Do Attacks in Southern Thailand Portend a Larger Conflict Between Buddhists and Muslims?
by Danny Fisher
“A Thai soldier looks on at the scene of a burned out school near Pattani, Thailand, Monday, April 16, 2007. The elementary school, which served mostly Thai Buddhist students, was burned in retaliation for the killing of several Muslim youths two days earlier. Two successive regimes have failed in the south with more than 40,000 troops and police unable to provide adequate security for Buddhist and moderate Muslim alike.” Photo by David Longstreath for the Associated Press.
The Associated Press reports on the growing number of attacks in southern Thailand that may threaten a larger conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in the region.
- Ten Muslim villagers killed by gunmen firing assault rifles into a mosque during evening prayers. A 53-year-old Buddhist rubber tapper shot, decapitated and limbs cut from his torso, his head impaled on a stick.
The circumstances and brutality of those attacks this month have revived fears that a long-running insurgency in Thailand’s south could be evolving into a sectarian conflict pitting Buddhists against Muslims.
Islamic separatists ignited the insurgency in January 2004, sparking a cycle of army repression and rebellion that has left more than 3,500 people dead. Frustrated by their inability to curb the violence, Thai security forces have increasingly been arming civilian self-defense forces — almost all Buddhist — to protect villagers.
The proliferation of guns, many put in the poorly trained hands of parties with scores to settle, makes the situation extremely volatile.
Reuters further reports on a study from the International Crisis Group (ICG) which says that “militants in Thailand’s deep south are using Islamic schools to recruit fighters” for the conflict.
In my interview with my good friend Erick D. White, which was posted to the blog last year, we talked a lot about the history of Buddhist-Muslim relations/tensions in southern Thailand. Take a look.
Danny,
The majority of those who have died in the South are Muslims at the hands of the insurgency. While there are inklings of the conflict taking on a Buddhist vs. Muslim character – and this is a meme that the insurgency would like to spread – it is mostly just a poor, easy hook that the international press employs. The insurgents attack all who are opposed to their project, Muslim or Buddhist. It remains, as far as we can tell, a very local affair (i.e. no international jihad) and primarily an ethno-nationalist insurgency.
Erick
From the executive summary of the International Crisis Group:
"While Thai leaders are preoccupied with turmoil in Bangkok, the insurgency in the South continues to recruit young Malay Muslims, especially from private Islamic schools. These institutions are central to maintenance of Malay Muslim identity, and many students are receptive to the call to take up arms against the state. This is not a struggle in solidarity with global jihad, rather an ethno-nationalist insurgency with its own version of history aimed at reclaiming what was once the independent sultanate of Patani. Human rights abuses by the Thai government and security forces have only fuelled this secessionist fervour, and policies that centralise power in the capital have undermined a regional political solution. Changing these policies and practices is essential as the government tries to respond to the insurgents’ grievances in order to bring long-lasting peace to the region."
"Policymakers should be cautious of quick fixes to what is a highly complex conflict. This struggle, nominally between a Thai Buddhist state and a Malay Muslim insurgency, targets civilians of all religions. More than 3,400 people have been killed since the violence surged in 2004. There are more dead Muslim victims than Buddhists, and many of the slain Muslims were marked as “traitors” to Islam. Insurgents draw on local culture to invoke traditional oaths to discipline their own ranks, though such practices alienate them from the religious purists attached to the global jihad. Ancient charms and spells are applied to protect fighters from harm, co-existing with YouTube videos and propaganda circulated on VCDs. Despite the leap into cyberspace, the insurgency has, for the most part, restricted itself to the geographic boundaries of the three southernmost border provinces.
As earlier Crisis Group reports have stressed, the movement shows little influence of Salafi jihadism, the ideology followed by al-Qaeda and the Indonesia-based regional jihadi group Jemaah Islamiyah. Some insurgents follow a mystical variant of Shafi‘i Islam and are actively hostile to the puritanism of what they term “Wahhabis”. Although a few Malaysians have been arrested in southern Thailand for trying to join the struggle, there is no evidence of significant involvement of foreign jihadi groups. While politically distinct, the movement uses the language of Islam and jihad to frame its struggle, as such words resonate with its membership and the constituencies it seeks to sway."
It's worth reading the whole executive summary, or even the report. It's not clear the reporters did.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6170&l=1
Erick