Knee-jerk reactions not the solution to crisis in far South

A group of youth leaders in Thailand’s Malay-speaking South have been summoned for attitude adjustment because a T-shirt they were wearing could have been construed as promoting independence for the Muslim-majority southernmost border provinces.
The print on the shirt depicted the Malay historical homeland of Patani, which today constitutes the three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, and the four Malay-speaking districts in Songkhla province. A Jawi script (Malay language written in Arabic text) read: “The Great Land of Northern Malaya”.
The Internal Security Operation Command (Isoc) Region 4, the Army-dominated outfit overseeing security in the far South, is considering legal charges against this group of youth activists. But first it has to be determined if the message on the T-shirt could be deemed as secessionist and/or violated any Thai laws.
The five men taken for attitude adjustment are members of the Federation of Patani Students and Youth, or Permas.
If security officials react with such insecurity to a T-shirt depicting a Malay historical land, then it is Thai officials who need to have their attitudes adjusted.
Patani, the Malays’ historical homeland, is part of the locals’ narrative. True, it is the same narrative that is embraced by the armed separatist movements. But that doesn’t mean these young men – or anybody who wears the T-shirts – are members of the armed separatist groups.
The possibility that these activists, as well as the locals, or anybody for that matter, embraces an entirely different narrative from the rest of the country should not qualify as a criminal case. It is a political issue and one that needs understanding instead of being bludgeoned by the full weight of the law.
This historically contested region has seen 12 years of violent insurgency, partly in reaction to the narrow-minded policy of successive governments in whose wisdom brute force – along with co-opting the locals through development and financial incentives – would get them to stop thinking about carving out a separate homeland.
As the facts show, it hasn’t worked. Nearly 7,000 people have been killed since January 2004 and the end is nowhere in sight.
It’s high time our policymakers and our government agencies think outside the box, instead of holding on to this ethno-centric “Thainess” fantasy that we have been teaching our children.
We not only forced the minorities and people outside the central region to speak our language but we demanded that they speak the dialect that is used in the central region.
Try speaking Lao, Khmer or Malay in the government workplace and check out the treatment you will get. In fact, in places like government hospitals in the far South a hospital worker gets fined Bt50 for speaking in Malay to fellow-ethnic Malays.
In a region where about 90 per cent of the 2 millions locals identify themselves as Malay, it is not hard to understand why an armed separatist insurgency has been going on for two successive generations.
Can we not see that it is our own racist attitude towards the Malays and other minorities that has placed our country in this predicament and political crisis?
Are we so blinded by our nationalism that we can’t see what we are doing to our young men by sending them to this conflict-affected region?
We don’t need to look too far back in history to see that the Malay-speaking region and the Thai state once enjoyed a comfort level in their relationship. Armed rebellion did not come until 50 years after the border was drawn between Siam and British Malaya in 1909.
But this comfort level was ruined by the policy of assimilation, which the local Muslims felt was coming at the expense of their religious identity and cultural narrative.
Are our authorities so insecure as to arrest young men for wearing T-shirts with the image of a Malay historical homeland? If so, then it’s our officials who need to go through a re-education.
Understanding and sensitivity is needed to address this complex issue, backed by political courage in order to bring about a real change.