A beacon for peace in far South is extinguished

Just a decade ago, in 2006, when Interior Ministry Permanent Secretary Grisada Boonrach was assigned vice governor of Yala, he would stop by and check on security officers manning the checkpoints in and around this restive province.
One late afternoon he came across a young man, a Muslim, who appeared to be slightly intoxicated.
“Are you Malayu [ethnic Malay]?” Grisada asked, to which the young man replied, “yes” without hesitation.
“Then why are you drunk?” barked Grisada.
The young man snapped back, asking the then-vice governor, “Who are you, Sapae-ing Basor?”
Grisada would learn soon learn more about the moral authority of one of Thailand’s most-wanted men, who at one time had a Bt10 million police bounty on his head.
Sapae-ing was perceived by many as the spiritual leader of Muslims in this Malay-speaking region. He was accused by the Thai police of being the leader of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), a longstanding separatist movement that surfaced in the early 1960s and today commands well over 90 per cent of insurgents operating in the South.
Sapae-ing fled his Yala home in December 2004 to escape arrest. Then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in a weekly radio address, claimed Sapae-ing was poised to become leader of a liberated Patani.
Thaksin accused this Thamvithya School principal of leading an army bent on carving out a separate homeland for the Malay Muslims in the southernmost provinces, a region historically known as Patani.
The arrest warrant for Sapae-ing was signed off by Thaksin’s point-man for the far South, Police Colonel Thawee Sodsong, in 2004. A decade later, Thawee would become the key figure in peace talks launched by the Yingluck government on February 28, 2013, during which another concerted effort was made to reach out to Sapae-ing for help.
Last week, upon learning news of Sapae-ing’s death, Thawee showed up in Pattani’s Yarang district to personally express his condolences to the late principal’s family.
Senior government officials who examined the warrant said the evidence against Sapae-ing was extremely flimsy and suspected it was motivated by Thaksin and his cronies’ agenda. They saw him as an easy target to get at the movement because students from his school had joined the insurgent movement.
It would be some time before the Thai government realised they weren’t just fighting young men with guns. They were up against an entirely different cultural and historical narrative that was breeding a new wave of separatist militants bent on forging a separate homeland.
These were not “sparrow bandits” who had embraced distorted Islam and history, as Thaksin and many Thai officials described them. The Thais were actually battling a competing history and a narrative that Sapae-ing exemplified.
Thai security planners eventually learned about Sapae-ing’s integrity, together with his strong religious credentials, and sought his help to end the conflict. Through him, they saw an opportunity to communicate with the Malays of Patani. But Bangkok was never clear as to what message it wanted to send or what kind of compromises it was willing to make with the Malays.
Attempts to get this spiritual leader to the negotiating table were fruitless because, according to people who knew him, Sapae-ing didn’t see the conflict as being about him but about the people of Patani. Furthermore, he sensed the Thais were unwilling to make any concessions and had failed to understand the root causes and grievances of people in this region.
He could have cut a deal for himself, but he chose not to. Too much was riding on his shoulders and he wasn’t about to sell out, said exiled separatist leaders.
Artef Sohko, a youth activist and graduate of Thamvithya School, said there was no leader in the Patani region who could claim anything like the level of respect and admiration that Sapae-ing commanded.
“There was nothing beneath him. He practices what he preaches. That kind of moral authority is hard to find nowadays,” said Artef, recalling how Sapae-ing would often tour the school grounds picking up trash to set a good example for students.
The historical Patani sultanate, once known for its ports and mercantile links with Western merchants, has been subsumed into four provinces of Thailand. Few Thais care to learn about this region’s glorious past, preferring to swallow a state-constructed narrative that encompasses the Malays but fails to recognise their difference.
But the mystique continues to shape the cultural and historical narrative for the people of this region and the end result is a series of separatist movements.
Sapae-ing has been a key figure in that story – an example of how the state fails to treat people who embrace a different cultural identity with respect and understanding.
Those who knew him say Sapae-ing was the most selfless person they ever encountered. They said he always placed the needs and dignity of his community before his own, and that’s why he refused to deal with the Thais during his years in exile.
His students loved him dearly. Many even considered a whupping from him a blessing that helped set them on the right path. Parents adored his strict discipline in an era when rapid social change is compromising the longstanding traditional values of this conservative community and leading youngsters astray.
According teachers at Thamvithya School, Sapae-ing liked to patrol beer joints after school in search of students. Any he caught could be sure of swift and painful justice.
Even after he disappeared from public sight, locals continued to talk about him. The mystique surrounding this righteous man of religion never seemed to fade. Some of those who observed his role in the regional conflict referred to Sapae-ing as “Yoda”, the wise and powerful Jedi master from George Lucas’ “Star Wars”.
Some young militants even believed he was blessed with the power of omniscience. They spoke as if he had never left them. For many, he never did; he was always in their hearts and minds. 
But after he was demonised and dismissed by Thaksin and his ilk as a power-hungry individual eager to be ruler of a liberated Patani, it was hard for any political or security official to take a softer or more subtle line. Pressure to end the conflict was too high and the Thai leadership couldn’t afford to look weak.
But when news of Sapae-ing’s death reached Bangkok this week, Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha promptly expressed condolences to his family. A gesture of goodwill is never too late, it seems.
“It could be that he [Prayut] wanted to make the Thais, the state and the government look less guilty because they were the ones who forced him to go out [into exile],” said Nualnoi Thammasathein, a veteran documentary producer and former BBC reporter who has done much work on the far-South conflict.
“They [the Thai government] look vulnerable, not sensible. I doubt that he [Prayut] did it for the family, but rather for himself and his government – maybe even to lift himself a little bit higher in the eyes of the Malays,” she added.
Prayut even instructed the Army to help his family transport Sapae-ing’s body back to Yala from Malaysia’s Terengganu state. Similar treatment was extended to the family of Romli Uttarasin, considered a founding father of the BRN, when he died in Malaysia in February 2010.
Thai security officials, on the other hand, said resolving the conflicts in this region will be harder without Sapae-ing, who could have played a crucial role in implementing any deal between the Thai state and the Malays of Patani. 
Sources in the BRN said Sapae-ing would be greatly missed but their fight against the Thai security forces would continue until they achieved their aims. Independence remains one of those aims, but sources add they are willing to negotiate with the Thais if the conditions are right. This means foreign governments observing the talks to ensure international best practice.
Bangkok will likely give the BRN the cold shoulder, demanding that the group join up with the separatist umbrella organisation MARA Patani for the ongoing peace initiative with the Thai government.

Don Pathan is a Thailand-based security consultant and a member of Patani Forum (www.pataniforum.com), a civil society organisation dedicated to critical discussion on the conflict in the far South.