Dr. Zachary Abuza (F '94, '98) a specialist in Southeast Asian politics and security at Simmons College, gave a lecture at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy yesterday afternoon on the insurgency in Southern Thailand.
The Jan Henrik Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies and the Fletcher Asia Club sponsored the lecture, which focused on the implications of the insurgency for Southeast Asian security.
"It's amazing how little attention is being paid to the insurgency in Southern Thailand," Abuza said to the crowd of students and faculty in Cabot. He said that the mainstream news media's attention is often diverted to higher-profile conflicts, like the current conflict in Iraq.
In his talk, titled "Conspiracy of Silence: The Insurgency in Southern Thailand and its Implications for Southeast Asian Security," Abuza said that the conflict has so far claimed more than 1,200 deaths in the past decade, with more than 1,000 occurring since a dramatic escalation of violence in January of 2000.
More than 63 percent of the casualties were civilians, and around 60 percent were Muslims, he said.
The insurgency, however, is being led by Muslims, who make up the majority religious group in the region. The region, collectively referred to as Pattani, is composed of the provinces Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala.
In his talk, Abuza offered a history of the conflict. The separatist movement has existed since the 1930's, but the fractious nature of the groups that compose it led them to be firmly suppressed by the Thai government, he said.
The movement seemed to go "dormant" in the early 1990's after many members were bought out by amnesties and deals with the government, he explained.
In the late 1990's to the early 2000's, however, the insurgency was revived by a large number of returning Malay intellectuals bringing revolutionary Islamist ideals from the Middle East, he said.
Abuza said that scattered incidents of violence erupted across the Southern provinces in 2004, ranging from bombings to seemingly random assassinations. Abuza attributed the renewed violence to former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's mismanagement of the situation.
Thaksin dissolved the Civilian-Police-Military Task Force 43 (CPM-43) and the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (SBPAC) in 2001, two institutions Abuza described as instrumental to peacekeeping in the region.
Thaksin also gave authority over the southern regions to the military police, which led to inter-service rivalry with the civilian police and intelligence failures between the two departments, Abuza said.
The armed forces' lack of counter-insurgency training, ignorance of local culture, and use of heavy-handed, brutal tactics have led them to "alienate themselves from the local population," Abuza said. This alienation, in turn, has hampered police and military efforts to gather information to properly combat the insurgency, he said.
After Thaksin was deposed in a September coup d'etat, the interim government under Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont boasts 1,700 insurgent arrests.
"The only important arrests have taken place in Malaysia," Abuza said. He said that many insurgents still remain at large in Thailand.
According to Abuza the violence has continued at pre-coup levels, despite the interim government's reestablishment of CPM-43 and SBPAC and a public apology by Chulanont for his predecessor's mismanagement in the southern region.
Almost 200 violent incidents have taken place since Thaksin was put out of power, claiming 91 lives, Abuza said.
Until now, no single separatist group has publicly claimed responsibility for any of the violence since the escalation in 2004. Abuza said this was a "conspiracy of silence" by the many different separatist groups in order to keep police and military in the dark.
Abuza said that despite the insurgents' seemingly separatist agenda, observers have to take into account the Islamist ideas at the heart of the conflict.
"This is a real battle within the Muslim community," he said.
Abuza received his MALD and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1994 and 1998, respectively.
