Why does Thailand’s South remain restless? Wrong politics or culture clash between Buddhists and Muslims?
Author: Dr. Wolfgang Sachsenröder
Most of the integration problems in the ethnic mix of Thailand are relatively low-threshold, at least compared to the civil war-like conditions in the troubled south that have been smoldering for decades. However, these have not always been there. They only started to become acute and bloody in the late 1930s and even more intensely from around 1960. The fact that the provinces on the border with Malaysia, Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, have a predominantly Malay and Muslim population, a total of about 1 , 8 million people, cannot have been the sole cause. The north of Malaysia today also belonged to Siam historically. It was made into a crown colony by Great Britain with most of what is now Malaysia in 1867. The current state of Kelantan and the Sultanate of Pattani were until then a center of Malay Islam, which had been spread by Arab traders in Southeast Asia since the 7th century and had been firmly established since the 15th century.
Kelantan was a center of Islamic scholarship for all of Southeast Asia with
the honorary title „The Veranda of Mecca“. Conquered in 1785, the
Sultanate of Pattani, including Kelantan, was under Siamese rule, but
increasingly came under British control in the 19th century. Until then, like
almost everywhere in the region, the borders were not only very permeable, but
also changeable. The British-Siamese Treaty of 1909 then drew a definitive
border with Malaysia, which today is not politically questioned between the two
countries apart from minor demarcation issues. He transferred the provinces of
Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah and Perlis to the British, who also took over their
debts to Siam. From Bangkok, the abandonment of the distant “worm process” in
the deep south, now more than 800 kilometers by air and more than 1,100
kilometers by car to the Malaysian border, must have been perceived as
relatively painless, because these Malay areas were not economically
significant at the time.
What could be understood as a reasonable
compromise in 1909, however, had ignored the fact that the historical and
religious differences connected the ceded areas more strongly with the
Malay-speaking provinces remaining in Siam than the latter with Siam.
Ethnically and religiously, Thailand extends some 300 kilometers deep into the
Malay-Malaysian cultural area. As on the Malaysian side in Kedah and Kelantan,
the people in the three troubled Thai provinces speak a dialect that differs
significantly from the High Malay (Bahasa Malaysia) and also use a special
Arabic alphabet, the Jawi. This linguistic and religious background as well as
a folkloristic idealization of the historical Sultanate of Pattani make it
possible to understand a Malay Islamic identity of the people in the south of
Thailand. The feeling of togetherness was further strengthened by the fact that
the Japanese occupiers of Thailand at the end of 1941 included a military
alliance with the Axis powers and returned Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and
Terengganu, which were also administered by Thailand from 1943 until the end of
the war.
The wrong path to terrorism
As in many linguistic-cultural border regions of
Europe, the coexistence of the various groups has rarely caused problems for a
long period of time, until either minorities felt disadvantaged and resisted
due to political errors by the central government or until ideological
nationalists from the other side incited separatist activities , Just as
denominational tensions led to violence in Northern Ireland, the contrasts between
Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand have intensified in recent decades.
For the Sultanate of Pattani, Bangkok was wide and
self-government and justice according to Islamic rules were common law. It was
only in the 1930s that the central government under General Phibun, Prime
Minister from 1936 to 44 and 1948 to 57, possibly influenced by the then common
racial biology in Europe and the USA, tried to „Thaiize“ the southern
border provinces. In a series of twelve decrees between 1939 and 1942, the government
tried to enforce a generally binding „Thai culture“ for the
minorities as well. Thai has been introduced as the sole language of
instruction in all schools, exceptions to general law such as Muslim family law
have been abolished and traditional minority clothing has been banned.
Above all, the linguistic „Thaiization“
and the replacement of the Islamic jurisdiction by centrally controlled civil
and criminal courts, as well as the penetration of Buddhist elements such as
the construction of pagodas and monasteries, were not accepted by the
population. In 1948, one of Pattani’s religious leaders, Haji Sulong, drew up a
catalog with seven demands that, from today’s perspective, sound anything but
exaggerated. The four southern provinces were to be administered by a Muslim
governor, the first seven years of school were taught in Malay, regional taxes
were also levied in the region, and Thai and Malay were used as equal official
languages. Haji Sulong was promptly declared an enemy of the state and mysteriously
disappeared on the way to a trial in 1955.
From the beginning of the resistance and
separatist movement, there were also religious and political differences
between the different groups. Even Haji Sulong’s reform Islam based on the
school of the Egyptian Mohammad Abduh met with rejection from Muslim
traditionalists. Some Malaysian groups are still against armed resistance and
are more concerned with balancing with Bangkok, but the radical forces
predominate. The Deep South Watch group of observers, founded in 2006, tries to
counter the state media reports, which are often viewed as tendentious, with a
more objective inventory of the unrest. For the period 2004 to 2018, 20,163
incidents are listed, 6,921 dead and 13,511 injured. Bombings and raiding
methods using firearms from motorcycles that are more familiar from criminal
milieus have become routine. The methods are constantly evolving, for example
that a second bomb will not explode until the rescue workers arrive at the site
of the attack. Weapons and methods increasingly show jihadist influence as well
as personal contacts to the known focal points in the Middle East and South
Asia.
Economic factors as a motivation for separatism
Compared to the Buddhists, also and especially in
the south, the Muslims are clearly at a disadvantage in terms of education and
career opportunities. Seventy percent only have a primary school degree against
50% of Buddhists, only 1.7% have a first university degree against almost 10%
of Buddhists, and only 2.4% have found employment in the civil service. In
various waves, the central government has tried to improve the infrastructure
in the rural southern provinces, but the dominant response in Bangkok in the
fight against the „insurgents“ was military and police measures, in a
particularly counterproductive manner during Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra’s tenure from 2001 to 2006 ,
A look across the border to the Malaysian
neighbors can easily arouse envy, because Malaysia as a whole, but also in the
northern states, is significantly developed and offers higher incomes. The
attempts by the governments in Bangkok to compensate for the development
differences with Malaysia by means of infrastructure measures were all too
often destroyed by the control measures by the military and the police and were
unable to convince the population as a whole.
Thailand and Islam or Islam in Thailand
Historically, Muslims from India and today’s
Pakistan, Cham from today’s Cambodia, or Persian and Arab traders have lived in
Thailand for centuries, easily tolerated but not fully integrated. According to
official figures, around 7.5 million Muslims live in Thailand today, almost 5%
of the total population, including 18% in the troubled south. There are 2,180
mosques, the construction of which is often subsidized by the state, but there
are also 173 mosques in Bangkok. There has been a royal advisor on Islamic
affairs since the early 17th century, called Chularatchamontri or Grand Mufti.
Today, the Central Islamic Council of Thailand (CICOT) is more important with
corresponding institutions in the provinces with a Muslim majority, which are
also responsible for the financial support of mosques and Islamic schools. A
limited parallel justice is again permitted for family and inheritance law,
similar to that in Malaysia and Singapore.
The new constitution introduced by the military
government in 2017 guarantees religious freedom, but only for Buddhists,
Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, and prohibits any religiously motivated
discrimination. The U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom
Report 2017 praised the Thai government’s attempts to promote understanding
with Muslims in the south, while criticizing nationalist Buddhist monks calling
for violence against Muslims to oppose their integration and state support
protest. There are reservations against an agreement on both sides. In June
2017, an Islamic religious teacher and his family were murdered when he tried
to mediate. The police and the army repeatedly tend to overreact, citing an
emergency decree from 2005 and exemption rules from 2004, mostly perceived by
the population as arbitrariness
. How likely is the conflict to be resolved? Whether
sufficient confidence in the central government can ever be built among the 1.8
million Malays in southern Thailand is particularly questionable because the
terrorist groups have been increasingly strengthened by Salafists and jihadists
in recent years and Southeast Asia as a whole is a safe retreat for fighters
the Middle East applies.
For the military, the inviolability
of the country is absolute dogma and a real purpose. In
this respect, a shift of the border in favor of Malaysia is unthinkable.
The EU model of open borders can also not be imagined in
Thailand or Malaysia. The core problem therefore remains
and will not be solved radically in the foreseeable future.