Creating Religious and Cultural Space for Muslims in Southern Thailand

By Nate Jones on 18 August 2006

Save for a few particularly bloody incidents, the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand has largely escaped the notice of the international news media. Left to stew, the bloody brew continues to generate incidents of spectacular violence, accompanied by a daily drip of unexplained revenge killings and disappearances. What has driven this confused conflict? And how can Malay Muslim community leaders contribute their cultural expertise to building peace in a policy environment that is security-focused?

The southern Thai conflict is rooted in a geopolitical anomaly. Due to the vagaries of colonial map-drawing, the Sultanate of Pattani was abolished in 1902 and its ethnically Malay and Muslim villagers were incorporated into the kingdom of Siam, where their homeland was broken up into the provinces of Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat, and Songkhla.¹ Despite warmongering from the former Sultan, the colonial borders held and were finally confirmed by the victorious British after World War II.

The new border left Thailand with resource-poor provinces and a culturally and religiously alien community on its southern border. Successive Thai governments tried different approaches aimed at incorporating the newcomers into the kingdom. But the region has resisted stabilization. Some of this is a result of ongoing low-level banditry, but some is the result of political violence carried out by strong insurgent movements that are both a cause and a consequence of hard-line crackdowns by Bangkok.²

Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has continued in the hard-liner tradition, pursuing a well-publicized strongman approach to the problem.³ The Prime Minister's controversial decisions have included dismantling the south's only credible reconciliation institution and then publicly humiliating its replacement, the National Reconciliation Commission.⁴

While Thaksin's policies have played well politically among northern Thais, he has not been able to ease the violence that has plagued the region since 2000. The Prime Minister has given security forces a legal carte blanche to produce results, and local Muslim villagers report that they fear the police more than the area's insurgents.⁵

Thaksin's bad-cop policies in southern Thailand, coinciding with his infamous “war on drugs,” have earned international criticism, but pundits and rights' groups have offered little constructive advice to solve the problem. A partial exception is the International Crisis Group (ICG), which has produced a thoughtful series of recommendations focused around rebuilding local trust by reconstructing a government framework that takes Malay Muslims' cultural and religious differences seriously. ICG has also called for the prosecution of officers involved in human rights abuses and an end to martial law.⁶

While ICG's recommendations effectively cover the policy aspects of a potential political solution, solutions for the religious aspects of the problem have not been widely discussed. It should be noted that there is a broad consensus that religious hostility is not a core motivation for the insurgents, their sympathizers, or the Malay Muslim community at large. Instead, it appears that the insurgency, which consists of a confused collection of guerrilla and criminal groups, is preoccupied primarily with concrete political recognition of Malay cultural uniquenesses. These political concerns tend to be shared by the broader Malay Muslim community. In this context, the language of instruction in schools, religious affiliation of teachers, and ethnic make-up of the bureaucracy are all hot-button issues.

Because of the political connection to the cultural issues described above, the problems have been most comprehensively analyzed in political terms. And a prominent approach to dealing with the problems has involved a criminalization of the insurgency and its sympathizers, in an attempt to separate “good” Muslim citizens from “bad”—without considering the institutionalized discrimination from Thai government and society that has generated hostility across the entire Malay Muslim community.

Besides these perspectives, however, a robust appreciation of the connection between formal religion and practiced culture among the Malay Muslims of southern Thailand yields possibilities for addressing the conflict in religious terms as well. To be sure, an exclusively religious approach to the problem will not yield an end to the violence. Indeed, extensive official corruption and the presence of drug smuggling rackets in the area will ensure a steady supply of work for local thugs and insurgents even in the face of strong policy responses from Bangkok. However, while government policies can aim at minimizing violent challenges to the state's authority, local and international Malay Muslim leaders and scholars can offer a series of constructive initiatives designed to build a resilient and well-adapted Malay Muslim community within a majority-Buddhist state.

A religious track to resolving the southern Thai conflict should not involve endless formal conferences and scripted inter-religious dialog on the subject of “tolerance”—usually with scant attention to genuine differences between faiths. Rather, Malay Muslim leaders, whether lay or clergy, can usefully consider their position in cultural terms. As arbiters and shapers of cultural practice, they occupy a unique and under-appreciated position within the various communal networks involved in the conflict.

The cultural authority of Islamic leadership can be both a strong conflict-resolution resource for the government and a source of genuine power and independence for the whole Malay Muslim community. Influential Malay Muslims in Thailand and abroad have already worked hard to promote a peaceful resolution to the conflict. This work of advocacy needs to be expanded and focused into a series of specific policy recommendations for the Thaksin government.

While popular demands have included a laundry list of culturally-sensitive changes, Malay Muslim advocates should focus on developing a plan of strategic implementation for these oft-repeated demands, including concerns about children's education, Islamic family law, and government representation. A well-placed proposal should lay out a step-by-step approach for the government coupled with simultaneous trust-building measures from the Malay Muslim community.

This strategy should not be advertised as a solution for current violence, but rather as a safety valve to prevent future violence through trust-building exercises that encourage a genuine relationship between the government and the Malay Muslim community. Even if the government does not act on all demands, the mobilization of Islamic leadership involved in designing and proposing such a unified strategy would significantly strengthen and focus the public voice of the Malay Muslim community within Thai politics, paving the way for significant future involvement on other issues.

Underlying a comprehensive strategy, however, needs to be a more visionary scholarly approach to the identity crisis of Malay Muslims. Local scholars need to address the condition of being Malay Muslim within the Thai state in a holistic way—from policy to poetry—imagining new solutions to the legacy of inertial ignorance and discrimination that has persisted through much of the last century.

Specifically, scholars need to propose creative solutions to three of the central paradoxes that fuel the conflict in southern Thailand. First, Thailand's national language, Thai, is the language of its dominant ethnic group, yet the Thai state includes 74 different language communities, including Pattani Malay, which is spoken by most of the Muslims in southern Thailand.⁷ How can Malay Muslims and other minority language groups overcome linguistic discrimination, which has led to bureaucratic and social segregation?

Second, the state religion of Thailand is Buddhism, but more than 3 million Thais follow a different faith. The state's official policy of religious diversity is admirable, but it is often crushed by bureaucratic ignorance or ingrained cultural snobbery.⁸ How can a strong Malay and Islamic identity be encouraged in such circumstances?

Third, dramatically different cultural, religious and lifestyle patterns encourage Muslim and Buddhist communities in southern Thailand to live segregated lives, fueling misunderstanding and fear. How can a distinctly Muslim community generate strong links with the majority Thai and Buddhist community without sacrificing its cultural integrity?

The answers to these and other questions must come from within the Malay Muslim community. Ultimately, this communal re-envisioning of identity must drive the political strategies of an awakened Malay Muslim political force within the framework of Thailand's democracy.

From the government's perspective, a Malay Muslim cultural and scholarly awakening should be encouraged along with hard power-focused policy decisions designed to minimize the violence that plagues the region. The government should design and implement a new education program designed to overcome the significant barriers faced by Malay Muslim students in the Thai school system. While mother-tongue education at the primary level is an important step, officials should also develop incentives to encourage Malay Muslim scholars to go on to higher education in both technical and liberal-arts fields.

Internationally, Bangkok would do well to focus on rebuilding strained relationships with Malaysia and Indonesia, who are naturally sympathetic to the plight of the Malay Muslim community in southern Thailand. Prime Minister Thaksin's vaunted military solution to the insurgency has played well with many Thai voters, but it is has deeply offended Southeast Asian neighbors with a strong Muslim heritage.

In the past, northern Malaysia has offered a relatively safe haven for insurgents from southern Thailand. Kuala Lumpur might be willing to crack down on insurgents operating on Malaysian soil if PM Thaksin's government announced a comprehensive policy package for southern Thailand designed to ameliorate the violence by creating political and cultural space for the Malay Muslim community to flourish. Regardless of Bangkok's willingness to adopt peace-oriented policy solutions, however, the Malay Muslim community would benefit from developing and articulating a strong and concerted political and cultural identity. In the end, this will earn attention in Bangkok while building hopeful, peaceful communities at the grassroots.

Last updated 12 January 2009