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What would Buddha say?
May. 13, 2004 9:53
What would Buddha say? (Islamists threaten Thailand)
By ERIK SCHECHTER
Flanked by a security detail, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
stopped in the southern Thai village of Krong Pinang on May 6 to knead
sweet roti bread with the locals. He also made the requisite tour of a
mosque and an Islamic school and even tried his hand at tapping rubber
on a plantation, reported Singapore's Strait Times.
It was damage control, Thai style.
Just a week earlier, Thai security forces had been tipped off about a
plan by Muslim rebels to attack police and army posts in a
coordinated, early-morning raid. Lying in wait, the police shot to
death more than 100 insurgents, many of them machete-wielding
teenagers riding in on brand-new motorcycles.
Some of the surviving Muslim guerrillas retreated to the red bricked,
16th-century Kreu-Se Mosque, in the southern Pattani, but the holy
site provided no sanctuary. The Thais finished them off with
rocket-propelled grenades.
The doomed attack was a replay of a more successful operation in
January, in which rebels made off with 300 rifles. But the Thai
defense minister called this latest one "a suicide operation,"
claiming that young insurgents had been "brainwashed by a mastermind."
Responding to demands from the UN, Thailand agreed to appoint a
commission of inquiry, staffed with Muslims, to investigate whether or
not the authorities had used excessive force. The police commander in
the south, Lt.-Gen. Proong Bunphandung, was likewise transferred to
Bangkok. But the good faith shown by this Buddhist democracy has made
little impact: Another policeman was murdered, last Friday, in the
Narathiwat province.
TO BE fair, the insurgents have a historical gripe. While only four
percent of Thailand's 63 million people are Muslim, most of them are
ethnic Malays living in five southern provinces. These lands once
belonged to a single Muslim state, Pattani, which was a vassal to
successive Siamese kingdoms in the north.
And Pattani has never kneeled without a fight.
In the 1630s, the sultanate refused to pay tribute to the powerful
kingdom of Ayutthaya, provoking a series of failed invasions. The
Malay Muslim statelet eventually knuckled under, but in 1757, when
Ayutthaya was laid to waste by the Burmese, Pattani took the
opportunity to declare independence.
It was a brief victory. King Rama I, founder of a new Siamese dynasty,
soon took Pattani and in 1909 the sultanate was formally annexed to
the Buddhist country.
During the Second World War, the Muslim region tried again to win its
sovereignty. Thailand had allied with Japan, so the Pattani rebels
sided with the British. However, after the war, the British forgot
their promises of independence to the ethnic Malay Muslims, thus
planting the seeds for modern secessionist movements.
In 1968, Tenku Bira Kotanila, a Muslim Indian intellectual, created
the formidable Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO). For the
next two decades, PULO was the dominant separatist group in the south
- thanks, in part, to Syrian military training and funding from the
Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS).
Ironically, the status of Muslims in Thailand was already improving by
that point.
THE WORST discrimination occurred during the fascist reign of Field
Marshall Phibun Songkhram. According to Raymond Scupin, an
anthropologist at Lindenwood University, "The Thai government tried to
forcibly assimilate the Malay Muslims through education, political
repression, ethnic Thai nationalism based on notions of a 'Thai
race'... and Buddhist education."
Muslims were banned from using Arab names and wearing the Malay
sarong; Bangkok even regulated how Muslim women were supposed to carry
their baskets.
But a year after Songkhram was removed from power, the Thai government
passed the Patronage Act of 1945, which gave official status to Islam.
A religious functionary, the Shaikh al-Islam would advise the king on
local Muslim issues, and the ulama, or scholars, would be employees of
the Interior Ministry.
Andrew Tan, a security analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defence and
Strategic Studies, notes that in 1977, the government used development
programs to fight poverty in the south.
"The Thais have spent a great deal of time and effort on dealing with
'root causes' and to a large degree have been successful," says Tan.
Indeed, by the mid-1980s, the rebellion in the south was simmering
down as the local population lost faith in PULO's violent methods.
Scupin says that "the Muslims in the south began to mobilize in new
political organizations calling for more dialogue and negotiations
with the Thai government."
The PULO rallied with smaller Muslim factions under the banner of the
United Front for the Independence of Pattani (or just Bersatu,
"United" in Malay), yet its fortune did not change in the 1990s. Its
headquarters in Mecca was raided by Saudi authorities. Its ranks were
depleted by a government amnesty program.
For much of Thailand's history, the military has hijacked national
politics, but in October 1997, the government passed its 16th
constitution, ushering in a number of democratic reforms. In terms of
political rights, the New York-based Freedom House now rates Thailand
a decent 2.5 on a scale of one to seven, considering it as free as
India and Peru.
Muslims share equally in that democracy. In proportion to its overall
population, Thailand's Muslims have eight senators and 22
representatives in the National Assembly. The last government had a
Muslim foreign minister, and Wan Muhamad Noor Matha - called a
"collaborator" by the radical PULO - is currently one of five deputy
prime ministers.
Curiously, the dozens of foreign media reports that allege anti-Muslim
discrimination never specify what forms it takes. By contrast, one
informed observer contended that at the very worst, Bangkok could be
accused of religious insensitivity. For instance, it offered college
scholarships from money raised in the national lottery and, through
conventional interest-paying banks, a debt-release program for farmers
- neither of which could be accepted by a devout Muslim.
But such complaints do not fuel a revolution.
In fact, the Thais had thought they had finally put an end to their
Muslim rebellion in the south a few years ago. In January 1998, the
Malaysian authorities arrested four top PULO commanders and handed
them over to Thailand, a blow which prompted massive defections among
Muslim guerrillas.
In 2000, a Thai military chief confidently declared in The Nation, an
English-language daily based in Bangkok, "Twenty years ago, there were
about 1,000 armed pro-separatists. Today, the number is about 100..."
TO BE sure, Thailand still has many problems that can be exploited by
the rebels.
Human Rights Watch analyst Brad Adams notes that "Thai elections are
extremely corrupt" and that the Thaksin government has been
backsliding on democracy, especially with its shoot-to-kill policy
that has "killed 2,500 suspected drug-dealers."
This carte blanche attitude to law enforcement especially affects
Thai-Malay Muslims since, according to the CIA, southern Thailand is a
major conduit for the heroin trade. But drug smugglers are not the
only ones targeted by out-of-control police officers.
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has reported that a prominent
Muslim human rights lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaijit, has disappeared
since March. Believed to have been kidnapped and murdered by the
police, Somchai was a critic of "excessive and unnecessary violence in
law enforcement."
Official brutality is the separatist movement's ace in the hole
because it alienates the local Muslim population, undoing years of
conciliation. Speaking to The Nation in April, one ex-senior PULO
commander who had taken advantage of an amnesty, explained that police
treatment of the locals was the reason he had first taken up arms.
"The police were quite abusive, slapping and kicking people at will
before asking any questions," said 54-year-old Yusouf Longpi. "Nobody
was willing to stand up to them."
Ultimately, though, it is radical Islamic education that will produce
a new generation of rebels.
Muslims tend to view Thai state schools with suspicion, believing that
the secular curriculum is a subtle way of diluting the ethnic Malay
identity. As a result, children are sent to hundreds of private
Islamic schools, known as pondoks, which teach in Arabic and the local
Yawi dialect.
These schools depend on Middle Eastern donors, who also offer
scholarships to Thais to study abroad. Thus, in the 1980s, Iran
managed to convert thousands of Thai-Malays to Shi'ite Islam.
Now, it is the Saudis' turn to export their beliefs.
Over the past 15 years, southern Thailand has become a breeding ground
for Wahhabism. Deriving its name from the 18th-century puritan
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, this doctrine, according Georgetown
University scholar John Esposito, sees "the world in white and black
categories - Muslim and non-Muslim, belief and unbelief, the realm of
Islam and that of warfare."
For many in southern Thailand, Wahhabism simply means adopting more
conservative Islamic traditions, such as wearing the Arab veil and
long gown. But there are also Wahhabis like Ismail Lufti, the fiery
anti-Western rector of Yalla Islamic College. Lufti and his 8,000
followers see Thai Buddhists in the north as morally bankrupt because
of the drinking, sex tourism, and rampant prostitution in Bangkok - an
attitude that does not lend itself to national reconciliation.
The radicalization of the southern provinces is helped along by global
media outlets, such as al-Jazeera, that link local Muslims with
traumatic events in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
And so, moderate Thai Muslims are now derided as "water buffaloes,"
eager to please the West. Muslim intellectuals with little or no
personal experience of the Arab-Israeli conflict have also taken to
translating such anti-Semitic works as The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion and Henry Ford's The International Jew.
"In the 1970s, there was none of this stuff in southern Thailand,"
says Scupin. "Now, it is filled with it."
Given these factors, as well as the region's history as an independent
sultanate, no amount of democratic legislation and development
programs instituted by Bangkok will put a complete end to fighting in
the Muslim south.
Another al-Qaida outlet?
Osama T-shirts sell in southern Thailand, but few Muslims there really
buy into al-Qaida. In fact, a top bin Laden operative captured last
year by Thai intelligence admitted that southern separatists had
rebuffed his attempts at building a terrorist alliance.
Commonly known as "Hambali," Riduan Isamuddin is the 40-year-old,
bespectacled Indonesian operations chief for Jemaah Islamiya (JI), a
Southeast Asian terrorist network with links to al-Qaida. He has been
connected to the Bali bombing, in October 2002, that killed over 200
people and had planned to attack American-owned hotels and airliners
in Bangkok.
The elusive Hambali was hiding out in the old capital of Ayutthaya, 65
km north of Bangkok, when, in August, he was captured by military
intelligence and police officers. The Thais then handed him over to
the CIA.
At least one of the machete-wielding teenagers in April's disastrous
attack wore a green shirt emblazoned with the letters "JI." But aside
from Hambali, who had trained under bin Laden in the 1990s, the JI and
al-Qaida do not share the same members.
"It is a completely independent organization that has had some of its
operations funded by al-Qaida, but is not directed or controlled from
outside," says Sidney Jones, the Indonesia Project Director for the
Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
The two groups do, however, share an anti-Western, jihadist ideology -
which is precisely why the Thai-Malay Muslim separatists rejected
Hambali's offer of cooperation. And so far, no Western hotels or
embassies have been targeted by the Pattani United Liberation
Organization.
"The separatists want to emphasize their local, territorial, ethnic
grievances instead," notes Andrew Tan, a security analyst at
Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
For a decade, the Jemaah Islamiyah has been running a training camp
under the auspices of the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF) in the Philippines. Much better organized than the Thai Muslim
groups, MILF's ties with JI go back to meetings in Afghanistan.
At best, Thailand is what Zachary Abuza calls "a nation of
convenience" for al-Qaida.
In Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, the Simmons
College political scientist writes that the country is flooded with
illegal arms thanks to conflicts in neighboring states. Thailand is
also an international banking and transport center with much of the
national economy "underground, unregulated, and untaxed."
So why then are Osama T-shirts selling in southern Thailand?
For the same reason Che Guevara is in vogue.
"Osama bin Laden is seen as standing up to America," says Jones, "and
anyone who does that is going to be popular."
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* See the REAL 'Religion of Peace', Islam, on this site - EXCELLENT
* http://www.mathematik.net/homepage/islam/islam.htm
* Translated: http://tinyurl.com/2ooqh
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