Violence begets violence in the troubled South

Last Tuesday, in the early morning, a group of gunmen dressed in black jumped out of a pickup truck and fired rounds into a teashop in Narathiwat’s Rangae district. The teahouse was full of Malay-Muslim villagers. A baby and five other people were killed. Hours later, five armed men stormed a school in Pattani’s Mayo district and shot the director and a teacher to death.

As always, the authorities blamed the killings on separatist militants who have yet to develop a public face to stake claims to their attacks.

But hardly anybody in the Malay-speaking southernmost provinces believes the authorities. Locals blame government death squads for the teashop killings in Rangae and blame separatist militants for the murder of the two teachers in Mayo.

The incidents took place on December 11 at 7.30am and 12.30pm, about five hours apart. That was just one day.

Hardly a day has gone by since January 2004 without such incidents taking place in the deep South. So far more than 5,000 people have been killed, most of them Malay-Muslims. That figure gives a better sense of the situation in the three southernmost provinces.

The fact that the authorities can get away with spin and distortion has to do with the fact that the vast majority of people in the other 74 provinces never demand a better explanation. They are indifferent to the grievances of the Malay-Muslims in the South.

Thais are quick to cry foul and demand justice when police or soldiers fire into crowds of political demonstrators, but care nothing for the Malay-Muslims. Imagine how many plaintive folk songs would be written if the victims of something like the Tak Bai massacre had been Thai rather than ethnic Malay.

Because the Malay-Muslims of Patani don’t buy into the historical and cultural narrative constructed by the Thai state, many Thais feel they don’t deserve equal or just treatment.

For the Malays in the deep South, the shooting spree at the Rangae teashop reminded them too much of the Ai Baye massacre in June 2009, when a group of allegedly pro-government gunmen fired into a mosque full of Muslims conducting evening prayers.

Like other incidents that involve these alleged death squads, nothing gets done. Nobody is caught or brought to justice. And if anyone is taken in – like the suspect behind the shooting at Ban Kasod in Yala’s Bannang Sata on July 11 – they are quickly released or cleared.

For Muslims in the South, the reality is clear and simple: the Thai authorities are not going to punish their own kind. So what’s the use of crying out loud about incidents such as that at the Rangae teashop? Retaliation by the authorities has become a fact of life. The government doesn’t seem to have any strategy to contain this problem, except to keep coming up with misleading spin just to get through the day.

Authority figures and teachers’ representatives appeared on Army-run TV the other day, begging the insurgents to stop murdering teachers. But no one, it seems, is willing to give a more adequate picture of the conflict – that violence begets violence. Something has to give if the government wants to see real change.

Secret peace talks with the old guard of the separatist movement have not produced the outcome the Thai side hopes for, partly because the old guard has been unable to convince the young militants that something good and constructive can come out of their discussion with the Thais.

Over the years, one issue consistently on the table at these talks is the killing of Islamic religious leaders by pro-government death squads, and the murder of teachers by insurgents. A sort of ground rule appeared to have taken shape in 2012, since only two teachers – one of whom was a former border police officer – were killed between January and October. All that changed on November 14 when gunmen killed a respected imam, Abdullateh Todir, in Yala’s Yaha district. Exiled leaders blamed a pro-government death squad for the killing. Insurgents retaliated forcefully and, just like that, schoolteachers are back on the militants’ hit list.

It’s a vicious and brutal statement from the insurgents, who are telling the Thai side that you can’t talk peace while letting death squads do as they please.