Election holds out little hope for South

With 7,000 lives lost in the appalling insurgency-related violence that’s gripped the southern border provinces since January 2004, politics parties 
contesting the March 24 election have little if anything to offer. Amid the random sound bites emanating from the campaigns there has been one notion, and only one, that might have something concrete to it.
The Pheu Thai Party (PTP) has made pronouncements, if vague, on Facebook about decentralising government to the benefit of the benighted South. It is not going so far as to suggest autonomy for the Muslim Malay homeland, which is an unpopular idea in many quarters. Rather, it is reviving the “special administrative region” that Yingluck Shinawatra promised during her 
successful campaign under the PTP banner to become Thailand’s first woman premier. 
Yingluck achieved the highest political office and then reneged on the promise, presumably under pressure from the military. Apart from continuation of the hostilities, there was little fallout. A political certainty in Thailand is that successful candidates can break promises made to the Malays of Patani and get away with it. Meanwhile the PTP took over the stop-and-go peace process, though its effort fell somewhere between a leap of faith and a 
deliberate hoax.
The aim, then as now, was to bring to the negotiation table the leaders of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional – the men who give the armed militants their marching orders. Some individuals who claimed to have the leaders’ confidence made offers, but it all came to naught. 
The PTP claims to have been the first party to initiate peace talks, but this is misleading. Then-Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont in late 2007 personally met leaders of the Patani United Liberation Organisation in Bahrain to try and break the ice.
Yingluck was right to try again, but her approach was wrong because it excluded other key stakeholders. Once the junta ousted her, it made the same mistake. Desperate to avoid chilling world opinion of Thailand any further, the coup-makers did all they could to keep the Patani horrors off the minds of citizens elsewhere.
Now the PTP is saying the 
insurgency should be a priority item on the national agenda, yet all previous governments said the same. It says it wants to start by getting citizens elsewhere to understand what’s going on, about the nature of the violence. It says that, longer term, it aims for peaceful coexistence with mutual respect for cultural diversity.
Is the PTP willing to say, though, that the fault lies with the state’s nationalistic policy requiring the Patani Malays to assimilate and set aside their ethno-religious identity, their cultural history? In pledging to ensure access to justice in the South and to reform security measures, is the PTP not making a promise that seems as likely as a bet that there will never be another coup? Can the PTP name one security official 
prosecuted for torturing a southerner or killing one extra-judicially?
The PTP talks about strengthening Thailand’s ties with neighbouring predominantly Muslim countries and seeking their guidance on reconciliation in the border provinces. The party is barking up the wrong tree. This conflict has never been about Islam. It is about relations between the state and a minority. Can the PTP name one Muslim country with a good record in relations of this kind?