Still talking to the wrong people

General Aksara Kerdpol, chief state negotiator in the Thai government’s ongoing peace talks with an umbrella organisation of Patani Malay separatists called MARA Patani, appeared dumbfounded this week at the latest action by the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN). But the general was not taken aback by the spate of bombings and arson attacks in the last two weeks apparently conducted in retaliation for the execution of two suspected insurgents on a Narathiwat back road. 
Instead, he was confounded by a BRN press statement in which the group declared it does not support the talks with MARA Patani. In Aksara’s mind, it seems, the BRN had been part and parcel of MARA Patani ever since the umbrella organisation was announced in Kuala Lumpur in August 2015. The BRN abandoned that idea long ago.
Aksara had been appointed the government’s chief negotiator nine months earlier, charged with rejuvenating the peace dialogue launched by the Yingluck Shinawatra government on February 28, 2013 but halted 10 months later when the BRN decided it wanted no part of the effort. 
General Aksara’s problem appears to be in believing what he wants to believe while ignoring obvious warnings. If he’d done his homework, he would not have been surprised by the BRN’s show of non-support this week, and certainly not dismissive of it. He would have known that, without the BRN’s involvement, the initiative he’s overseeing is doomed to fall short in its mission.
The approach is fatally flawed since, firstly, none of the MARA Patani representatives has any influence at all on the actual combatants. It is the BRN that controls the insurgents in the three southernmost provinces and the four Malay-speaking districts in Songkhla province. This is what crippled the Yingluck initiative at the outset in 2013. At the time, in this very space, we repeatedly pointed out that Hasan Taib, the designated “liaison” man in the talks, was not part of the insurgency’s command and control apparatus. This factor alone placed the initiative somewhere between a hoax and a dangerous leap of faith. And it didn’t take long for the effort to collapse.
So it’s fair to say that Aksara would not have been dumbstruck if he’d reviewed what went wrong then and what remains wrong now. He perhaps felt he could move the process forward without correcting that past mistake, which entailed talking peace with the wrong people (Hasan Taib previously) and for the wrong reasons (back then, the political needs of the Yingluck government). MARA Patani came into being to pick up where Hasan Taib had left off, but again it was repeatedly pointed out that it too lacks command and control over the militants. 
In its April 10 statement, the BRN said nothing really different from what it’s been saying since 2013, including in interviews with The Nation. But this is not to say the statement has no value. It reiterates the group’s demands, and it is in the government’s best interests to take these seriously and re-evaluate its position accordingly.
The government needs to consider whether it’s moving in the right direction in pursuing dialogue with MARA Patani and, if so, why there’s been no meaningful progress. It seems that the BRN militants are wasting no time discrediting any claims of “progress” issued by MARA Patani and the government. The result is a vicious tit-for-tat cycle in a bloody conflict that refuses to give either side any genuine gains. It should be abundantly clear to the state negotiators that it is worth their time and effort to re-examine what must be done to get the real BRN to the table.