THE Royal Thai Army will adopt new tactics against a militant Islamic uprising, following the coup that sent Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted prime minister, into exile in London last week. According to sources briefed by the army high command, Thaksin’s bungled response to the insurgency in southern Thailand, which has claimed 1,700 lives in two years, was a critical factor in the generals’ decision to get rid of him.
Military intelligence officers intend to negotiate with separatists and to use psychological warfare to isolate the most violent extremists, in contrast to Thaksin’s heavy-handed methods and harsh rhetoric.
The coup leader, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, is a Muslim who has sworn loyalty to Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the symbol of nationhood in this majority Buddhist country of 65m people.
The king has since bestowed his approval on the generals, a sign to Thais that the royal palace shared the belief that Thaksin had to go.
The tanks rolled on a rainy night in Bangkok last week while Thaksin was at the United Nations in New York. But if the prime minister’s absence was the opportunity, sources said, the incentive to act was a sense that the Thai state was losing control over its southern territory, where 4m Muslims live.
A final spur for the coup came when bomb explosions tore through the south’s commercial and tourist centre of Hat Yai last Saturday night, killing a Canadian visitor and three others, wounding dozens and prompting holidaymakers to flee.
Shocked Thai officials conceded that the terrorism could no longer be contained and might spread north to resorts such as Phuket and Koh Samui, with catastrophic results for the £5 billion-a-year tourist industry, still reeling from the 2004 tsunami.
That may explain the muted response to the coup from the United States and Britain, which deplored the damage to Thailand’s young democracy but did not call for Thaksin’s restoration to office.
The coup, in fact, coincided with a low-key conference in Singapore including CIA officials, Pentagon analysts and academics, which heard pessimistic assessments of the deteriorating situation in southern Thailand. “The degree of extremist religious activity in the south is extraordinary,” said one participant, Professor Zachary Abuza of Simmons College, Boston. “There has been a complete failure of intelligence. No one knows who the insurgents are. They don’t have a face.”
For months Thailand had been without a functioning government as its politicians traded allegations of corruption and disputed an election that had returned Thaksin to power in February, reinforcing his determination to stay at the helm as both Thailand’s richest man and its most powerful elected leader.
As head of the army, Sonthi was already deadlocked in an argument with Thaksin over the insurgency in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. Muslims are a majority in the three provinces, sundered from the Malay sultanates by a treaty between Britain and Siam in 1909. A separatist campaign rumbled on for decades, but it had become insignificant thanks to shrewd policies of religious tolerance and good works by the king. ()
When Thaksin, a former policeman who made his fortune from telecommunications, came to power in 2001, he broke with the old order. He put police cronies in charge of the southern border and shut down two intelligence clearing centres. Soon, reports in the media alleged that corruption, smuggling and racketeering were rife.
In January 2004 militants raided an armoury and started a killing spree. Since then they have murdered Buddhist monks, teachers, hospital staff and civil servants — anyone seen as representing the Thai state. The army seemed powerless to halt the chaos.
“Down there you stay inside the camp at night,” said a soldier who recently returned from a tour of duty. “If you go out, you die.”
Thaksin’s iron-fisted methods went disastrously wrong. A suicidal mass assault on army and police posts by young Muslims, many armed only with machetes, ended with almost 100 “martyrs” dead.
Then 74 unarmed Muslims died at the hands of the security forces at the village of Tak Bae, most of them suffocated in trucks, and a suspected police death squad abducted Somchai Neelaphaijit, a Muslim lawyer, on a Bangkok street. Somchai, who had brought torture cases before the National Human Rights Commission, was never seen again.
Unable to win by military means, the army argued for negotiations with known separatist organisations in a bid to outflank the militants. The king’s concern became clear when his privy counsellors endorsed a return to the traditional approach, but Thaksin ignored such pleas.
Tensions multiplied and rumours swept Bangkok. Police arrested an army officer in charge of a car rigged with explosives and parked near the prime minister’s residence.
Three weeks ago Thaksin, his wife and son emerged from the Oriental hotel. The prime minister got behind the wheel of his bulletproof Mercedes, obliging his bodyguards to follow a route known only to him. Trust at the top had broken down.
Thais were relieved, then, to see that the coup went off without a shot, even if they disagreed with it. This weekend Bangkok streets were coming back to life and children exchanged smiles with soldiers as they posed for photographs.
The generals promised to hand over to civilians after two weeks and to hold elections next year. An inquest into the Thaksin years of “CEO government” may bring prosecutions for corruption and the seizure of ill-gotten gains. Some Thai academics say the real priorities should be better education and a genuinely open economy to face the challenge from China, all reasons to end a wasteful, low-intensity war.
While Thaksin settles into exile in the West End, reportedly as a guest of his old friend Mohamed al-Fayed, the army now needs to find the men without a face in the jungles of the south and to win back hearts and minds — if it is not too late.
