The flaring of new problems last week in Thailand's Muslim-majority southern provinces on a scale unseen in years demonstrates just how tense relations between Bangkok and Thailand's provinces bordering Malaysia have become, analysts in Bangkok say.
The recent attacks that resulted in the deaths of 4 soldiers and 2 policemen may be merely a taste of the difficulties in store for Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government in the lead-up to Thailand's elections in early 2005.
The South of Thailand has long suffered unrest, especially in the 1970s and 80s when a separatist movement rumbled on, but the latest violence in Muslim provinces Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala was so well coordinated and organized that it marked a debut from anything seen before in Southern Thailand.
In the South of Thailand, former police lieutenant-colonel Thaksin Shinawatra has given all power to the police, poured in money and received a new year's gift that he didn't expect, said academic Panitan Wattanayagorn to the foreign press last week. Panitan Wattanayagorn from the Chulalongkorn University, said several factors suggested that this could be the beginning of a new age of conflict in the South of Thailand.
The first sign was the irresponsible withdrawal of the Thai military, as exemplified by the abolition of joint police, military and civil command over the region of the Muslim provinces, soon after Thaksin Shinawatra took office in early 2001. This new Thaksin-government came in and in the flick of a hand declared victory in Southern Thailand over many centuries of conflict. The Thaksin government declared victory overnight, Panitan Wattanayagorn added.
This created a conducive environment for the rise of a power struggle among many, many groups in the southern provinces of Thailand and permitted organized crime gangs, who are allying with corrupt local politicians, to flourish.
On this difficult terrain, Islamic groups linked to the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist network are now approaching those fragmented separatist movements as they also try to link up with gangsters in the south, he said. And these newly emerging alliances are responsible for last week's violence in South Thailand, Panitan added further.
On Friday, the Thai government rejected as "speculation" assertions by a key security official that the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) was implicated in those latest attacks, but the same Thai government is struggling to otherwise say definitively who it believes is responsible.
Thammasat University's Chaiwat Satha-Anand meanwhile said the Thai government was now paying for its errors in judgment. Thailand has never lived with such a strong central power, and this is creating defiance among the 3 million Muslims who live in Southern Thailand, Chaiwat said.
The government of Thailand thinks that it can solve the southern problems with money, but in some provinces in the south of Thailand, a thousand kilometers (600 miles) from Bangkok, nearly one third of the population is living under the poverty line.
Indeed Thaksin suddenly pledged, last Saturday to bring prompt prosperity to the Muslim dominated southern provinces. Over the next 5 years I will aggressively develop those 3 provinces, Thaksin said. Our next generation must not face poverty. They must be given an education and get good jobs. This is an urgent task for the Thai government, Thaksin added.
A member of the opposition Democrats party Thavorn Se-Nium said that meanwhile the Thai government's policy of an "eye-for-eye" in responding to violence and its lack of sensitivity towards Muslims and their religion, as well as cultural and linguistic factors, meant the Muslims of Thailand's southern provinces are more in tune with Malaysia than with Bangkok.
Thavorn Se-Nium criticized the Thai police units transferred from the centre of Thailand to the south where they searched mosques with their sniffer dogs, a serious insult for the Muslim population there.
Thaksin's government will have to deal with the southern problem politically rather than militarily, Thavorn added, and with more attention towards developing education, particularly in the Islamic schools in South Thailand.
Last Sunday's burning down of Thai government schools was emblematic of the anger some Muslims harbor towards the government's Thai-language curriculum imposed on Muslim children and as evidence of the threat they pose to militant Islam.
For Thaksin, drafting a plan of action for dealing with the South of Thailand must be a top priority, with elections looming in February - March 2005.
The south of Thailand will be a battlefield for the next election, said the academic Panitan Wattanayagorn. Thaksin Shinawatra must very fast win the battle of the south of Thailand. This is the reason he is very upset with the latest violence there.
