In the South, a strategy doomed to fail

Having boasted that the situation in two worrisome districts in Songkhla province was normalising, security forces have twice been jolted this month by insurgents conducting bomb attacks.

The authorities had claimed significant progress in restoring order and stability in Chana and Thepa, to the extent that martial law was lifted there just over a year ago.

But on Tuesday in Thepa, a man was killed and 11 others were injured, including an 11-year-old child, when a bomb went off. It had been fixed to a motorbike parked near a convenience store behind the train station. It appears the culprits lured police to the scene by reporting a mobile phone attached to a suspicious object spotted inside the store. When the officers arrived, the insurgents detonated the explosive, killing one civilian and injuring five police personnel.

Nine days earlier in nearby Chana district, insurgents carried out a similar attack with a bomb-laden motorcycle parked next to a police vehicle near the railway station. Just as two officers were about to get in their vehicle, insurgents set off the bomb, killing one of the officers as well as a four-year-old boy.

Violence in the South spiked two months ago after nearly two years of steep decline in the overall number of incidents. Officials had been quick to claim credit for the decreasing tension, saying their strategy for containing the conflict was bearing fruit. In their display of confidence, however, they demonstrated once again a tendency to forget that this is an insurgency, not conventional warfare. 

Claiming any measure of success in specific districts is pointless, since the separatist militants do not view the field of operations the same way. If there is any strategic lesson to be learned from the past 13 years, it is that the insurgents have a high degree of mobility throughout the Malay-speaking region and can slip in and out of communities at will to carry out their violent activities.

The latest attacks in Songkhla serve as a reminder that the government and security forces must redefine their benchmark for success. The insurgents are not interested in gaining territory – at least not at this stage of the conflict – but rather in capturing the proverbial hearts and minds of citizens of the South. To do so they must discredit the security agencies by rendering the area as ungovernable as possible, through the use of violence.

It must be kept in mind that the insurgents have the fundamental support of the citizenry. Even if some disagree with the brutality, they share the militants’ deep-seated mistrust of the Thai state. The vast majority of Malay Muslims in the South are just as concerned about the collateral damage in the war being waged as anyone else in the Kingdom. In fact, their disdain for the insurgents’ brutal methodology has over the years helped bring a degree of civility to the conflict. The public outcry in the South over the burning of schools and assaults on Buddhist monks and temples forced the insurgents to stop attacking such “soft targets”.

And yet, after more than a dozen years, the government still has not found a way to get the citizenry on its side. Part of the reason for this failure is the authorities’ obsession with reducing the number of violent incidents, a goal funded by an enormous operational budget. Judging by the pronouncements of their spokesmen, the security forces appear to be interested in nothing else but the numbers. Their focus should, of course, be on determining the root causes of this long and cruel conflict, resolving the injustice that fuels it and eliminating their own culture of impunity that allows the cycle of violence to continue.

Instead, they continue to pay lip service to notions of justice and freedom, of which they appear to have only a vague understanding. Public-relations stunts are common, designed to show the rest of Thailand that the local people are on the government’s side. But, with two more deaths this month, the killings remain even more common.