Thailand May Extend Shariah Law in Violence-Ridden Muslim South
By Haslinda Amin and Daniel Ten Kate
June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Thailand may allow more local autonomy and consider extending Shariah law to defuse a separatist insurgency in Muslim provinces that border Malaysia, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.
“More decentralization and provisions that respond to specific needs are fine,” Abhisit said in an interview in Singapore yesterday. “We can respond to needs on Shariah law, on the education system.”
Abhisit, 44, is seeking to undermine suspected separatists in four southernmost provinces who have attacked teachers, Muslim worshippers and policemen this month, leaving at least 31 dead and more than 50 injured. The prime minister, who took office in December, has insisted any decentralization of power wouldn’t be tantamount to autonomy, which the government opposes.
“Most of the local Malay Muslims just want a more autonomous, more decentralized administration so that they have political space for their own cultural and religious identity,” said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a political science lecturer at the Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani province. “So far the local identity has been suppressed by the central government.”
Shariah law is a system that operates under a code of Islamic principles first established in the Arab world by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Under a 1946 law, Thailand allows limited use of Islamic rules in the mostly Muslim provinces for settling family and inheritance issues.
Former Sultanate
Abhisit has advocated a reconciliatory approach with more development aid for the region, where separatists have fought for an independent state since Thailand formally annexed the autonomous Malay-Muslim sultanate in 1902. A planned development plan that would create jobs in the region “will go a long way to contribute to stability,” he said.
Large-scale military operations in June 2007 cut the number of violent incidents in the south in half to an average of fewer than 100 per month last year, according to Deep South Watch, a group that tracks the attacks. They have started to increase again in the first six months of this year.
“It appears that the improvement in counter insurgency tactics did as much as it could do and has ceased to make significant inroads,” said Anthony Davis, a Thailand-based security analyst for Jane’s Information Group. “The insurgents are essentially regrouping and as this month shows, they have a significant organizational capacity.”
Negotiations ‘Impractical’
Abhisit said negotiations with separatists were impractical because the movement was “not integrated.” Insurgents in the area, which is about twice the size of the Palestinian territories, were supported by funds from drug cartels, human trafficking rings and other criminal syndicates, he said.
Separatist groups target “devout, hard-working, well- mannered students” from private Islamic schools to join the insurgency, the International Crisis Group said in a report yesterday. Some undergo frontline military training while others are used for psychological warfare, it said.
“Recruiters appeal to a sense of Malay nationalism and pride in the old Patani sultanate,” says Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, Crisis Group’s Thailand analyst. “They tell students in these schools that it is the duty of every Muslim to take back their land from the Buddhist infidels.”
Direct Elections
Last week, Abhisit said the government was weighing direct elections in the region, similar to those in Bangkok and Pattaya, a resort city on the Gulf of Thailand, which are the only localities in the country to have direct elections for their leaders. The two cities command a budget that’s nearly equal to the allocation for Thailand’s 75 other provinces, whose governors are appointed by the Interior Ministry.
About 3,500 people have died in Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani and Songkhla provinces since the decades-old insurgency against Bangkok rule flared up in 2004. More than half of those killed since 2004 were Muslim, Deep South Watch said, whereas about 95 percent of Thailand’s population of 66 million people is Buddhist.
Last month, a Thai court exonerated security officials blamed for the deaths of 78 male Muslim protesters in 2004 who suffocated after being packed into trucks for transport to a military base. Abhisit said his government was “proving” to people in the region that “there will be no more injustices.”
“We need to take this approach and we have to be patient,” Abhisit said. “We can’t overturn perceptions that have been built up or the trust that has been lost over the last seven or eight years in a few months.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Daniel Ten Kate in Bangkok at
[email protected]; Haslinda Amin in Singapore at
[email protected].
