Hearts and Minds in Thailand’s Deep South
This from our friend and past interviewee Erick D. White: Thailand’s The Nation offers a strong editorial on the recent arrests and probing into violence in Thailand’s deep south. Here’s a snippet:
- The strategy now, it seems, is for the authorities to distance themselves as much as possible from these suspects, as more names will be made public in the coming days.
- Like the April 2007 shooting incident in Narathiwat’s Bang Lang Dam district – when similar, government-trained village militias fired into a group of Muslim funeral-goers, killing four and injuring six others – the Army initially tried to blame [the massacre at a village mosque in Narathiwat's Joh I Rong district] on insurgents. And when that didn’t work, they tried to justify the attack by saying the Malay Muslims were armed with sticks and stones. Never mind that a unit of Border Patrol Police was just metres away from the scene of the 2007 clash, which started off with verbal abuse but ended in the death of the funeral mourners.
- Authorities have not taken any action against the suspects and the incidents, like other similar cases, will probably fade from people’s memories. They say that time heals all wounds. But for the Malays in the deep South, the opposite appears to be the truth. This is because such injustices are fed into the historical narrative that questions the legitimacy of the Thai State in the Malay historical homeland. In other words, it helps them justify the armed insurgency against the state and reinforces the notion that the deep South is an occupied territory.
- If anything, incidents such as the Bang Lang Dam shooting and the Al-Furqan massacre reveal a deep-seated problem of outsourcing security work to local civilians who have little consideration for the political consequences when they decide to fire indiscriminately into a mosque or a teashop full of people. It also raises the question of training and motivation techniques for the village militias – like showing video footage of innocent Buddhist civilians and monks, to motivate them to sign up for jobs as village scouts or defence volunteers. This is the kind of thing that international terrorists do in the course of indoctrination and recruitment processes.
- Senior security officials in the South say that relations between the authorities and the local Malay Muslim residents are at a low point, and any effort to get things back on track will depend heavily on how the authorities handle the investigation into the massacre at the mosque.
