restoring the historical state of Pattani. Not surprisingly, Chavalit excludes himself from the group of officials surrounding Thaksin who made this miscalculation (Bunkrom 2005: 55–56). Chavalit argues that critics of the TRT government who claim that the dismantling of the border agencies was a key stimulus for renewed separatistinspired violence are ignorant of the real situation prevailing at the time. After the demise of the SBPAC, its key responsibilities did not disappear but were distributed among other agencies, such as the police, the justice system, and provincial governors. This administrative-based justification does not effectively counter subsequent arguments that the SBPAC’s symbolic role was far more important to borderland Muslims than matters of security and comprehensive development. More telling, however, is Chavalit’s argument about insurgency detection. He argues that the insurgency would have taken place regardless of whether or not the SBPAC was dissolved, because the modes of separatist organization and ideological dissemination had changed radically from the earlier period. The movement was no longer centered on armed groups sequestered in the hills and forests, and the small number of former separatists who subsisted largely by extortion and crime were not significant. Instead, a new

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border underground development was taking place, with the ideology of separatism being spread surreptitiously among Muslim youth in rural and urban districts by militant teachers in the religious schools. The thoroughness of this infiltration is the reason officials now find it extremely difficult to distinguish friend from foe among the Muslim people in the current insurgency. This long-term secret expansion could not have been contained or detected by state agencies such as the SBPAC/CPM 43 or other intelligence groups. Further, and in common with other commentators, Chavalit points out that the growth in militancy was inextricably linked to world trends— Islamic militancy and the emerging conflict between the U.S. and Islamic states elsewhere—that meshed with more local grievances arising from resentment against state officials. According to The Last War, this the growth in militancy emerging polarization in world politics gave strength to persisting ideas to promote a was inextricably linked separate Pattani state (Bunkrom 2005: 56–58). to world trends Having argued that the current violence was caused by forces unconnected to the operations of the SBPAC/CPM 43, The Last War proceeds to outline briefly the history of these agencies from their foundation in 1981. It applauds their success in suppressing separatist groups through methods of politics and infiltration, and the persuading of militants to join with the state and focus on the economic development of the border provinces. Chavalit could hardly have done otherwise but praise these agencies, since he was one of the generals in charge of implementing Prem’s policies—activities that were the basis of Chavalit’s reputation as a progressive soldier who championed compromise and harmony in the nation. Ironically, it was the success of this counterinsurgency strategy, he reminds the reader, that drove the insurgents to change their organizing and mobilizing methods to the point where officials underestimated the pervasiveness and strength of the movement, as evidenced on January 4, 2004 and thereafter. Throughout the book these points are repeated, serving to deflect responsibility both from the military and from Thaksin. The book’s rationale for Thaksin’s reallocation of SBPAC/CPM 43 duties to the government ministries, provincial governors, and police (army units were to play a minor role) passively repeats the justification given in

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Marc Askew late April 2002 in Thaksin’s Prime Minister’s Office order 123/2545 (Bunkrom 2005: 60–63). The preamble to this order claimed explicitly that economic, social, and political conditions in the border provinces had “improved markedly compared to earlier years,” and that disturbances were “largely the work of criminals and interest groups connected to the illegal economy.” These problems needed to be addressed at their source by stamping out pervasive “dark influences” (itthiphon meut) through police action and established judicial processes. Simultaneously, economic development needed to be implemented, and to deliver this development efficiently, the confusing arrangement of agencies then existing needed to be removed, in line with reforms to the bureaucracy initiated earlier in April 2002 (incorporating the new “CEO provincial governor system”).62 It is worth digressing from Chavalit’s memoir to mention that on the eve of the SBPAC’s dissolution, this agency produced a commemorative volume celebrating its past achievements, ranging from educational and economic development to poverty eradication. With entries provided by its last director and the heads of different divisions, the publication sycophantically vindicates Thaksin’s disbanding of the agency. This is not surprising, given that Thaksin now enjoyed unprecedented authority in determining bureaucrats’ professional fortunes. Although the volume was not widely distributed to the public, it also reflected the need to allow bureaucrats to save face and show symbolic respect to the agency’s originator, Prem, the revered and influential principal Privy Councilor to the nation’s King (SBPAC 2002). The final entries are a telling commentary on Thaksin’s official redefinition of the southern “problem.” In an essay on its role in maintaining peace and good order (khwamsangop riap roi), the SBPAC’s head of security coordination, Chamlong Kraidit, points out that a “new problem” has emerged on the border in the guise of interest groups sustaining an illegal economy based on drug trafficking, smuggling, and gambling. These groups have created disturbances that are made to appear as the work of separatists. The SBPAC has been successful in implementing national security policy in the past, and the violent events occurring in the border provinces—the work of criminals, not politically motivated separatists—are matters that can now be addressed by regular government agencies. The piece ends with a cautionary reminder that problems of disorder cannot be solved without cooperation between the public and state officials in a spirit of unity. This

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border is the only hint in this otherwise sycophantic volume that some officials were concerned about the demise of the agency (SBPAC 2002: 180–83). The final piece, written by the SBPAC’s head of public relations, Sukkitti Thonphitak, is even more explicit in defining the “new” situation. He records that intelligence assessments of the groups behind the killing of officials in December 2001 clearly showed that ordinary criminals were responsible, and that this was confirmed by local community leaders. He goes on to record that the government’s informal cabinet meeting in Narathiwat in March 2002 had confirmed this assessment, and that this consequently marked the end of the SBPAC’s twenty-year security role on the border. It was now, he maintained, appropriate to mainstream the administration of the border provinces, for to continue the SBPAC would send the wrong signal to the people of the border provinces about the state of the region (SBPAC 2002: 187–90). Chavalit’s account in The Last War reflects much of the deference that marked bureaucrats’ reception of Thaksin’s project of normalizing the problem of recurring violence in the Muslim south by defining policy challenges largely in terms of economically driven development and efficient maintenance of law and order. But the portrayal of the restructuring of the border agencies as a straightforward administrative process driven by considerations of efficiency clearly disguises the critical political context of these changes, downplays dissatisfaction within the military, and avoids reference to concerns about the strength of separatism that were being voiced at the time of the disbanding of the SBPAC/CPM 43. Notwithstanding his denial that these measures were responsible for the clandestine expansion of separatist militancy, Chavalit attempts later in the book to wriggle out of any responsibility for Thaksin’s decision, and in so doing betrays the unease about the decision among elements of the military leadership at the time. An extract produced from his speech to students of the National Defense College in November 2004 shows that the critical decision to reduce the military’s role in border security in favor of the police was made at Thaksin’s cabinet meeting held in Narathiwat in March 2002, convened to address the causes of recent attacks and arson. Speaking to the students as fellow soldiers, Chavalit emphasizes that it was difficult for him to openly oppose this measure at the time, but adds that he stated at the cabinet meeting that “the sound of guns” would surely return to the region.63 This is a comment not about the wisdom of disbanding the border

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Marc Askew agencies but about the significance of the reduction in the role of the military that accompanied it—a point that is reinforced indirectly in sections of the book by reference to comments of other retired army generals, such as Harn Leenanond.64 Chavalit’s retrospective claim that he was uneasy about ceding control of southern security entirely to the police can be contrasted with his own affirmative public statement in late March 2002 that the “police will from now on have a unified chain of command to tackle security issues in the Deep South.”65 Having claimed that the disbandment of the multifunctional SBPAC was irrelevant to the comprehensive spread of Islamic-inspired separatist ideology and networks on the border, Chavalit’s justification for the founding of the similarly styled Southern Border Provinces PeaceBuilding Command (SBPPC) in October 2004—an outcome of Thaksin’s Prime Minister’s Office order 68/2547 (the “Policy to Promote Peace and Happiness in the Three Southern Border Provinces”)—is notably lame. He argues that the SBPPC differs from the SBPAC in having greater strength, being more oriented to development and consultation, and being directly accountable to the prime minister (Bunkrom 2005: 193– 95).66 Military sources at this time suggested that the SBPPC was deliberately configured to resemble its defunct predecessor, but Chavalit is obviously reluctant to concede this.67 Instead, the book’s praise of the SBPPC aims to vindicate Thaksin as a leader who has efficiently and decisively “adjusted” policy in response to the king’s widely publicized injunction (of February 2004) to handle the southern unrest with “understanding, accessibility and development.”68 It is not surprising that in a book aimed at salvaging his reputation and defending Thaksin, Chavalit’s account of the dissolution of the SBPAC glosses over the real confusion and uncertainty surrounding assessments of southern unrest during the years prior to the events of January 4, 2004. Moreover, while he hints at military-police conflicts in matters of resources and responsibilities, the fact that the SBPAC was an obstacle to Thaksin’s extension of political power in the Democrat Party-dominated south is invisible in his portrait. Press coverage of the spate of attacks on police posts in early 2002 shows that they were interpreted in various ways. Muslim politicians of the Wadah faction and southern Muslim academics (such as Phirayot Rahimulla) judged that separatist gangs calling themselves “Mujahideen” had degenerated into thugs: they had no authentic ideology

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border (udomkan) and were being hired by interest groups to foment discord. But senior police officers in the border provinces suspected that the attacks on police installations were the mark of ideologically inspired guerilla forces.69 Government sources and senior members of the SBPAC affirmed that the disturbances of 2002 were a “new” phenomenon: they were a product of internal conflicts among state officials as well as the actions of influential figures involved in illegal trading who were fabricating an image of insurgentinspired disorder.70 Prior to the dissolution of the SBPAC, Thaksin had entrusted the task of evaluating the southern situation to an old pre-cadet-school classmate, Major General Songkitti Chakkabhatra, who had little experience of working in the south. He reported back that there was no separatist insurgency. Songkitti’s view seems to have played a key role in shaping Thaksin’s decision-making about the dynamics of borderland disturbances and the fate of the SBPAC. Thaksin was certainly determined to ensure that he was not a victim of disinformation from Democrat-connected networks of the military. Nonetheless, it was the police commissioner-general Sant Sarutanond who made the formal proposal to restructure border administration and allow the police to take a dominant role (Kitti 2005: 44; McCargo 2006: 48–49). If this banditry-orientated theme was a setup to justify their own place-seeking under Thaksin’s aegis, then these two men were misguided, for Songitti lost his position as Fourth Army commander in August 2003 and Sant was removed from his position by Thaksin for unsatisfactory performance in connection with the southern unrest in February 2004.71 In contrast to the banditry-centered view of borderland disturbances, retired former Fourth Army Region commander General Kitti Rattanachaya, when interviewed in April 2002, insisted that separatists linked to international terrorist organizations were almost certainly involved in these attacks, and that it was a fatal mistake to assume that the separatist movement had declined as a factor in southern unrest. These groups were not conspicuous, he argued, because leaders and members were operating from across the Malaysian border, and there was a united front that included supporters among ordinary Muslim villagers in the border provinces who had long harbored grudges against Thai officialdom.72 Kitti pointed to the political nature of the Thaksin government’s assessment of border turbulence in this period by commenting: “If the

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Marc Askew government is claiming that the separatist movement has disappeared, then you can be sure that they are expecting to gain more than an average number of votes in the next election.”73 The claims by Thai journalists, academics, politicians (not only Democrat politicians but at least one senior TRT government advisor, Rung Kaewdaeng), and other commentators that the disbanding of the SBPAC/CPM 43 in mid-2002 was a critical policy mistake that enabled the rise of the insurgency that burst forth on January 4, 2004 have been widely accepted. They have also been repeated by foreign analysts and journalists, even though such claims have often been based on little substantial evidence. Arguments about the importance of the SBPAC/ CPM 43 in the border provinces rest on a number of claims and assumptions regarding their effectiveness in a number of roles, principally: • •

•

•

Intelligence-gathering, detection, and suppression of separatist insurgent groups; Monitoring the behavior of government officials, acting on complaints of ill treatment, corruption, etc., and punishing such officials through transfers out of the region; Enhancing Muslim-state dialogue and the participation of communities in planning and development in the border provinces; and Delivering relevant community/economic development benefits and support for education and religious activity.

In 2004 these claims to the multifunctional effectiveness of the SBPAC/ CPM 43 were highlighted by Kavi Chongkittavorn, associate editor of the Nation, in a major regional affairs publication: Under the Chuan administration from 1997 to 2000, the Interior Ministry’s Administrative Centre for Southern Border provinces served as a clearing house for all parties concerned. The Centre, which was abolished six months after Thaksin became prime minister in June 2001, provided a venue where soldiers, police, Muslim leaders and religious teachers, and local officials met to exchange views and compare notes. This mechanism, while not perfect, enabled conflicting parties to air their views and grievances. It helped to reduce tensions and prevent conflict from escalating. In its absence,

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border each group continues to live in isolation without any common dialogue forum. That helps to explain why there has been a lack of co-ordination between the military and police assigned to provide security and protection to the public in the south. (Kavi 2004: 274; emphasis added)

Kavi’s portrait of SBPAC effectiveness combines the first and third functions listed above, while implying the second, and in addition asserts a causal connection with the rise of the insurgency on the grounds of chronological convergence. In a book published in 2005, Prasong Sunsiri, former secretarygeneral of Thailand’s National Security Council, focused entirely on the protective and suppressive functions of the agencies, claiming that the rise of insurgency soon after their disbandment was proof enough that the SBPAC/CPM 43 had been effective, and that this proved Thaksin’s culpability (Prasong 2005: 135–36). An explicit causal connection was also made by the Pattani-based scholar Chidchanok Rahimmula at a conference held in Songkhla Province late in 2004. She argued that large numbers of people in the border provinces were opposed to the dissolution of the agencies in mid-2002 because they were not yet capable of defending their communities; moreover, there was widespread fear and distrust of the police who were to now take over security responsibilities. Reinforcing the point, she argued that popular dissatisfaction over the loss of the SBPAC proved that it had indeed been successful both in minimizing border disturbances (although just how this was realized is not specified) and enhancing participation. Furthermore, the agencies had been regarded by people as an integral part of the border, a point contrasting strikingly with the claims of the SBPAC’s valedictorian tribute (mentioned earlier) that the persistence of the agency would tend to perpetuate a pathological image of the south for local people. Chidchanok went on to connect the rise in disturbances from June 2002 directly to the disbandment of the agencies, thus laying the blame squarely at the feet of the Thaksin administration (Chidchanok 2004: 62–63). Other commentators have argued that the SBPAC was effective by virtue of its record in monitoring and acting on complaints of officials’ corruption and/or misbehavior toward local people (point 2 above). Statistics of the numbers of officials transferred out of the border provinces in the period before the year 2000 have been used to support this claim to effectiveness.74 Beyond these specific roles, as Duncan McCargo has

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Marc Askew highlighted, positive views of the SBPAC in the region were based on activities that symbolized the goodwill of the state in listening to Muslim concerns and supporting Muslim religious and educational needs (McCargo 2006: 44). This role has been emphasized by leading academics in Pattani.75 In the three years since the January 4 events, this role has been frequently alluded to by journalists critical of the Thaksin government and its apparent failure to draw popular support and protection away from the insurgents. For example: Since Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra dissolved the civilian-run Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre almost five years ago, the government has been unable to come up with an effective agency that could command the same kind of respect and trust from the local community.76

Notwithstanding the cumulative force of these claims and the evidence adduced, however, arguments about the connection between the disbanding of the border agencies and the rise of violent insurgency are marked by conflation and contradiction. It is ironic that, although commentators now extol the critical importance of the SBPAC/CPM 43 in maintaining the security of communities and gathering intelligence, in 2002 some of them were echoing the SBPAC’s declarations that the majority of attacks at that time were undertaken by interest groups or hired gangs of separatists operating as simple thugs without ideology (a view arguments about the connection between also voiced by Muslim the disbanding of the border agencies politicians such as Den Tohmeena in 2002). and the rise of violent insurgency are One also needs to ask: if marked by conflation and contradiction the SBPAC and CPM 43 were so central to the cumulative growth of trust between the state and Muslims for a period of twenty years, why was this trust so quickly eroded between mid-2002 and January 2004? And if the SBPAC was so successful in delivering relevant development, religious, and educational funding to the border provinces using substantial

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border government funding for over two decades, why are poverty and educational deprivation cited by the same commentators as persisting “root causes” of Muslim disaffection and alienation? Until more comprehensive research is undertaken on the past activities and performance of the SBPAC, claims to its effectiveness will be dominated by rhetoric and assumption. Moreover, the logic of the argument that Thaksin’s dissolution of the SBPAC established the conditions for violent insurgency is arguably based on a fallacy of chronological convergence. Accepting that Thaksin’s 2001–2003 destabilization of the military command of the Fourth Region through patronage and reshuffling surely played a part in weakening institutional capacity, this still does not explain the incapacity of the SBPAC/CPM 43, Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) of the Fourth Army Region, and Police Special Branch of Police Region 9 in detecting the growth of a clandestine insurgency which we now know draws its greatest strength from Islamic radicalism transmitted through the Islamic schools. One unorthodox Southern Thai commentator—“Barun,” the pseudonymous columnist for the Thai-language Nation Sutsapda (Nation Weekly)—has argued against the standard line that the demise of the SBPAC in May 2002 laid the conditions for the explosion of violence. To Barun, the SBPAC was never an effective agency for the detection and suppression of groups fomenting instability. The continued (albeit sporadic) violence and arson in the border provinces over the 1990s is evidence, he argues, that the SBPAC/CPM 43 were never successful in preserving peace on the border, so their demise can hardly be a factor in allowing for the spread of the current instability, which has been generated by an ideologically driven network of unprecedented character (Barun 2005: 171). It might also be recalled, in support of this point, that in 1997, when Chavalit was prime minister and border disturbances were rising dramatically (from an estimated 51 in 1996 to 70 in that year), he severely criticized the SBPAC and CPM 43 for their inability to gather satisfactory information on the perpetrators, despite his government’s provision of additional resources for intelligence operations.77 Adding to this picture of the SBPAC’s ineffectiveness is the view from a highly placed officer in ISOC Bangkok headquarters (with experience in the south) that the SBPAC was controlled by interest groups on the border that enriched themselves by milking its substantial budget, thus

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Marc Askew wasting opportunities for community and educational development among borderland Muslims. In an interview with this author, this officer pointed out: Money for development of the border communities allocated to the SBPAC disappeared into the hands of national and local politicians—it was distributed among the phuak of the Democrat and Wadah politicians, and they have lived comfortably as a result.78

The high level of corruption existing in the SBPAC was apparently discussed among leading figures in ISOC prior to the SBPAC’s dissolution in mid2002. This officer also emphasized that ISOC actually supported disbandment. Conflict between the police and military, he argued, was not connected to any struggle over SBPAC resources, which were in the hands of bureaucrats and civilians who were busy dividing them up among their phuak. As for CPM 43, he claimed that the military had actually proposed its dissolution because its resources had been reduced considerably since the time the military budget had been lowered under Chuan Leekpai’s Democrat-led government in the early 1990s (in this he echoed an argument made by Kitti Rattanachaya). He emphasized that, due to budget limitations, by 2002 there remained less than sixty men in CPM 43’s operational force, so “it was pointless to keep CPM 43 in operation, because under these conditions it couldn’t effectively perform its job in surveillance.”79 In summary, this source’s account indicates that the SBPAC’s complementary development and security/intelligence functions were severely compromised by corruption and by government neglect. This assessment lends some indirect support to the view that Thaksin’s real aim in disbanding the SBPAC was to break the influence of the multilayered Democrat Party political machine that dominated the southern provinces (Suphalak and Don 2004: 303–04).80 Any portrayal of the dissolution of the SBPAC as a scheme to displace the Democrat machine, however, ignores the fact that during this time the Muslim Wadah faction politicians of Thaksin’s TRT held seats in more than half the constituencies in the three border provinces of Narathiwat (three seats), Pattani (one seat), and Yala (two seats), and also maintained their own extensive support networks. Thus Democrat control in the borderland was far from complete. Other accounts suggest that the SBPAC maintained broad effectiveness in disbursing development and mediating conflicts but had been fatally

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border hobbled in its intelligence functions since the early 1990s by inadequate funding and poor-quality staff. This view is advanced by a retired police colonel with long experience as a commander in both the Border Patrol Police and regular police force in the three The major problem…was provinces. Kickbacks and cronyism existed in the SBPAC, he notes, but this is normal the long-term decline in in any Thai government institution, and intelligence-gathering it was not enough to compromise the SBPAC’s effectiveness as a mediating institution between the state and borderland Muslims. The major problem, he asserts, was the long-term decline in intelligence-gathering effectiveness of all agencies, including CPM 43, over more than a decade. In the period of Prem’s rule during the 1980s, he argues, police and military intelligence personnel were highquality, dedicated individuals, but over time intelligence-gathering came to be bureaucratized and office-bound, run by personnel who had little interest in field-based work. CPM 43 did not have a separate staff distinct from other intelligence agencies: personnel were seconded from the military and police. The monitoring by intelligence officers of developments among separatists and criminal networks relies on individual connections and trusted friendships with informants, which must be sustained with adequate funds derived from secret government disbursements. When government funds were reduced during Chuan’s first Democrat-led government (1992– 1995), officers had to use their own funds to pay for information and help their informants in various ways. Paradoxically, these extra funds were drawn from illegal sources, such as protection money levied by police on gambling dens. But, he notes, reductions in funding progressively reduced officers’ intelligence-gathering capacity, which was based on the continuous cultivation of relationships with their informants (mostly former separatists). CPM 43 was only as efficient as the personnel who were seconded to it from military and police units, and this former officer affirms from personal experience that many police colleagues who were seconded to that agency were mediocre and uninterested in their work.81 The judgment that there had been a major intelligence failure in detecting a new form of insurgent movement in the south, highlighted in Chavalit’s memoir The Last War (discussed above), is supported by various sources claiming that intelligence flaws were present well before the Thaksin

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Marc Askew administration. General Kitti Rattanachaya argues that a progressive weakening of intelligence capability and security administration began with the Democrat-led government’s cutting of intelligence expenditure for all agencies from 1995. This continued into Banhan Silpa-Archa’s government, when overall coordination of border security was taken out of the hands of the Fourth Region Army Command and entrusted to a national committee presided over by the Minister of the Interior. To Kitti, there was also a fatal downgrading of the importance of separatism as an active force. This was initiated by the NSC and ISOC and registered in the change in the official designation of separatist insurgents from “The Movement of Bandit Terrorist Separatists” (Khabuankan Chorn Kokanrai Baeng Yaek Dindaen) to “Bandit Terrorists” (Chorn Kokanrai). To Kitti, the dissolution of the SBPAC/CPM 43 was just one in a sequence of accumulated mistakes by Thai governments (Kitti 2004: 159; Kitti 2005: 156–59). As for early detection of a new network-based insurgency drawing on militant Islam, Kitti relates that after his retirement in 1994 he monitored these new developments via his own informant networks and tried to warn his military colleagues, but these warnings were ignored.82 Kitti was not the only warning voice. Chaiyong Maneerungsakul, veteran southern journalist and a former advisor of the SBPAC under the second DP-led administration of 1997–2000, relates that he passed information about the weapons training of Muslim youth and activities of radical clerics at religious schools to senior generals and two successive directors of the SBPAC (including the Democrat-appointed Palakorn Suwannarat), but this news was not taken seriously.83 The Democrat Party’s righteous attacks on Thaksin, charging that he had been in grave error to deny the presence of separatism in the south, conveniently avoided acknowledging the fact that the past Chuanled administration, while maintaining surveillance of the small number of older separatist organizations (with an estimated active force of only 30 to 70 men), had also failed to detect new patterns of organization.84 Ultimately, the pervasive claims that the disbanding of the SBPAC (particularly CPM 43) by Thaksin enabled the current insurgency to burst forth and escalate are based on shaky assumptions that need much closer examination. In the polemics that exploded on the question of southern violence in 2004, the SBPAC was marshaled as a convenient and evocative straw man by Thaksin’s critics and others in search of easy answers. If one accepts the scenario (as this author does) that militant insurgent networks

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border were developing outside the purview of state officials from the early to mid1990s, then as an intelligence-gathering agency and regional monitor, the SBPAC was clearly a failure. At the same time, among many people in the border provinces, this agency was clearly an important symbol of engagement and dialogue, an appeals center and lobbying ground for resources. Since 2004 there have been repeated calls for its the SBPAC was marshaled resuscitation, and in late October 2006 it as a convenient…straw was finally reestablished by the new coup85 installed government. Yet the acclaim that man by Thaksin’s critics has greeted this does not mean that the agency could have played a role in lessening the tensions of 2003 or preventing the outbreak of attacks in early 2004. The spread of Islamic-inspired militant youth networks from the 1990s occurred under the noses of the SBPAC officials, and was driven by far more complex global/regional/local dynamics than this agency was capable of monitoring or controlling. The Southern Crisis as Political Capital: The Democrat Party Assault on Thaksin and the Thai Rak Thai Party The political struggles generated by the rise to power of Thaksin Shinawatra and his new Thai Rak Thai Party have been central to shaping representations of the causes of southern turbulence. As one Thai scholar has noted (echoing an earlier prophecy of Surin Phitsuwan), failure to deal with the ongoing southern insurgency has proved to be Thaksin’s “Achille’s heel,” undermining his triumphant claims to legitimacy based on his ostensibly decisive CEO-style of national “problem-solving” (Ukrist 2006).86 During the TRT’s first period in office (2001 to 2005), critics, including the Democrat Party, continually attacked Thaksin’s trophy populist policies (the 1 million Baht village development fund and 30 Baht hospital insurance scheme) as both ineffective and debt-producing. But Thaksin was able to brush these aside by invoking their widespread popularity among the impoverished northeastern farmers. By contrast with Thaksin’s other programs, the daily killings and grizzly assassinations in the border provinces during 2004–2005 could be neither talked away nor effectively fudged with statistics. Viewing Thailand’s political landscape from the vantage point of 2006, the southern insurgency and persisting

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turbulence have been seen as the beginning of Thaksin and TRT’s decline, which accelerated markedly in early 2006 following news of Thaksin’s controversial tax-free sale of Shincorp shares (McCargo 2006: 67–68; Kasian 2006). During 2004–2005, the southern crisis did not dent substantially Thaksin’s electoral popularity at the national level, but it did destroy his credibility among the majority of voters in the south, and most conspicuously among the Muslim population of the three turbulent border provinces. Here, his political legitimacy was comprehensively undermined by the region’s political guardian, the Democrat Party. Conversely, by their association with Thaksin, the locally renowned Wadah politicians became political casualties at the hands of enraged Muslim residents, to the ultimate political benefit of the Democrats. One of the driving forces behind the view that Thaksin’s governance was the root cause of the “problem” of southern unrest was the Democrat Party. Following Thaksin’s smashing electoral victory in 2001, the Democrats were relegated to a humiliating parliamentary opposition role. In that year, TRT swept the national polls, unseating the Democrat-led government and winning in all regions except the DP’s strongest and most reliable base, the the Democrat Party’s political south. There, in contrast to their rout survival depended on by TRT elsewhere, the Democrats held on to all their constituencies, retention of its southern seats commanding 48 of a total of 54 southern seats. They dominated representation in eleven of the region’s fourteen provinces, and the only barrier to complete domination were the six seats held by Muslim Wadah faction politicians of the New Aspiration Party, who soon followed their party in its merger with Thaksin’s TRT monolith (Thitinan 2003). Long identified by critics as a regional party, after 2001 the Democrat Party’s political survival depended on retention of its southern seats, with southern politicians now representing over half the Democrat constituencybased MPs in parliament. However bizarre the conspiracy theory of the PIN document (discussed at length earlier) that Democrat politicians had planned the January 4 raid, it was grounded on one clear political fact—that from 2001 the Democrat Party at the national level was facing a major crisis and needed to preserve

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border its southern base at all costs. The southern Democrat politicians needed to prevent the six non-Democrat border constituencies held by the Wadah faction from being used as a wedge by TRT to expand at the expense of the long-established Democrat political machine, which controlled the urban districts of the border provinces. The Democrat machine is based on comprehensively embedded alliance networks (phuak) in local government and the regional military, police, and bureaucratic structure. This machine had been nurtured by national politicians when the Democrats had held government office and periodically controlled the critically important patronage mechanism of the Interior Ministry. Whether or not Thaksin dissolved the SBPAC in 2002 principally as a stratagem to undermine Democrat phuak in the south, he certainly used the opportunity to engineer transfers of high-ranking military and police and officials (notably provincial governors) toward this end. In the south during 2001–2005, and especially from 2004, the formidable Democrat Party orators of the south held the moral high ground in finding plausible reasons to conjure their age-old symbolic bogeyman, “dictatorship” (phadetkan), and represent themselves as guardians of the southern people, Buddhists and Muslims alike. This moral campaign was conducted in the increasingly tense world and regional atmosphere heralded by the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, which had an immediate effect on Thailand’s Muslims in general, and particularly on those of the Deep South. This environment intensified further with the Bali bombing of 2002 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and emerged fully blown in the concerted outbreak of border violence in the south in 2004. Over this period, although they could not convince the whole country to turn against Thaksin because of his government’s failure to contain the southern violence, the Democrats were nevertheless highly successful in convincing the majority of Buddhist and Muslim southerners that Thaksin was the embodiment of evil and rapacious ambition, and that he was “the problem” of the south. 2001–2003: Critiquing Thaksin and Protecting Southern Muslims During 2001–2002, the rise of global and regional terrorism threats and an emerging polarization in world opinion on the merits of the U.S.-led “war-on-terror” had their effects on public opinion within Thailand. The

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Marc Askew country’s Muslims, and those in the south in particular—together with various concerned Thai activist groups—made clear their view that the U.S. was conducting an anti-Muslim war in the guise of anti-terrorism. By late 2001, following the U.S. retaliatory bombings of Afghanistan, Muslims in the border provinces were showing their solidarity in various ways, ranging from peaceful demonstrations and burning of U.S. flags to gathering funds to support Osama bin Laden and displaying framed prints of him in their homes and street-side shops.87 Local reactions to the U.S.-led hunt for global terrorist networks in the region posed a challenge for Thaksin as he attempted simultaneously to calm domestic opinion, maintain a positive international image of the anti-Americanism country to ensure essential tourism flows, and within Thailand grew implement security measures satisfactory to regional neighbors and the U.S. (Chow 2005; Kavi 2004). With the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003, anti-Americanism within Thailand grew, as did the anxieties of the southern Muslims that they were being persecuted in an antiIslamic witch-hunt. The Democrat Party joined in the chorus of opposition that emerged when Thaksin met U.S. President George W. Bush in mid-June 2003, and when in the same month authorities arrested three southern Muslims for suspected Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) affiliation and bomb-plotting. From 2003 the southern Democrats made efforts to advocate southern Muslim grievances. In so doing they attempted to undermine the position of the Wadah politicians who were now compromised by association with Thaksin’s homeland security legislation and his drug war, which was accompanied by an upsurge of kidnappings, shootings, and arms thefts in the border provinces. Wan Noor, Minister of the Interior since October 2002, was a key target for the Democrats. Following thefts of guns from army depots in Narathiwat and Yala and more killings in late April, the Democrats demanded that Wan Noor resign. The Democrat’s parliamentary firebrand Thaworn Senniam (MP for Songkhla) alleged that some of Wan Noor’s own hua khanaen in Yala were members of “certain Muslim groups” responsible for attacks, and this was why Wan Noor was not acting against them and was unable to quell the rising level of violence. Democrat leaders renewed their demands for the reinstatement of the SBPAC to help address the instability.88

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border On June 27, 2003, the Democrats announced the formation of their Democrat Party Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (DPSBPAC) and marked its formation with a major conference of party members of the five border provinces (Narathiwat, Pattani, Satun, Songkhla, and Yala), which they held in Pattani the following month.89 This new Democrat Party agency was named as a deliberate gesture of defiance against Thaksin and his dissolving of the SBPAC the previous year, simultaneously signifying the party’s commitment to provide a forum and clearing house for Muslim grievances on the border (DPSBPAC 2003a).90 The prominent Songkhla Democrat MP Niphon Bunyamanee was appointed its director. Niphon, one of the party’s deputy secretary-generals, had official duties to organize the party’s campaigns in the three border provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala. Until early 2003, the prominent Pattani senator and former Wadah leader Den Tohmeena had been one of the most vocal public advocates of southern Muslims against what they saw as the anti-Islamic trend of government security legislation, but by July of that year the Democrats had made their move to assume leadership in championing the beleaguered Muslims of the border provinces against Thaksin and his government. In so doing they aimed to undermine the popular legitimacy of the Wadah group among borderland Muslims. The DPSBPAC functioned as a clearing house for information and publishing, officially based at the party’s headquarters in Bangkok. With an impressive list of committee members and “advisors,” the core of this “center” actually consisted of Niphon as director and three clerical assistants. The DPSBPAC announced its presence through a report in magazine format that was distributed in the border provinces. This was the first of three publications that the center produced before it fell into abeyance shortly after the February 2005 national election. With the dramatic title “Who Started the Fire on the Southern Border?” the first issue featured reports of meetings between Democrat MPs (especially the prominent Muslim MPs Surin Phitsuwan and Thanin Chaisamut) and community leaders, plus extracts of Democrat politicians’ speeches juxtaposed with photographs of concerned-looking DP politicians meeting local Muslim groups. It was distributed at a large DP meeting held in Pattani on July 20 (the meeting was entitled “With Love and Much Concern for Brother and Sister Thai Muslims”), where the audience was addressed by new party head (and southerner) Banyat Banthathan, leading Muslim Democrat

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Marc Askew Surin Phitsuwan, and the Pattani Muslim academic Phirayot Rahimulla, who was signaling his own political aspirations (Phirayot was to stand and win election as a DP party list candidate in 2005). The first magazine of the DPSBPAC contained an introductory essay that emphasized how the party had always tried to develop relevant policies for the border, as evidenced in the last Chuan government’s “National Security Policy for the Southern Border Provinces (1999–2003),” which reaffirmed the importance of the SBPAC and policy formulation through consultation. Under Democrat governments in the past, the essay claims, border disturbances were kept down to a satisfactory level because of the perspicacity of the party in recognizing the complex characteristics of the border provinces and the importance of encouraging participation through the SBPAC. By contrast, the Thaksin government dissolved the SBPAC and the rise in disturbances since 2002 is clear evidence that this measure allowed the disturbances to escalate. Thaksin’s new “CEO governor” system, which replaced the SBPAC, the writers claim, contradicted the important principle of coordination and consultation between citizens and bureaucracy; moreover, it heralded a dangerous monopoly of power (phuk-khart amnart, a favorite Democrat expression), which allowed for the politically motivated transfer and promotion of officials. Since the dissolution of the border agencies, bombings and shootings have increased, and have risen even more markedly since the assumption of Wan Noor to the position of Minister of the Interior. The clear message was that the TRT government did not understand the southern border problems as the Democrats did. The report then plays the classic “national sovereignty” card in its argument against Thaksin, claiming that his meeting and agreement with President Bush to assist in the “war on terror” were dangerous and against national interests. The evidence justifying the recent arrest of the three local Muslims as JI terrorist suspects is unclear, and the anti-terrorism policy now embraced by Thaksin reflects his standing as a lackey to U.S. interests. A number of community leaders have disappeared: they have been abducted and murdered (um kha) by “government officials” (i.e., police) in another expression of uncontrolled state power and arrogant impunity. The arrest of respected Muslim teachers without sufficient evidence, the suspicions brought against their pondok schools as receivers of terrorist funding, and the disrespectful entry of police into these sacrosanct places are all unjustified and are frightening Muslim brothers and sisters in the border provinces—moreover,

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border all this is being done to please a foreign power. Thaksin has ignored the Wadah politicians in his government, and they have no influence over policy. What will Wan Noor do now? Will he speak out for his Muslim brothers and sisters, as he has pledged as a Wadah representative, or will he defer to Thaksin in order to hold on to his position in the cabinet? (DPSBPAC 2003a: 1–4) In proclaiming that Thaksin was an enemy of southern Muslims and a puppet of the U.S., and that key Wadah politicians were now impotent to represent local Muslims, the Democrat Party was making a major pitch to wean political support away from the Wadah group in the three provinces. The message was clear: the Democrat Party was the only buffer between the persecuted borderland Muslims and the evil state of Thaksin and his uncontrollable and shadowy minions. Notably, “Who Started the Fire on the Southern Border?” says nothing about the identities of groups behind the increasing number of arson and shooting incidents taking place in the south, focusing instead on Thaksin’s government as a perpetrator. The DP’s discourse of alarm in its publications, and the speeches of its politicians over the next year, acted to consolidate and authenticate the rumors and fears of persecution prevailing among borderland Muslims.91 The first DPSBPAC magazine also featured a nineteen-point “Democrat policy” for “building the southern border as a Darussalam.” Darussalam (Arabic: “a place of peace”) was translated broadly into Thai here as meaning “a land of peace and plenty.” This was also the theme of Surin’s address at the Pattani meeting, and reflected his long-held views on the issue. The points in the policy cover a range of areas, stressing that economic, community, and educational development initiatives need to be consistent with custom and religion (including self-sufficient agriculture), and that cultural diversity must be respected and valued. Emphasis was placed on the building of respect and value for Muslim culture within Thai society, the promotion of understanding among all ethnoreligious groups inhabiting the borderland, and the enhancement of participation at all levels. In terms of government and administration, the policy stopped short of arguing for any special autonomy for the Muslim-majority border provinces; it did, however, highlight the importance of educating government officials and transferring officials who treated Muslims unfairly or who underperformed. As for security measures, the policy advocated what was essentially a return to the SBPAC model, including collective civilian-police-military

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Marc Askew cooperation in monitoring events and the return of the army, in place of the police, to assist with maintaining order (DPSBPAC 2003a: 20–21). Democrat politicians continued to consult with southern Muslim leaders during August 2003, by which time the highly publicized capture in Thailand of “Hambali,” planner of the Bali bombings, had brought the country’s borderland Muslims further into the international spotlight. Several weeks after Hambali’s widely publicized arrest, and in the tense environment surrounding the government’s impending emergency decree against terrorism, Niphon Bunyamanee arranged for a meeting between senior and local Democrat MPs and a group of religious teachers in a hotel meeting room in Pattani.92 The teachers confirmed the pervasive fears of southern Muslims that they were being persecuted in an American-led “war on terror.” The Democrats seemed comforted by the general hostility felt toward Thaksin, whom the teachers branded an ally of the U.S., but they were not so pleased to hear that the Democrats were perceived as having done little to help the borderland Muslims in the past. A host of concerns about poverty and education was raised, and some of the teachers A host of concerns felt strongly that the main problem was the destructive effects of capitalism on traditional about poverty and ways of life. The out-migration of young people education was raised to work in Malaysia was a major issue here. In thinking about developing policies to uplift the borderland economy while simultaneously promoting self-sufficiency, the Democrats pointed out that they ran the risk of losing votes, given Thaksin’s triumphant electoral jibe that “if you want to be poor, vote Democrat, if you want to be rich, vote TRT.” There was unanimity in the view that the borderland was a place where ordinary Buddhists and Muslims already lived in harmony and mutual respect as phi-nong (close siblings), although charges of unfair treatment of Muslims by officials and police were made by some teachers. One asked why more Muslim policemen were not employed in these provinces. Another pointed out that “some politicians” were behind the recurrent turbulence. Some of the teachers evinced considerable admiration for Malaysian multiculturalism and the higher standard of living of fellow Malays across the border. Under the weight of these many issues, the Democrat politicians present were unable to do more than affirm the party’s commitment to developing a

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border multilevel policy in consultation with local people. In concluding, the new Democrat deputy party leader Anek Laothamatas was forced to confess in the presence of his southern Democrat MP colleagues that the party (contrary to its current rhetoric) did not understand deeply enough the issues of the border provinces. He emphasized the need for political solutions, pledging that the party would “serve the south” and hurry to work toward improving the conditions of the border provinces. In informal discussions after the meeting, Anek, an academic specialist on decentralization and local government, suggested that a distinctive regional administration for the border provinces was most likely to be the best model. A developed Democrat policy toward the border provinces did not emerge in public over the next months, although Surin Phitsuwan, as the Democrat’s most prominent Muslim advocate, was active in publicizing his ideas in the press during the early months of 2004, which embodied key themes of the nineteen-point program for Darussalam.93 Despite their strident rhetoric during the latter months of 2003, the Democrats, both nationally and in the south, were on the defensive. They were kept off balance by Thaksin, who gained national prestige by hosting the October Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, conducted under intense security. To the press, Thaksin played down the terrorist threat in Thailand (in the light of media speculation that foiled JI groups had targeted Bangkok hotels and embassies for attack), arguing that the authorities were in control.94 In early September, police searching for illegal arms caches raided the Yala home of Davut Sa, a prominent DP member, stimulating southern Democrat accusations that the government was politically undermining them under the cloak of anti-terrorist precautions. At Yala’s central mosque, local Muslims staged a large blessing ritual for Davut to publicly affirm his innocence.95 The DPSBPAC’s second magazine report of October 2003 was dedicated to critiquing Thaksin’s anti-terrorist decree as an anti-Muslim and authoritarian measure, and in this context the Davut Sa event was used to link symbolically the Democrat Party with borderland Muslims, presenting them as shared victims of government persecution (DPSBPAC 2003b). The southern Democrats translated the government’s executive decrees against terrorism and money-laundering into Yawi and distributed copies to communities throughout the border provinces. These copies featured covers with illustrations of southern Muslims, and TRT Minister of the

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Marc Askew Interior Wan Noor complained that that this unfairly projected the idea that the decrees were aimed at Muslims.96 At this point, however, Thaksin was in the political ascendancy. Recurring border violence was not enough to shake TRT’s confidence that it could rout the Democrats in the south through an onslaught based on development initiatives, exposing the Democrat machine’s long-standing neglect of its southern electorate. 2004–2005: The Democrat Riposte—Thaksin as the Cause of the Southern Crisis After October 2003, Thaksin visited the southern border provinces several times, announcing a host of development projects and reaffirming claims that he had been responsible for raising the price of rubber.97 TRT spokespeople confidently proclaimed that the party’s popularity in the south had increased to the extent that it would win at least twenty seats from the Democrats in the 2005 elections.98 But despite these triumphant predictions, the period beginning from early 2004 saw the increasing erosion of Thaksin’s legitimacy in the south, which presaged his electoral failure in the region in early 2005. The Democrat Party played a critical role in this process, not by devising alternative policies that could effectively compete with Thaksin’s populism and development-centered concern about the discourse, but by a remorseless negative border violence was a campaign that succeeded in demonizing him and his government as enemies of the people primary issue for voters of the region. In electoral terms, the first tangible sign of this was demonstrated in a byelection held on February 22, 2004 in Songkhla Province, nearly two months after the upsurge of violent attacks following January 4. Although the scale of the violence was not yet having an impact at a national level, its effects on local perceptions in Songkhla (which is adjacent to Pattani Province) were considerable. Concerns among Songkhla residents were focused not only on the killings taking place, but on the severe effects they were having on tourist visits from Malaysia and Singapore. In this heartland of the party’s support, the Democrat candidate won convincingly over his TRT opponent by more than 25,000 votes (see Askew 2006a: ch. 5). Significantly, the Democrat Party’s exit polls suggested that concern about the border violence was a primary issue for voters, with

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border 76.3 percent of the sampled voters unhappy with the government’s handling of the southern border province disturbances.99 In 2003 TRT had seemed poised to capture this last bastion of Democrat political support in the next national election, but from 2004 this possibility began to fade as the Democrats artfully exploited local anxieties about the southern insurgency to consolidate opposition to Thaksin’s government. The party’s efforts to shore up Democrat support in the south involved a tough struggle in the face of aspirant TRT groups contesting provinciallevel elections in March, and the defection of a number of Democrat MPs to TRT later in the year, but they eventually succeeded. The tragic events of Tak Bai in October 2004 signaled the turning point in Democrat fortunes. The Satun Democrat MP Thanin Chaisamut played a leading role in demonizing the government by distributing VCDs (video compact discs) depicting the events throughout the border provinces. Thanin (though struggling for support within his own Satun constituency against fierce TRT competition, and later disqualified) was touted as a hero by southern Democrat MPs for defying the government’s ban on distributing these VCDs throughout Muslim communities, especially in the border constituencies where Wadah faction MPs were defending their seats. In the lead up to the 2005 national election, the southern Democrats prepared a set of policy proposals specifically for the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala. Launched in Pattani in December 2004 and widely distributed as a brochure through the three provinces, “The Pattani Declaration” was developed with strong input from Phirayot Rahimulla. Now a DP party list candidate, he was touted as the party’s key expert on the border disturbances, although other Muslim Democrat politicians have not entirely agreed with his culture-centered analysis of the root causes of the unrest. The Pattani Declaration reasserted that Thaksin’s wrong-headed policies had caused the violence to expand to a point where an unprecedented level of insecurity and violence pervaded the lives of ordinary people. The policy echoed ideas being floated by conflict-resolution advocates on employing peaceful means to address the crisis, incorporating long-standing grievances among the Muslim elites surrounding education, religion, and culture as well as points relating directly to the current violence. Four policy areas were summarized, covering politics and administration, education, economy, and society. Key proposals of the Pattani Declaration were: (1) the resuscitation of the

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Marc Askew SPBAC/CPM 43; (2) the abolition of the “CEO governor system”; (3) the formulation of a new Islamic Act with full public participation; (4) elevation of the pondok schools as a central institution in local Muslim society; (5) establishment of Shariah (Islamic law) courts dealing with property and inheritance; and (6) concerted attention to the problem of drug use among Islamic youth and suppression of “influential” groups that peddled drugs. As for the means to directly address the violent events, the declaration was vague, making high-sounding statements such as “Separate the terrorists from the population” and “Stop kidnap killings.” The Democrats continued to focus on government officials as a key group in perpetrating violence and generating disaffection in the borderland, with several points demanding strict enforcement of the law for corrupt and badly behaved officials (DPSBPAC 2004). At the campaign rallies of January–February 2005, Thaksin’s failure to diagnose the problems of the south and his disbanding of the SBPAC were cited as fundamental leadership flaws. Although nationally the prime minister’s popularity was boosted by his decisive actions to address the Tsunami disaster that had struck the Andaman coast provinces of the south in December, this did little to boost his approval on the border. Phirayot Rahimulla was introduced to border province audiences at the hustings as a knowledgeable specialist deeply familiar with the history and current problems of the subregion. In his speeches Phirayot reported that his own research on border disturbances in the past showed that most had been fomented by competing government officials. There had been separatist groups operating continually, but their ideas, based on grievances generated by mistreatment, did not represent the views of 99 percent of Muslims on the border. Phirayot explained to the Democrat Party’s southern audiences that the current turbulence had been caused by Thaksin’s dissolution of the SBPAC and CPM 43. These agencies had been devised by the revered southerner and former Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanond, who, according to the Democrats, had always understood the needs of the culturally diverse border region.100 In the national election of February 2005, TRT’s triumphant populist blandishments were effective in every region of the country except the south, where TRT was rebuffed by voters (though not without some tough contests). At the national level the Democrat Party was soundly thrashed by TRT, but in the south the Democrats expanded their number of seats to 52

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border (up from 48 in 2001).101 In the three border provinces, the long-standing Wadah faction Muslim politicians were ejected and replaced by Muslim Democrats (in all but one constituency of Narathiwat). The vote against TRT in the border provinces was seen by analysts as a direct protest vote against Thaksin’s approach to the border problems. In the former Wadah strongholds, the voting swing to the Democrats was less a political conversion than a desperate protest vote against a government that was seen as a major perpetrator of violence against Muslim communities, and against an administration that was proving unable to reduce the daily violence or convincingly identify the groups responsible.102 It is fair to judge that if the “southern fire” had not escalated when it did, the Democrat’s electoral bastion in the south would have been broken apart by Thaksin’s TRT Party. Thus the Democrats gained considerable political capital from their opposition to Thaksin’s methods of quelling unrest, as exemplified in the Tak Bai disaster. The rhetoric of blame continued to mark their proclamations after the 2005 election. At the special joint sitting of parliament convened by Thaksin in late March 2005 to defuse criticism and canvass for solutions, the Democrat leadership again slammed Thaksin for causing the southern violence. Former DP leader Chuan Leekpai repeated his well-worn attack on the Thaksin government for wrongly assessing the situation in the border provinces and dissolving the SBPAC, claiming that its abolition had “opened the way for militants to build up their ranks before an eruption of violence.”103 New DP leader Aphisit Vejjajiva presented a set of proposals prefaced with the claim that the southern problem “resulted from the government’s mishandling of the situation over the last four years.”104 Although apparently clear on the causes of the problem—abuse of state power and wrong policy—the DP leadership showed that it was just as confused about the identity of the perpetrators as everyone else. Chuan’s righteous affirmation that all perpetrators of killings “should be punished according to the law” was a worthy ideal, but it naively assumed that perpetrators were easy to apprehend and identify. Individually, and not surprisingly, southern Democrat politicians held varying viewpoints about culprits and solutions. A number of leading MPs in the south were convinced that some Wadah politicians and their networks had been a key group in laying the groundwork for the insurgency. As for the policy solutions represented in the Pattani Declaration—and incorporated in the formal DP campaign policy on the south during 2006—they did not

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Marc Askew reflect a consensus among the party’s Muslim MPs. For example, one prominent Muslim Democrat MP of Narathiwat has disagreed with Phirayot that language or culture issues are relevant to the current turbulence, or that they are a major concern among ordinary people of the region.105 Meanwhile, newly elected Muslim Democrat MPs in the border provinces have been just as afraid as anyone else to venture into the “red” districts of their own constituencies. It needs to be acknowledged that in 2003 and thereafter the Democrat Party was energetic in representing a range of genuine concerns among people in the south. As well, during 2005 to late 2006, when Thaksin was shying away from confronting the worsening violence and consigning key responsibilities to ministerial underlings, the Democrats pushed hard for the southern turbulence to be openly acknowledged as a national crisis of the first priority. At the same time, however, it is undeniable that the party has played a large part in constructing an image of the southern “problem” as one directly caused by Thaksin’s administrative mistakes and arbitrary use of “state power” (amnart rat, a favorite DP hobby-horse). With the selective amnesia that marks former governments consigned to political opposition, the Democrats have simplified an extremely complex situation— and one that they themselves have helped perpetuate. Conclusion The quest to identify the causes and culprits of the ongoing violence in Thailand’s Muslim-majority south is a highly politicized process, and the intensity of debates in Thailand over the past three years has been inextricably tied to the confrontations generated by Thaksin Shinawatra’s controversial mode of governance and policy-making. It is clear that Thaksin’s attempts to restructure the state from 2001 to 2004 contributed to destabilizing the borderland at the very time when global political and ideological changes were impacting on the country, its sensitive borderland society, and its immediate region. Extrajudicial kidnappings and murders under Thaksin’s aegis clearly played a role in alienating southern Muslims, with the kidnapping of Somchai Nilapaichit being a notorious and indisputable example of terrorism at the hands of officials. But the panic and fear surrounding um kha (abduction and murder) has also been spread effectively by a militant network that employs rumor as a strategic weapon. This monograph contends that the arguments branding Thaksin as a key culprit

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in sparking the current “fire in the south,” though partly valid, are also oversimplified. It has examined a common narrative of Thaksin’s critics— namely, that the disbandment of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center was a proximate and palpable precondition for panic and fear…has also the rise in the insurgency. I have suggested been spread effectively that, in terms of intelligence-gathering at least, the SBPAC was not effective, and have highlighted alternative arguments that this and other agencies had been rendered ineffective by the policy flaws of earlier governments. From 2004 through to 2005, the largely southernbased Democrat Party opposition, bereft of policies with which to counter Thaksin’s populism, managed to retain its electoral heartland via a campaign that demonized Thaksin as a cause of the southern unrest, conveniently downplaying the DP’s own incapacity when in government to fully address the complex dynamics that keep the borderland volatile and vulnerable. As the journalist Sathian Chantimathon perceptively remarked, “The problems and turbulence [of the south] are a longaccumulated inheritance that has now been passed to the government of Thaksin Shinawatra” (Sathian 2005: 540). Efforts to comprehend the dynamics of the current violence have been informed by narratives of conspiracy. Though some of these conspiracy theories are outlandish, their plausibility for local actors derives from knowledge of the well-established and complex ways that power has been deployed in the borderland by overlapping interest groups (including politicians at all levels) and underworld networks. In using the concept of a “disorderly border” here, I do not aim to reproduce a state-centered discourse legitimizing top-down regulation. In fact, the competing, fissured, and predatory agencies of the Thai state have been central agents in reproducing this disorder. Thaksin himself was fully Thaksin’s agenda was to aware of this, a point that is often weaken Democrat networks underplayed by commentators in their efforts to indict him as the prime cause of the unrest. To be sure, Thaksin’s agenda was to weaken Democrat networks in the south by restructuring border administration, but it is significant that Muslim critics in the south

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Marc Askew who opposed Thaksin’s policies also argue that entrenched Democrat-based interest groups have been a key element in weakening the region (though they conveniently exclude Wadah politicians and their networks from the equation). Moreover, from 2004 to 2006, a number of former military and intelligence officers emphasized that the southern violence emerged and persisted because of the inability and unwillingness of successive governments to address a disorderly state that has rendered the borderland vulnerable through pervasive corruption, predation, and competition. The long-standing presence of the disorderly state as a foundational ingredient of borderland instability, and local knowledge of it, has made it easy for insurgent groups to exploit already low popular-trust thresholds and succeed in implicating officials as the perpetrators of attacks. Much commentary evokes a binary portrait of the southern crisis, such as “Hegemonic Buddhist State vs. Oppressed Muslim Borderland.” Debates have certainly raised important and unresolved Muslim concerns, but in Muslim commentaries there is a clear reluctance to accept the fact that Muslim separatist groups and leaders have long functioned as another vested interest group on the borderland, drawing material sustenance and advantage from instability and conflict. The majority of “influential figures” in the borderland are Muslim Malays, yet southern Muslim advocates who concede this also emphasize that Thai Buddhist officials have acted as the protectors of these people—a fact that, while valid, ethnicizes the issue and casts blame on a Thai Buddhist ruling apparatus rather than acknowledging a problem of corruption/criminality that crosses ethnoreligious boundaries. Key southern Muslim intellectuals and civil society advocates rightly identify the disorderly border as a foundational problem and the most urgent one requiring attention. To them, the border provinces have been kept in a permanent state of weakness and vulnerability by it has never been politically Thailand’s governments, none of which has been determined to expedient for the Thai state to address its disempowerment, strengthen local communities precisely because it has never been politically expedient for the Thai state to strengthen local communities. These southern advocates are acutely aware that initiatives

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border for empowerment from the border (rather than from the center) have always raised the historical specter of separatist subversion for Bangkok governments. Interestingly, such commentary on a manipulated, abandoned borderland is echoed in the statement of a senior Muslim police commander in Pattani: namely, that the border provinces have for too long been a dua pralong (testing ground, or playing field of competition) initiatives for empowerment… for rival political and interest groups.106 Making sense of this have always raised the historical long-neglected, contested, and specter of separatist[ism] manipulated borderland is clearly an essential part of the process of forging some new equilibrium in the border provinces. The necessary transition to a “hightrust” culture, as advocated by some commentators as a basis for change (Warayuth 2006), is a challenge that cannot be met without addressing deeply embedded structures of informal power in the borderland.

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Endnotes In the research for and writing of this monograph, I have accumulated a number of debts that need acknowledgment here. Many thanks to the Thai newsmen Prayut Siwayarot and Don Pathan for their generous exchange of views and information, to Samatcha Nilaphatama for assistance, and to all those who granted interviews to me in Thailand. I also thank Dr. Muthiah Alagappa for first encouraging me to write the monograph and the East-West Center Washington workshop discussants and anonymous referees who commented on drafts, particularly Duncan McCargo. Michael Nelson kindly provided additional news literature. But I especially need to acknowledge the commitment and friendship of “Bangyi” Yusof, who gave me invaluable support and data during my village-based fieldwork in Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala during July–October 2006. Tragically, Bangyi was assassinated by insurgents on December 11, 2006. He leaves a widow and two children, more victims of southern Thailand’s enigmatic violence. 1. These have included: an official apology by the prime minister for the deaths inflicted by authorities in April and October 2004; the abolition of “black lists” of suspects and rewards offered for their capture; the resuscitation of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center; and the acceptance of Pattani Malay as a legitimate language for use in government offices. 2. For portrayals of Thaksin’s political agenda as a comprehensive project to restructure, centralize, and capture the Thai state, see Ganesan 2004; McCargo and Ukrist 2005; Pasuk and Baker 2004. For a recent retrospective analysis of Thaksin’s declining popularity that identifies the southern crisis as one causal factor, see Kasian 2006. 3. For published items on the topic, see Supalak Ganjanakhundee, “Shadowy Network Unfolds,” Nation, May 1, 2004; Don Pathan, “Alone in the Shadow of Militants,” Nation, May 21, 2006; Prayut Siwayarot, “Pert Yuthasart Neowruam Mai” [Revealing the strategy of the new united front], Khom Chat Luek, July 26, 2006; Prayut Siwayarot, “Kaennam Buan Tai Pert Pak” [A leader of the united front confesses], Khom Chat Luek, August 7, 2006; and Nirmal Ghosh, “Mystery Group Runs Insurgency in Thai South,”

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Marc Askew Straits Times, July 25, 2005. Official security documents include: Interrogation Testimony of Usman Useng, teacher and former student of Thammawitthaya Foundation School, Yala, Royal Thai Army, Military Intelligence Section, classified document, November 10, 2004; Phatthanakan Khong Klum Kokhwammaisangop [The development of the groups committing disturbances], National Security Council (NSC), classified intelligence summary, June 2005: 4; National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Senthang su Kanpen Samachik Khabuankan kokhwam mai sangop nai 3 Changwat Chaidaen Phak Tai [Directions in the recruitment of members to the movement to create disturbances in the three southern border provinces], August 2005. 4. In addition to the above, see Thort Rahat RKK Nuai ‘Rop Phiset’ Kwa Imphot Chark Indo Theung Chaidaen Tai [Decoding the RKK group of “special fighters”: An import from Indonesia comes to the Thai border], Issara News Center, January 9, 2006. For a report of RKK involvement in a recent wave of bombings and shootings on February 18, 2007, see Muhamad-Ayup Pathan, “Three People Arrested over Southern Attacks,” Bangkok Post, Feburary 21, 2007; for attempts to detect regional organizational/ideological linkages, see Abuza 2005, 2006. 5. Pennapa Hongthong, “Policing the South: Risk of Death Is a Part of Life for Forensic Officers,” Nation, January 19, 2007. 6. This outline is an elaboration and refinement of the tripartite portrait of representations of the southern crisis presented by the columnist “Chang Noi” in the article “Interpreting the South,” Nation, May 10, 2004. 7. In July and August 2005, two volumes were produced by Good Morning Press, the same publisher of Panlop’s self-vindicatory book of the Krue Se events, written under the pen name “Seua Kaown” and entitled The Crisis of the Southern Fire Floods the Country (in Thai). In October 2005 a three-volume set of pocketbooks was published by Animate Group, with accounts of the turbulence portrayed in diarized form by a pseudonymous author, “Kandakawi,” who may well be the same author of the earlier series. All volumes are critical of what the writer portrays as pro-Muslim conciliation approaches by the National Reconciliation Commission, and highlight the viciousness of the killings and the sufferings of government officials and innocent people in the three border provinces. 8. See Don Pathan, “Same Faces, But Motives Have Changed,” Nation, April 3, 2002. 9. Julian Gearing, “Southern Discomfort,” Asiaweek, March 20, 1998. Internet edition: www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/98/0320/is1.html. 10. Extract from an interview with Somchai published by Warasan Khao Kotmai Mai [Journal of new law], March 2004, reproduced on frontispiece of 365 Wan: Thanai Somchai Nilaphaichit [365 days, lawyer Somchai Nilaphaichit], Thai Working Group on Human Rights Defenders/Asian Human Rights Commission, 2005. Internet edition: http://thailand.ahrchk.net/docs/Somchai-365days.pdf. 11. “PM Says Foreign Criticism Does Not Worry Him,” Bangkok Post, May 2, 2004. 12. Don Pathan, “Do Not Oversimplify the Southern Troubles,” Nation, July 27, 2005. 13. The People’s Intelligence Network (PIN), “Action at Cho Airong–2004,” January/ February 2004, p. 2, hereafter cited as “PIN.” 14. PIN, pp. 2–3. 15. Ibid., p. 5. 16. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 17. Ibid., pp. 23. 18. Ibid., p. 24.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border 19. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 20. Ibid., p. 25. 21. Ibid., p. 26 22. Author’s interview with retired General Kitti Rattanachaya, October 5, 2006. 23. These politicians were named in the press during 2004. They vigorously denied the speculation about their involvement in planning the insurgency. 24. PIN, p. 47. 25. Ibid., pp. 38, 50. 26. Ibid., pp. 46–48. 27. Ibid., pp. 49. 28. Ibid., p. 51. See Harn Leenanond, “Dap Fai Tai (2) Ru Yuthasart—Ru Yuthawithi” [Quenching the southern fire (2): Know the strategy—know the tactics], Matichon Raiwan, December 21, 2004; Rung 2005: 133. 29. PIN, p. 53. 30. Ibid., p. 50. 31. Ibid., p. 59. The report states that the news of the 1000-day plan was prompted by BRN Ulama’s disagreement with the plan’s objectives and the leaking of a written document proclaiming the group’s withdrawal. Thai officials had the document translated from Yawi into Thai. 32. Ibid., pp. 89–90. 33. Ibid., p. 90. 34. Ibid., p. 91. 35. Ibid., pp. 92–93. 36. “Confession—No Surprise,” Bangkok Post, February 19, 1998. 37. “Dr Farish A. Noor Interviews the Head of the Patani BERSATU Movement, June 16, 2005,” www.brandmalaysia.com/movabletype/archives/2005/06/dr_farish_a_noo.html. 38. Author’s interview with Mansoor Sar-Lae, September 12, 2006. 39. Avudh Panananda, “Chavalit’s ‘Last Word’ on South,” Nation, August 4, 2004. 40. “Thai Muslim Senator, 2 MPs Accused of Masterminding Raid on Army Arms Depot,” Channelnewsasia report, 23, March 2004 1854 hrs (SST), www.channelnewsasia.com/ stories/ southeastasia/view/76786/1/.html. 41. This point about the early surveillance of Najmuddin and others involved in the PUSAKA Foundation is based on information from a southern journalist who allowed me to view photographs of Najmuddin and Masae taken by government undercover intelligence operatives during 2002, at opening ceremonies of religious schools in the three provinces. The name of the journalist and the agency cannot be revealed here. 42. I refer here to Romali Uttrasin, elder brother of Wadah politician Ariphen Uttrasin, who was suspected as a BRN-C official. Romali had been under suspicion for some years. He fled to Malaysia in 2004, and the Department of Special Investigations posted a reward of 2 million Baht for information leading to his capture. Suspicion of Romali during the previous Democrat-led administration was mentioned to me by a senior Democrat Party politician who worked closely with Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai. 43. Najmuddin was protected from arrest by parliamentary immunity during 2004. 44. “TRT MPs’ Fund Body Linked to Militants,” Nation, April 2, 2004; Surasak Tumcharoen and Sermsuk Kasitipradit, “MP Denies Being Subversive,” Bangkok Post, April 3, 2004; Smatcha Hoonsara, “Najmuddin Alleges Police Plot,” Nation, May 15, 2004; “Court Aquits Ex-TRT MP,” Bangkok Post, December 16, 2005. 45. “Dead Separatist Was a Gun Runner: Thaksin,” Nation, August 30, 2003.

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Marc Askew 46. Andrew Perrin, “Silent Witness: Has Thailand’s Muslim-Dominated South Served as a Training and Staging Base for Jihadi Terrorists?” Time Magazine, November 1, 2002. www.time.com/time/ asia/covers/ 1101021125/thailand.html. 47 Author’s interviews with Sino-Thai rubber plantation owners of Yala, January–February 2004. 48. Derived from the author’s interviews with a variety of currently serving and retired officials in Pattani, Narathiwat, and Songkhla Provinces, including police of different ranks and former district head officers (nai amphoe) who served in Waeng, Cho Airong, and Rangae districts, Narathiwat. 49. For comments on the weak borderland by former military figures, see Harn Leenanond, “Dap Fai Tai (3)” [Quenching the southern fire (3)], Matichon Raiwan, January 19, 2005; Bunkrom 2005: 137–39; Thanapol 2004: 133; and Kitti 2005: 27. 50. Kunsiri Olarikkachat “PM, Anand Agree to Disagree: Thaksin to Keep All Options Open,” Bangkok Post, July 29, 2005. 51. Wassana Nanuam, “Drug Rings ‘Behind Unrest’: Chaos Incited to Stop Narcotics Suppression,” Bangkok Post, August 31, 2005. 52. Yuwadee Tunyasiri and Waedao Harai, “Traffickers Financing Separatists. Kongsak Vows Wider War on Drug Gangs,” Bangkok Post, November 15, 2005; “Police: Drug Trafficking Supports Southern Insurgency,” Bangkok Post, November 17, 2005. 53. “Drug Dealer Behind Southern Bomb Blasts,” Bangkok Post, June 18, 2006. 54. Phatthanakan Khong Klum Kokhwammaisangop [The development of the groups committing disturbances], National Security Council, classified intelligence summary, June 2005: 9. 55. Author’s interview with Ahmad Somboon Bualuang, September 28, 2006. 56. Khrongkan Santi Changwat Chaidaen Phak Tai [The peace project of the southern border provinces], Kanchumnum Khong Pratchachon Phu Tongkan Khowruam Kaekhai Panha Doi Santhi [The gathering of people who want a peaceful solution], August 2006. Word processed booklet. 57. Author’s interview with Lt. General Vaipot Srinual, September 14, 2006. 58. “Police Unit Withdrawn after Crowd Surrounds Yala School,” Nation, November 6, 2006. 59. Author’s interviews with Nikraman Suleiman, September 19, 2006; and with Worawit Baru, September 13, 2006. 60. My findings on the general lack of interest in Pattani’s history and culture heroes, such as Haji Sulong, among villagers are based on a four-month period of field research visiting villagers in Pattani and Yala (July to October 2006). They are corroborated by Ms. King-Oa, a reporter of the Nation and anthropology scholar who has spent a period of intensive participant-based research in Ra-Ngae district, Narathiwat. Author’s personal communication, August 2006. 61. Author’s interview with Mansoor Sar-Lae, September 12, 2006. 62. Prime Minister’s Office order 123/2545, April 30, 2002. 63. Bunkrom 2005: 230. 64. Ibid., 175. Harn Leenanond’s criticism of the withdrawal of the army from the region, and his charge that the police were in “over their heads,” were reported in the press within a few days of the January 4 raid. See “New Approach to Security Needed,” Nation, January 7, 2004. 65. “The Week That Was: A Unified Command to Fight Trouble,” Nation, March 31, 2002.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border 66. Not to be confused with the SBPPPC (Southern Border Provinces Peace Promotion Command), established in March 2004. The SBPPPC was a forward command group of ISOC, under the control of General Panlop Pinmanee, who ordered the controversial storming of the Krue Se mosque. It was dissolved in May 2004. 67. Piyanart Srivalo, “Security Control: Army Keeps Top Post in the South,” Nation, May 22, 2005. 68. For a presentation of the emergence of new government policy as a reflection of royal wisdom, see the report in the government’s Foreign Office public relations magazine, “Peace-Building in the Three Southern Border Provinces,” Inside Thailand Review, 2005: http://Thailand.prd.go.th/ebook/ review/content.php?chaptered=20#120. 69. See Don Pathan, “Same Faces, But Motives Have Changed,” Nation, April 3, 2002. 70. Phuchatkan Raiwan, March 29 and April 9, 2002. 71. For reports on the fates of Sant and Songitti, see Wassana Nanuam, “Songitti Out after Six Months,” Bangkok Post, August 29, 2003; “Arsonists Go on the Rampage in Thai South,” Agence France-Presse, March 19, 2004. Internet edition: www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific. 72. Phuchatkan Raiwan, March 29, 2002. 73. Phuchatkan Raiwan, April 9, 2002. 74. See Suphalaksa and Don, Santiphap Nai Plaeow Phlueng, pp. 2004: 302–03. For a review of some of these arguments and evidence used to support them, see McCargo, “Thaksin and the Resurgence of Violence in the Thai South,” p. 2006: 44. 75. Author’s interview with Dr. Worawit Baru, Pattani, December 28, 2005. Worawit’s emphasis on the important symbolic role of the SBPAC was consistent with remarks earlier made to Duncan McCargo, who quotes Worawit as emphasizing that the agency’s importance could not be assessed on formal criteria alone. 76. “Editorial: Stumbling in the Dark,” Nation, December 8, 2005. 77. Somchai Meesane, “PM Warns Army Men in South: Officers Told to Bring Peace to the Region,” Bangkok Post, January 19, 1997. 78. Interview, senior military intelligence officer of ISOC close to ISOC commander, December 22, 2005. Now based in Bangkok, he served for three years in ISOC Fourth Army Region. His identity is here concealed by request. 79. Ibid. 80. This rationale has been taken up by Duncan McCargo, although he nests this process within a wider structural framework, proposing that Thaksin’s quest for dominance of the state necessitated the deconstruction of an extensive power network that articulated around the figure of Prem Tinsulanond and the monarchy; McCargo 2006: 65–68. 81. Author’s interview with retired Police Colonel Mongkol, former Police Border Patrol officer Yala (1965–1981), and District Police Superintendent in charge of stations in Narathiwat and Pattani Provinces (1982–1994), September 30, 2006. 82. Author’s interview with retired General Kitti Rattanachaya, October 5, 2006. 83. Author’s interview with Chaiyong Maneerungsakul, September 11, 2006. 84. During 1997–2000, Chuan Leekpai regularly received reports of Pattani separatist gatherings in Kelantan. Author’s interview with a senior Democrat MP who served as ministerial assistant to Chuan during this period, and was given the task of viewing intelligence reports on separatist activities, August 6, 2006. 85. “Experts Hail Revival Plan for SBPAC,” Bangkok Post, October 28, 2006. 86. The “Achille’s heel” prophecy was voiced by Surin Pitsuwan in “Seven Pointers to Calming the South,” Nation, February 17, 2004.

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Marc Askew 87. I observed prints of bin Laden during visits to southern border towns in Narathiwat, Songkhla, and Yala in late 2001. Some further details can be noted in Nanthadet 2006: 44. 88. “Democrat Offensive: Calls for Wan Noor Sacking,” Nation, May 4, 2003. 89. Focus PakTai, July 26–August 1, 2003; Siam Rat, July 13, 2003. 90. Ironically, perhaps, the publication was funded by the Electoral Commission of Thailand’s “fund to promote political parties.” 91. In 2005 Mansoor Sa-Lae, a southern Muslim writer, attempted to explain to his readers the widespread mistrust of officials that prevailed among ordinary Muslim chaoban (village folk), emphasizing that their paranoid fear of um kha (abduction and murder) was not at all strange, since its prevalence had been continually affirmed by the southern Democrat Party leaders in their speeches. See Mansoor 2005: 30. 92. This meeting, held on August 31, 2003, was graced with the ambitious title “Advisory Meeting to Determine a Strategy for Solving the Problems of the Southern Border Provinces.” The meeting was not revealed to the press. I was present at this meeting, where a dozen Muslim religious teachers of Pattani were assembled to air their views. In attendance were the prominent southern Democrat MPs Niphon Bunyamanee and Trairong Suwankiri, in addition to party secretary-general Pradit Pathraprasit, deputy party leader Anek Laothamatas, and his colleague the NGO leader Aphichart Thongyu (both left in mid-2004 to form the Mahachon Party). Also present were two Pattani Democrat MPs and Muslim DP member Jeh-aming Tohtayong, then deputy party spokesman, who had lost his Narathiwat seat against Ariphen Uttrasin in the 2001 elections. 93. See especially Surin Pitsuwan, “Seven Pointers to Calming the South,” Nation, February 17, 2004. 94. Matichon Raiwan, September 24, 2003. 95. “Police Raid Yala Democrat’s Home,” Nation, September 9, 2003; “Show of Support,” Bangkok Post, September 11, 2003. 96. “Decree Was Translated to ‘Help’ Southerners,” Bangkok Post, September 23, 2003. 97. Wichayan Boonchote, “PM Vows to Keep Price of Rubber above B30/kg,” Bangkok Post, October 3, 2003. 98. Sukanya Lim, “Southern Dilemma,” Nation, December 3, 2003. 99. Democrat Party, “RDI Centre” www.democrat.or.th.rdicenter/. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Connors of LaTrobe University, Melbourne, for directing me to this source. 100. Based on my recordings of one of Phirayot’s election addresses at a Democrat Party rally in Hat Yai, Songkhla Province, January 28, 2005. 101. The Democrat Party secured only 96 seats nationally (losing most of their remaining seats in Bangkok), down from the 130 seats they gained in the 2001 elections (combing both constituency seats and party-list seats, gained from a proportional system based on a national list). 102. Bangkok Post, Februrary 8, 2005. 103. “Troop Levels to Be Reduced,” Nation, April 1, 2005. 104. “PM Admits Action in South Flawed,” Bangkok Post, March 31, 2006. 105. Author’s interview with Jeh-aming Tohtayong, Democrat MP, Narathiwat, September 16, 2006. 106. Author’s interview with a high-ranking Muslim police commander, Pattani Province, September 22, 2006 (name withheld by request).

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Bibliography N.B.: Interviews and other documents, including classified intelligence material and press reports, are listed in the Endnotes. Abuza, Zachary. 2005. “A Conspiracy of Silence: Who is Behind the Escalating Insurgency in Southern Thailand?” Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor 3(9), May 6: 4–6. ———. 2006. “A Breakdown of Southern Thailand’s Insurgent Groups.”’Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor 4(17), September 8: 3–6. Askew, Marc. 2006a. Culture and Electoral Politics in Southern Thailand: Election Campaigning, Group Formation and the Symbolic Construction of Political Allegiances in Songkhla Province. Bangkok: King Prajadhipok’s Institute, Thailand. ———. 2006b. “Sex and The Sacred: Sojourners and Visitors in the Making of The Southern Thai Borderland.” In Horstmann, Alexander, and Reed Wadley, eds. 2006. Centring the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands. Oxford and New York: Berghahn: 179–208. Askew, Marc, and Erik Cohen. 2004. “Pilgrimage and Prostitution: The Pattern of Border Tourism in Lower South Thailand.”–Tourism Recreation Research 29: 89– 104. Barun (pseud.). 2005.–Yihad Sithao: Khrai Srang? Khrai Liang Fai Tai? [Grey jihad: Who created it? Who is nurturing it?]. Bangkok: Sarika Printing. Battersby, Paul. 1998–1999. “Border Politics and the Broader Politics of Thailand’s International Relations in the 1990s: From Communism to Capitalism.” Pacific Affairs 71(4), Winter: 473–88. Bunkrom Dongbangsattan. 2005. Kan dor su Khrang Sut Thai khong Phon Ek Chavalit Yongchaiyudh [The last war of General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh]. Bangkok: Offset Press. Chidchanok Rahimulla. 2004. “Seuksa Khabuankan Baengyaek Dindaen lae Kokanrai

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Marc Askew nai Changwat Chaidaen Phak Tai khong Thai” [Study of separatist movement and insurgents in the border provinces of southern Thailand]. In Sathanakan lae Thit Thang Kan Kae Panha Changwat Chaidaen Phak Tai nai Yuk Patirup [The situation and direction for solving the problems of Thailand’s southern border provinces in the age of reform]. Songkhla: Department of Public Administration, Prince of Songkhla University. Chow, Jonathan T. 2005. “ASEAN Counterterrorism Cooperation since 9/11.” Asian Survey 45(2): 302–21. Connors, Michael K. 2006. “War on Error and the Southern Fire: How Terrorism Analysts Get it Wrong.”–Critical Asian Studies 38(1): 151–75. Croissant, Aurel. 2005. “Unrest in South Thailand: Contours, Causes and Consequences Since 2001.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 27(1): 21–43. DPSBPAC (Democrat Party Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center). 2003a. Khrai Chut Fai Tai? [Who started the fire on the southern border?]. Bangkok: DPSBPAC, June. ———. 2003b. Darn! Por.Ror.Kor. Korganrai [Oppose! the executive decree on terrorism]. Bangkok: DPSBPAC, October. ———. 2004. Khamprakart Pattani [The Pattani Declaration]. Bangkok: DPSBPAC, December. Ganesan, N. 2004. “Thaksin and the Politics of Domestic and Regional Consolidation in Thailand.” Contemporary Southeast Asia 26(1): 26–44. Ghosh, Nirmal. 2005. “Mystery Group Runs Insurgency in Thai South.”–Straits Times, July 25. Hamilton-Hart, Natasha. 2005. “Terrorism in Southeast Asia: Expert Analysis, Myopia and Fantasy.” The Pacific Review 18(3): 303–25. Holt, Andrew. 2004. “Thailand’s Troubled Border: Islamic Insurgency or Criminal Playground?” Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor 2(10), May 20: 4–6. ICG (International Crisis Group). 2005. Southern Thailand: Insurgency, not Jihad. International Crisis Group Asia Report No. 98, May 18. Kaeow Withunayathian et al., eds. 2006. Khwamru lae Khwam Mairu 3 Changwat Chaidaen [Knowledge and ignorance about the three border provinces]. Bangkok: Social Research Institute, Chulalongkorn University. Kasian Tejapira. 2006. “Toppling Thaksin.” New Left Review 39 (May–June): 5–37. Kavi Chongkittavorn. 2004. “Thailand: International Terrorism and the Muslim South.” In Southeast Asian Affairs 2004. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies. Kitti Rattanachaya. 2004. Pert Pong Chut Fai Tai tang Rat Pattani [Revealing the igniting of the southern fire—establishing a Pattani state]. Bangkok: Phichit Printing. ———. 2005. Dap Fai Tai kap Rat Thai [Quenching the southern fire and the Thai state]. Bangkok: Than Ruam Ho Co. Mansoor Sar-Lae. 2004. Fai Tai … Ru Cha Dap? Phak 1 [The southern fire … or will it be quenched? Part 1]. Hat Yai: Muslim Tai Publishing. ———. 2005. Fai Tai … Ru Cha Dap? Phak 2 [The southern fire … or will it be quenched? Part 2]. Hat Yai: Muslim Tai Publishing. McCargo, Duncan. 2006. “Thaksin and the Resurgence of Violence in the Thai South: Network Monarchy Strikes Back?” Critical Asian Studies 38(1): 39–71. McCargo, Duncan, and Ukrist Pathmanand. 2005. The Thaksinization of Thailand. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.

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Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border Nanthadet Meksawat. 2006. Patibatkan Lap Dap Fai Tai [Secret action to quench the fire in the south]. Bangkok: Ruamduai Chuaikan. NRC (National Reconciliation Commission). 2005. Khanna Kammakan Issara phuea khwamsamanchan haeng chart, Rang raignan chabap sombun: Ao Chana Khwamrunraeng duai phalang samanchan [NRC draft report: Defeating violence with the power of reconciliation]. Bangkok: NRC, October 10. ———. 2006. Khanna Kammakan Issara phuea khwamsamanchan haeng chart, Raingan Khannakammakan Issara Pheua Khwamsamanachan Haeng Chart: Ao Chana Khwamrunraeng duai phalang samanchan [NRC final report: Defeating violence with the power of reconciliation]. Vol. 1. Bangkok: NRC. Panlop Pinmanee. 2004. Phom Phit Rue? Thi Yuet Krue Se! [Was I wrong to take the Krue Se mosque?]. Bangkok: Good Morning Press. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker. 2004. Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsa. 1994. Corruption and Democracy in Thailand. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Pasuk Phongppaichit, Sungsidh Piriyarangsan, and Nualnoi Treerat. 1998. Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja: Thailand’s Illegal Economy and Public Policy. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Prasong Sunsiri. 2005. Songkhram Korkanrai: andarai klai dua [Terrorist war: Danger close by]. Bangkok: Sorkhit Duaydon Publishing. Rung Kaewdaeng. 2005. Songkhram lae Santisuk @ Chaidaen Phak Tai [War and peace @ the southern Thai border]. Bangkok: Matichon Publishing. Sathian Chantimathon. 2005. Chorayut Nai Muang [Secret war in the city]. Bangkok: Matichon Publishing. SBPAC (Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center). 2002. 20 Pi So.Or.Bor.Tor. Banthuek Prawatsat 2 Thotsawat Chaidaen Tai [Twenty years of the SBPAC: Historical notes of two decades of the southern border]. Hatyai, Songkhla: Office of the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior. Siriworn Kaewkan. 2006. Koroni Khatakam To Iman Satorpa Kadir [The murder case of Tok Imam Satorpa Karde]. Bangkok: Photphai Printing. Smith, Anthony L. 2004. “Trouble in Thailand’s Muslim South: Separatism, not Global Terrorism.” Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies 3(10), December. www.apcss.org/ Publications/APSSS/TroubleinThailandsMuslimSouth.pdf Srisompob Jitpiromsri, with Panyasak Sobhonvasu. 2006. “Unpacking Thailand’s Southern Conflict: The Poverty of Structural Explanations.” Critical Asian Studies 38(1): 95–117. Sullivan, John P. 2005. “Terrorism, Crime and Private Armies.” In Robert J. Bunker, ed. 2005. Networks, Terrorism, and Global Insurgency. London: Routledge, 69–83. Suphalak Kanchanakhundi and Don Pathan. 2004. Santiphap Nai Plaeow Phlueng [Peace in flames]. Bangkok: Nation Books. Thanapol Boonyopatham. 2004. Ru Thae—Ru Than: Dap Duan Fai Tai [Know completely—know in time: Quench the fire in the south urgently]. Bangkok: Communication and Studies Co. Thitinan Phongsudhirak. 2003. “Thailand: Democratic Authoritarianism.” In Southeast Asian Affairs 2003. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 271–81. Ukrist Pathmanand. 2006. “Thaksin’s Achilles Heel: The Failure of Hawkish Approaches in the Thai South.” Critical Asian Studies 38(1): 73–93.

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Marc Askew Warayuth Sriwarakuel. 2006. “Building High-Trust Cultures for Peace in the South of Thailand.” In Yusuf, Imtiaz, and Lars Peter Schmidt, eds. 2006. Understanding Conflict and Approaching Peace in Southern Thailand. Bangkok: Konrad Adenaur Stiftung, 75–91. Yusuf, Imtiaz, and Lars Peter Schmidt, eds. 2006. Understanding Conflict and Approaching Peace in Southern Thailand. Bangkok: Konrad Adenaur Stiftung.

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Project Information

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83 Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia Project Rationale, Purpose, and Outline Project Director: Muthiah Alagappa Principal Researchers: Morten Pedersen (Burma/Myanmar) Saroja Dorairajoo (southern Thailand) Mahendra Lawoti (Nepal) Samir Kumar Das (northeast India) Neil DeVotta (Sri Lanka) Rationale Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia is part of a larger East-West Center project on state building and governance in Asia that investigates political legitimacy of governments, the relationship of the military to the state, the development of political and civil societies and their roles in democratic development, the role of military force in state formation, and the dynamics and management of internal conflicts arising from nation- and state-building processes. An earlier project investigating internal conflicts arising from nation- and state-building processes focused on conflicts arising from the political consciousness of minority communities in China (Tibet and Xinjiang), Indonesia (Aceh and Papua), and southern Philippines (the Moro Muslims). Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, that highly successful project was completed in March 2005. The present project, which began in July 2005, investigates the causes and consequences of internal conflicts arising from state- and nation-building processes in Burma/Myanmar, southern Thailand, Nepal, northeast India, and Sri Lanka, and explores strategies and solutions for their peaceful management and eventual settlement. Internal conflicts have been a prominent feature of the Asian political landscape since 1945. Asia has witnessed numerous civil wars, armed insurgencies, coups d’Ètat, regional rebellions, and revolutions. Many have been protracted; several have far-reaching domestic and international consequences. The civil war in Pakistan led to the break up of that country in 1971; separatist struggles challenge the political and territorial integrity of China, India, Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, Thailand, and Sri Lanka; political uprisings in Thailand (1973 and 1991), the Philippines (1986), South Korea (1986), Taiwan (1991) Bangladesh (1991), and Indonesia (1998) resulted in dramatic political change in those countries.

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84 Although the political uprisings in Burma (1988) and China (1989) were suppressed, the political systems in those countries, as well as in Vietnam, continue to confront problems of legitimacy that could become acute; and radical Islam poses serious challenges to stability in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The Thai military ousted the democratically-elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. In all, millions of people have been killed in the internal conflicts, and tens of millions have been displaced. Moreover, the involvement of external powers in a competitive manner (especially during the Cold War) in several of these conflicts had negative consequences for domestic and regional security. Internal conflicts in Asia can be traced to contestations over political legitimacy (the title to rule), national identity, state building, and distributive justice––that are often interconnected. With the bankruptcy of the socialist model and transitions to democracy in several countries, the number of internal conflicts over political legitimacy has declined in Asia. However, the legitimacy of certain governments continues to be contested from time to time, and the remaining communist and authoritarian systems are likely to confront challenges to their legitimacy in due course. Internal conflicts also arise from the process of constructing modern nation-states, and the unequal distribution of material and status benefits. Although many Asian states have made considerable progress in constructing national communities and viable states, several countries, including some major ones, still confront serious problems that have degenerated into violent conflict. By affecting the political and territorial integrity of the state as well as the physical, cultural, economic, and political security of individuals and groups, these conflicts have great potential to affect domestic and international stability. Purpose Internal Conflicts and State-Building Challenges in Asia examines internal conflicts arising from the political consciousness of minority communities in Burma/Myanmar, southern Thailand, northeast India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Except for Nepal, these states are not in danger of collapse. However, they do face serious challenges at the regional and local levels which, if not addressed, can negatively affect the vitality of the national state in these countries. Specifically, the project has a threefold purpose: (1) to develop an in-depth understanding of the domestic, transnational, and international dynamics of internal conflicts in these countries in the context of nationand state-building strategies; (2) to examine how such conflicts have affected

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85 the vitality of the state; and (3) to explore strategies and solutions for the peaceful management and eventual settlement of these conflicts. Design A study group has been organized for each of the five conflicts investigated in the study. With a principal researcher for each, the study groups comprise practitioners and scholars from the respective Asian countries, including the region or province that is the focus of the conflict, as well as from Australia, Britain, Belgium, Sweden, and the United States. The participants list that follows shows the composition of the study groups. All five study groups met jointly for the first time in Washington, D.C., on October 30–November 3, 2005. Over a period of five days, participants engaged in intensive discussion of a wide range of issues pertaining to the conflicts investigated in the project. In addition to identifying key issues for research and publication, the meeting facilitated the development of cross-country perspectives and interaction among scholars who had not previously worked together. Based on discussion at the meeting, twenty-five policy papers were commissioned. The study groups met separately in the summer of 2006 for the second set of meetings, which were organized in collaboration with respected policy-oriented think tanks in each host country. The Burma and southern Thailand study group meetings were held in Bangkok July 10–11 and July 12–13, respectively. These meetings were cosponsored by The Institute of Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University. The Nepal study group was held in Kathmandu, Nepal, July 17–19, and was cosponsored by the Social Science Baha. The northeast India study group met in New Delhi, India, August 9–10. This meeting was cosponsored by the Centre for Policy Research. The Sri Lanka meeting was held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, August 14–16, and cosponsored by the Centre for Policy Alternatives. In each of these meetings, scholars and practitioners reviewed and critiqued papers produced for the meetings and made suggestions for revision. Publications This project will result in twenty to twenty-five policy papers providing a detailed examination of particular aspects of each conflict. Subject to satisfactory peer review, these 18,000- to 24,000-word essays will be published in the East-West Center Washington Policy Studies series, and

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86 will be circulated widely to key personnel and institutions in the policy and intellectual communities and the media in the respective Asian countries, the United States, and other relevant countries. Some studies will be published in the East-West Center Washington Working Papers series. Public Forums To engage the informed public and to disseminate the findings of the project to a wide audience, public forums have been organized in conjunction with study group meetings. Five public forums were organized in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the first study group meeting. The first forum, cosponsored by The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, discussed the conflict in southern Thailand. The second, cosponsored by The Sigur Center for Asian Studies of The George Washington University, discussed the conflict in Burma. The conflicts in Nepal were the focus of the third forum, which was cosponsored by the Asia Program at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The fourth public meeting, cosponsored by the Foreign Policy Studies program at The Brookings Institution, discussed the conflicts in northeastern India. The fifth forum, cosponsored by the South Asia Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, focused on the conflict in Sri Lanka. Funding Support The Carnegie Corporation of New York is once again providing generous funding support for the project.

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Project Director Muthiah Alagappa, Ph.D. Director, East-West Center Washington (from February 2001 to January 2007) Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center (from February 1, 2007)

Burma/Myanmar Study Group Morten Pedersen United Nations University Principal Researcher Mary Callahan University of Washington Christina Fink Chiang Mai University Saboi Jum Shalom Foundation, Yangon Kyi May Kaung Freelance Writer/Analyst, Washington, D.C.

Zaw Oo American University Martin Smith Independent Analyst, London David I. Steinberg Georgetown University David Tegenfeldt Hope International Development Agency, Yangon Mya Than Chulalongkorn University

Tom Kramer Freelance Consultant, Amsterdam

Tin Maung Maung Than Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Curtis Lambrecht Yale University

Ardeth Thawnghmung University of Massachusetts, Lowell

David Scott Mathieson Australian National University

Meredith Weiss East-West Center Washington

Win Min Chiang Mai University

Khin Zaw Win Independent Researcher, Yangon Harn Yawnghwe Euro-Burma Office, Brussels

Southern Thailand Study Group Saroja Dorairajoo National University of Singapore Principal Researcher

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Thanet Aphornsuvan Thammasat University

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88 Marc Askew Victoria University, Melbourne

Duncan McCargo University of Leeds

Suchit Bunbongkarn Chulalongkorn University

Celakhan (Don) Pathan The Nation Newspaper, Bangkok

Kavi Chongkittavorn Nation Multimedia Group, Bangkok

Surin Pitsuwan MP, Thai House of Representatives

Neil John Funston Australian National University

Thitinan Pongsudhirak Chulalongkorn University

Surat Horachaikul Chulalongkorn University

Chaiwat Satha-Anand Thammasat University

Srisompob Jitpiromsri Prince of Songkla University, Pattani Campus

Vaipot Srinual Supreme Command Headquarters, Thailand

Joseph Chinyong Liow Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Wattana Sugunnasil Prince of Songkla University, Pattani Campus

Chandra-nuj Mahakanjana National Institute of Development Administration, Bangkok

Panitan Wattanayagorn Chulalongkorn University Imtiyaz Yusuf Assumption University, Bangkok

Nepal Study Group Mahendra Lawoti Western Michigan University Principal Researcher Itty Abraham East-West Center Washington Meena Acharya Tanka Prasad Acharya Memorial Foundation, Kathmandu Lok Raj Baral Nepal Center for Contemporary Studies, Kathmandu

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Surendra Raj Bhandari Law Associates Nepal, Kathmandu Chandra Dev Bhatta London School of Economics Krishna Bhattachan Tribhuvan University Sumitra Manandhar-Gurung Lumanthi and National Coalition Against Racial Discrimination, Kathmandu Harka Gurung (deceased) Transparency International, Nepal

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89 Dipak Gyawali Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology, Kathmandu Krishna Hacchethu Tribhuvan University Susan Hangen Ramapo College, New Jersey Lauren Leve University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Prakash Chandra Lohani Former Finance Minister, Nepal Pancha Narayan Maharjan Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur Sukh Deo Muni Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi Anup Pahari Foreign Service Institute, Arlington

Rajendra Pradhan Social Science Baha, Kathmandu Shree Govind Shah Environmental Resources Planning and Monitoring/Academy of Social Justice & Human Rights, Kathmandu Saubhagya Shah Tribhuvan University Hari Sharma Social Science Baha, Kathmandu Sudhindra Sharma Interdisciplinary Analyst (IDA), Kathmandu Dhruba Kumar Shrestha Tribhuvan University Seira Tamang Centre for Social Research and Development, Kathmandu Bishnu Raj Upreti National Centre of Competence in Research, Kathmandu

Northeast India Study Group Samir Kumar Das University of Calcutta Principal Researcher

Subir Bhaumik British Broadcasting Corporation, Kolkata

Sanjay Barbara North Eastern Social Research Centre, Assam

Uddipana Goswami Center for Studies in Social Science, Kolkata

Sanjib Baruah Center for Policy Research, New Delhi Bard College, New York

Dolly Kikon Stanford University

Pinaki Bhattacharya The Mathrubhumi, Kerala

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Swarna Rajagopalan Chaitanya – The Policy Consultancy, Chennai

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90 Dipankar Banerjee Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi

Pratap Bhanu Mehta Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Kalyan Barooah Assam Tribune

Sukh Deo Muni Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

M.P. Bezbaruah UN – WTO (World Tourism Organization), New Delhi Bejoy Das Gupta Institute of International Finance, Inc., Washington, D.C. Partha S. Ghosh Jawaharlal Nehru University Sanjoy Hazarika Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, New Delhi Anil Kamboj Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi Bengt Karlsson Uppsala University, Sweden Ved Marwah Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Bhagat Oinam Jawaharlal Nehru University Pradip Phanjoubam Imphal Free Press, Manipur V.R. Raghavan Delhi Policy Group Rajesh Rajagopalan Jawaharlal Nehru University E.N. Rammohan National Security Council, New Delhi Bibhu Prasad Routray Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi Ronojoy Sen The Times of India, New Delhi Prakash Singh Border Security Force (Ret’d.) George Verghese Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Sri Lanka Study Group Neil DeVotta Hartwick College Principal Researcher

Sunanda Deshapriya Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo

Ravinatha P. Aryasinha American University

Rohan Edrisinha Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo

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91 Nimalka Fernando International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination & Racism, Colombo Bhavani Fonseka Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo Mario Gomez Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies, Colombo Air Vice Marshall Harry Goonetileke Colombo Anberiya Hanifa Muslim Women’s Research and Action Forum, Colombo Dayan Jayatilleka University of Colombo N. Kandasamy Center for Human Rights and Development in Colombo S.I. Keethaponcalan University of Colombo

Darini Rajasingham Centre for Poverty Analysis, Colombo John Richardson, Jr. American University Norbert Ropers Berghof Foundation for Conflict Studies, Colombo Kanchana N. Ruwanpura Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York P. Sahadevan Jawaharlal Nehru University Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo Muttukrishna Sarvananthan Point Pedro Institute of Development, Sri Lanka Peter Schalk Uppsala University, Sweden Asanga Tilakaratne University of Kelaniya

N. Manoharan Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi

Jayadeva Uyangoda University of Colombo

Dennis McGilvray University of Colorado at Boulder

Asanga Welikala Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo

Jehan Perera National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, Colombo Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam MP, Sri Lanka

Jayampathy Wickramaratne Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, Sri Lanka Javid Yusuf Attorney-at-Law, Colombo

Mirak Raheem Centre for Policy Alternatives, Colombo

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93 Background of the Southern Thailand Conflict The three “southern border provinces” of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat have an ambiguous status within the Thai nation and state. Officially part of Siam since 1909, the region roughly corresponds to the former Malay sultanate of Patani. The area remains around 80 percent Malay-speaking and Muslim, and has never been properly incorporated culturally or psychologically into Buddhist-dominated Thailand. Bangkok has largely pursued a policy of assimilation and standardization, making few concessions to the distinctive history and character of the region. Like the rest of Thailand, the southern border provinces are administered mainly by officials dispatched from the distant capital. The region has a long tradition of resistance to the rule of Bangkok, and political violence has emerged at various junctures in modern history. Some of this violence was perpetrated by the Thai state. Landmark events included the 1948 Dusun-yor incident (in which dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Malay-Muslim villagers were killed in Narathiwat) and the 1954 arrest and “disappearance” of prominent Islamic teacher Haji Sulong at the hands of the Thai police. Radical “separatist” elements began waging a guerrilla war against the Thai state in the 1960s, and fighting reached its most virulent stage during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A number of groups were behind the fighting, including the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN). By 1980 as many as 1,000 insurgents were carrying out regular attacks in the south, and had even staged a number of bombings in Bangkok. But the Prem Tinsulanond government (1980–1988) successfully reined in the violence, granting amnesties to former militants and setting up new security and governance arrangements in the area, coordinated by the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC). Prem’s policy was to co-opt the Malay-Muslim elite with a combination of political privileges and development funds, much of these brokered by the army. Though far from perfect, these policies were broadly effective for about two decades. During the first term of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (2001– 2005), however, the security situation in the south deteriorated sharply. An overconfident Thaksin dissolved the Prem-era special administrative arrangements and placed the highly unpopular police force in charge of security in the Deep South. These politically motivated policy blunders

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94 coincided with a sharp rise in militancy and the reemergence of violent resistance to the Thai state. On January 4, 2004, more than 50 militants staged a daring raid on an army camp, seizing a large cache of weapons and scoring an enormous propaganda victory. In the three years that followed, almost 2,000 people were killed in political violence in the region. The two worst days of violence were April 28, 2004, when more than 100 men died in simultaneous attacks on a series of security posts, culminating in a bloody siege at the historic Krue Se mosque; and October 25, 2004, when 78 unarmed protestors died in Thai military custody, apparently mainly from suffocation, following mass arrests at Tak Bai, Narathiwat. These two incidents greatly undermined the legitimacy of the Thai state and boosted the militant movement. Nevertheless, the origins and character of the political violence in the south remained a highly contentious issue. At least some of the killings in the region were popularly attributed to extrajudicial murders carried out by, or on behalf of, the Thai security forces, while others were undoubtedly revenge killings or simply ordinary criminal acts. The militant movement has declined to make public statements of responsibility or to issue any demands, thus contributing to a growing climate of fear. Although there seems every reason to believe that the majority of incidents are being perpetrated by people with militant sympathies, the nature of the militant movement remains somewhat unclear. Some analysts insist that the movement is essentially a reconfigured version of earlier groups such as BRN-Coordinate, while others see the movement as a shadowy and largely ad hoc network. Whereas earlier political violence in the region used mainly “separatist” rhetoric, drawing on notions of Malay identity and history, anonymous leaflets circulated since January 2004 have invoked explicitly “jihadist” sentiments. Most analysts of the conflict remain skeptical about claims that the southern Thai violence is linked with transnational networks such as Jemaah Islamiya (JI); the causes of the conflict seem overwhelmingly homegrown. Thaksin’s mishandling of the south was one factor contributing to the September 19, 2006 military coup d’Ètat. Ironically, though Thaksin had favored security-based solutions to the violence, many senior army commanders advocated political solutions such as those advanced by the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC)—a high-level body established by Thaksin to propose new policies to address the southern

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95 violence, but whose conclusions the prime minister had spurned. The new military-backed Surayud Chulanont government adopted a more conciliatory approach to the conflict from October 2006, yet the violence continued unabated, and much vaunted “dialogue” with the militants failed to produce results.

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96 D

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©

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2007 by East-West Center www.eastwestcenter.org

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List of Reviewers 2006–07 The East-West Center Washington would like to acknowledge the following, who have offered reviews of manuscripts for Policy Studies. Itty Abraham East-West Center Washington

Sumit Ganguly Indiana University, Bloomington

Jaya Raj Acharya United States Institute of Peace

Brigham Golden Columbia University

Vinod K. Aggarwal University of California, Berkeley

Michael J. Green Center for Strategic and International Studies Georgetown University

Muthiah Alagappa East-West Center Washington Edward Aspinall Australian National University Marc Askew Victoria University

Stephan Haggard University of California, San Diego Natasha Hamilton National University of Singapore Rana Hasan Asian Development Bank

Upendra Baxi University of Warwick Apurba K. Baruah North Eastern Hill University, Shillong Thomas Berger Boston University Ikrar Nusa Bhakti Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta

Eric Heginbotham RAND Corporation Satu P. Limaye Institute for Defense Analyses Donald Horowitz Duke University

C. Raja Mohan Nanyang Technological University

S. Kalyanaraman Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi

Mary Callahan University of Washington

Bengt Karlsson Uppsala University

Richard Chauvel Victoria University

Damien Kingsbury Deakin University

T.J. Cheng The College of William and Mary

Mahendra Lawoti Western Michigan University

Chu Yun-han Academia Sinica

R. William Liddle The Ohio State University

Ralph A. Cossa Pacific Forum CSIS, Honolulu

Joseph Chinyong Liow Nanyang Technological University

Neil DeVotta Hartwick College

Gurpreet Mahajan Jawaharlal Nehru University

Dieter Ernst East-West Center

Onkar S. Marwah Independent Consultant

Greg Fealy Australian National University

Bruce Matthews Acadia University

David Finkelstein The CNA Corporation

Duncan McCargo University of Leeds

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98 Donald McFetridge Former U.S. Defense Attaché, Jakarta

Selma Sonntag Humboldt State University

Andrew Oros Washington College

Ashley South Independent Consultant

Morten Pedersen United Nations University, Tokyo

Robert H. Taylor University of London

Steven Rood The Asia Foundation, Philippines

Willem van Schendel Amsterdam School for Social science Research

Danilyn Rutherford University of Chicago

Meredith Weiss East-West Center Washington

James Scott Yale University

Thongchai Winichakul University of Wisconsin, Madison

Emile C.J. Sheng Soochow University

Wu Xinbo Fudan University

John Sidel London School of Economics Martin Smith Independent Analyst

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Harn Yawnghe Euro-Burma Office, Brussels

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Policy Studies Previous Publications Policy Studies 28 Counterterrorism Legislation in Sri Lanka: Evaluating Efficacy N. Manoharan, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi

Policy Studies 27 Japanese Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism: Implications for Japan’s Security Strategy Paul Midford, Norwegian University for Science and Technology, Trondheim

Policy Studies 26 Taiwan’s Rising Rationalism: Generations, Politics, and “Taiwanese Nationalism” Shelley Rigger, Davidson College

Policy Studies 25 Initiating a Peace Process in Papua: Actors, Issues, Process, and the Role of the International Community Timo Kivimäki, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen

Policy Studies 24 Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology, and Politics Joseph Chinyong Liow, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Singapore

Policy Studies 23 The Politics of Military Reform in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Elite Conflict,

Policy Studies 22 India’s Globalization: Evaluating the Economic Consequences Baldev Raj Nayar, McGill University

Policy Studies 21 China’s Rise: Implications for U.S. Leadership in Asia Robert G. Sutter, Georgetown University

Policy Studies 20 The Helsinki Agreement: A More Promising Basis for Peace in Aceh? Edward Aspinall, Australian National University

Policy Studies 19 Nine Lives?: The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Japan J. Patrick Boyd, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Richard J. Samuels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Policy Studies 18 Islamic Radicalism and AntiAmericanism in Indonesia: The Role of the Internet Merlyna Lim, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia

Policy Studies 17 Forging Sustainable Peace in Mindanao: The Role of Civil Society Steven Rood, The Asia Foundation, Philippines

Nationalism, and Institutional Resistance Marcus Mietzner, Political Analyst

(continued next page)

These issues of Policy Studies are presently available in print and PDF. Hardcopies are available through Amazon.com. In Asia, hardcopies are available through the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore at 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Pasir Panjang Road, Singapore 119614. Website: http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/ Online at: www.eastwestcenterwashington.org/publications

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Policy Studies Previous Publications continued Policy Studies 16 Meeting the China Challenge: The

Policy Studies 8 The Moro Conflict: Landlessness and

U.S. in Southeast Asian Regional Security Strategies

Misdirected State Policies

Evelyn Goh, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Singapore

Eric Gutierrez, WaterAid, U.K. Saturnino Borras, Jr., Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

Policy Studies 15 The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity,

Policy Studies 7 The Tibet-China Conflict: History

Language Policy, and Political Discourse

and Polemics

Arienne M. Dwyer, The University of Kansas

Elliot Sperling, Indiana University, Bloomington

Policy Studies 14 Constructing Papuan Nationalism:

Policy Studies 6 Violent Separatism in Xinjiang:

History, Ethnicity, and Adaptation

A Critical Assessment

Richard Chauvel, Victoria University, Melbourne

Policy Studies 13 Plural Society in Peril: Migration, Economic Change, and the Papua Conflict Rodd McGibbon, USAID, Jakarta

Policy Studies 12 Sino-Tibetan Dialogue in the PostMao Era: Lessons and Prospects Tashi Rabgey, Harvard University Tseten Wangchuk Sharlho, Independent Journalist

Policy Studies 11 Autonomy in Xinjiang: Han Nationalist Imperatives and Uyghur Discontent Gardner Bovingdon, Indiana University, Bloomington

Policy Studies 10 Secessionist Challenges in Aceh and Papua: Is Special Autonomy the Solution? Rodd McGibbon, USAID, Jakarta

Policy Studies 9 The HDC in Aceh: Promises and Pitfalls of NGO Mediation and Implementation Konrad Huber, Council on Foreign Relations

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James Millward, Georgetown University

Policy Studies 5 The Papua Conflict: Jakarta’s Perceptions and Policies Richard Chauvel, Victoria University, Melbourne Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta

Policy Studies 4 Beijing’s Tibet Policy: Securing Sovereignty and Legitimacy Allen Carlson, Cornell University

Policy Studies 3 Security Operations in Aceh: Goals, Consequences, and Lessons Rizal Sukma, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta

Policy Studies 2 The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a Separatist Organization Kirsten E. Schulze, London School of Economics

Policy Studies 1 The Aceh Peace Process: Why it Failed Edward Aspinall, University of Sydney Harold Crouch, Australian National University

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