By Heru Susetyo
I HAVE recently returned to Jakarta from Bangkok where I met a group of Muslim intellectuals from south Thailand lamenting the worsening situation facing Muslims in the region, especially following the shooting of a van that led to the death of eight Buddhist Thais in Yala in the previous week. Curfews were slapped on, and violence has been escalating in Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani provinces.
This conflict, which has been taking place over 40 years, has caused severe backwardness in the region. Despite being an oil producing region, especially Songkhla, the conflict-related poverty, high illiteracy rate and poor health care system set them worlds apart from residents of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket or other corners of Thailand.
A Buddhist-majority country, 11 per cent of its 65 million population is Muslim with most (6.3 million) living in the southern areas that share borders with Malaysia: Narathiwat (which sits next to Kelantan), Yala (which borders with Perak), Songkhla (which borders with Kedah and Perlis), and Satun (which borders with Perlis). Most of the Muslims reside in Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, and are easily identified by their attire and the distinct dialect of Malay Pattani (known as Yawi).
This is a region that has seen too many conflicts, both "horizontal" between members of different ethnic and religious groups, and "vertical" between residents and the state`s police or military force. There has been a long list of cases of violence, the last being the shooting of a van which killed its eight Thai Buddhist passengers, preceded by a bomb explosion in a masjid which killed some Thai Muslims on Wednesday in Yala on March 14.
Both the Muslims and the Buddhists have been adversely affected. One primary school teacher, a Buddhist by the name of Juling Pangamoon, died on January 8, 2007 after eight months of being in a coma following the assault of a group of people near where he taught in South Thailand. The death of a man who had travelled so far from Chiang Rai, north Thailand, to dedicate his life teaching the southern children, stirred up ethnic and sectarian sentiments.
The roots of the conflicts are hardly simple, involving cultural and structural aspects of the nation as well as the history of its national integration. Abuses of administrative power by the state apparatus, injustices in the centralisation process of the country, the poverty in the three Southern provinces, and the educational system that fails to accommodate Islamic aspirations of the Malay Muslim ethnic group _ these are some of the factors.
At the cultural level, conflicts flare up from time to time over ethnic and sectarian differences.
The historical fact that the three provinces had once been sovereign _ part of the Pattani kingdom _ before their annexation by the Kingdom of Siam (which later became Thailand) on 1785, helped contribute to the powder-keg situation.
The government, especially during the administration of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, handled the situation using a security approach as well as reconciliation _ through the establishment of the emergency state in 2004 and 2005, and the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) in 2005.
Statistics show that 82 per cent of cases of violence taking place in the region between 1995 and 2005 occurred during Thaksin Shinawatra`s regime. In 2004, a total 1,843 cases of violence took place while in 2005 a total of 1,703 cases were recorded. In 2004 alone, around 550 people lost their lives in South Thailand.
One of the most shocking cases is the killing of 87 Muslim protesters outside of the Tak Bai police office by the security forces on 25 October 2004. Shortly after that around 50 Muslim youth, 20 of them women, were reported to have "disappeared".
The current situation is by far the worst for the Muslims, observed one of the Muslims that I met in Bangkok. Suspicion is widespread, as is random violence and killing that takes place even amongst the Muslims themselves. One Muslim police officer was recently killed after attending the Friday prayer - simply because he worked for the government.
The security authorities suspect that four groups were behind the shootings, namely Ulama, Logistic, Rundi Kumpulan Kecil (RKK), and the Permudo _ each reportedly tasked with different parts of the creation of unrest including the brainwashing and training of people to commit acts of terrorism.
The party caught in the middle of all these conflicts is the poor people of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat who have to suffer the loss of the quality of life that people enjoy in other parts of the country.
Not many civil servants, including teachers and police and military personnel who are willing to work in south Thailand despite the government`s promise of pay bonuses.
Thaksin`s regime has been accused to be behind most of the violence by human rights bodies, but even after his ouster on September 19, 2006, the violence continues in south Thailand. Analysts such as Michael Gilquin (2002) said southern Thailand`s problems are complex and the government would need to exert efforts to provide social, cultural and political solutions.
It is not enough to just accommodate the Muslims there as a separate religious entity, there should also be campaigns to recognise them at all spheres of life and free them of discrimination and marginalisation _ which is the right of all.
The writer is a human rights lawyer at Paham (Centre for Legal and Human Rights Advocacy) in Indonesia and a lecturer at the Law School of the University of Indonesia.
The Brunei Times
Source: www.bruneitomes.com (7 April 2007)
