Politics of proclamations in south Thailand By Marc Askew

Oct 25, 2011
Politics of proclamations in south Thailand
By Marc Askew
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MJ25Ae02.html

A battle to classify and interpret the violence in Thailand's southern border provinces has been ongoing since early 2004, paralleling the more grisly and confusing realities on the ground. Driving the cacophony of debate about the problems and solutions to the crisis is a debilitating violence which has persisted for nearly eight years.

It is a messy affair for which the Thai state seems to have no decisive or compelling solution. Clandestine cell-based insurgent
groups continue to attack civilians and officials. They are part of a murky mix of bombings and shootings that also stem from private violence, political rivalries and vested interests.

Single-issue organizations have actively campaigned to shape knowledge and perceptions about the ongoing violence in the deep south. Human-rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch act as lobby groups armed with the apparent certainties of international legal rhetoric and United Nations declarations to reinforce the gravity of their pronouncements.

Other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Brussels-based International Crisis Group or Thailand's Deep South Watch (DSW), base their legitimacy on their claims to independence and research expertise. (DSW is famous for its progressive body count of total fatalities, currently estimated at over 4,800 since January 2004, which is widely cited in media reports but regarded by Thai authorities as a grossly inflated estimate of actual insurgency-instigated deaths.)

Just like state officials, NGOs are involved in what the scholar Mahmood Mamdami has described as "the politics of naming". The name of the game is to gain public attention and control the narrative - or at least a sizeable piece of it. Playing with language and definitions is a key part of this. For example, naming the situation in the south an "insurgency" collapses a host of messy events into a simple causal cliche that is easily consumable for foreign readers.

Inserting the emotive but ambiguous word "systematic" in front of the term "torture" gives weight to condemnation of instances of official's mistreatment of detained suspects. And applying the derogatory name "militias" to village home guard defense units adds rhetorical punch to a fashionable state-bashing narrative about factors pushing the violence. Press releases are the standard weapon in activist efforts to pressure the media and push for public attention.

On September 27, the London-based Amnesty International released a report in Bangkok which claimed that insurgent violence against civilians in the south constituted "war crimes" as defined by the Geneva Conventions. From 2004 until recently, international NGOs have preferred to place the blame for the ongoing violence almost entirely at the feet of the Thai state and military, condemning conspicuous cases of torture and demanding the lifting of the Emergency Law of 2005, which allows for the detention and questioning of suspects for up to 30 days (subject to court approval) and provides immunity to officials.

It was only in 2007 that another prominent international rights group, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, released a report condemning insurgents for targeting civilians, who make up the bulk of casualties in this murky conflict. Amnesty's recent proclamation goes much further than HRW's earlier declaration in its invocation of international law principles and categories.

Amnesty took a bold step in calling attention to the continued suffering inflicted on "non-combatants" in the Deep South. But if judged by the critical reception at the report's official release at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Thailand, its hoped-for publicity bombshell may well be a dud. Not only did its condemnation of insurgents go against the grain of most other NGO views of the key causes of violence (ie, the Thai state), but the Thai authorities themselves are opposed to the international ramifications of Amnesty's judgment.

Amnesty's press conference began with a categorical statement by Donna Guest, deputy director of its Asia-Pacific division, that targeted attacks on civilians constitute "war crimes" according to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on "persons taking no active part in hostilities".

This legal designation of war crimes in international humanitarian law is applicable to "international and internal armed conflicts such as the one in southern Thailand" and is binding on all parties to the conflict, she said. Guest went on: "Insurgents are clearly in violation of the law and must cease these attacks immediately."

Raised rhetorical ante
Guest said that southern Thailand's violent situation came under the definition of an "Internal Armed Conflict" according to criteria of the intensity and duration of violence and chain-of command of the armed groups.

Amnesty's Thailand and Myanmar researcher, Benjamin Zawacki, the writer of the report, had a somewhat different line: the use of the label "Internal Armed Conflict" and all its legal implications for enforcing accountability for war crimes was "long overdue". He said his report raised the issue of the south "to another level".

Despite all the legalistic certainties of its rhetoric, Amnesty's argument came in for strong critique. One representative of southern Muslim students claimed that the charges against insurgent "crimes" were remarkably similar to those made by the Thai state. More serious were the weak foundations for identifying the warring parties in this "Internal Armed conflict".

An International Commission of Jurists representative questioned just how the "insurgents" could be legally defined as a clear party to the conflict if no group has claimed responsibility for the violence.

Another question dealt with the problematic issue of defining the violence as an "insurgency" if a large percentage (some 30%, according to internal police estimates) of events and victims were the result of private and crime-related disputes. This query was met with Amnesty's assertion that the majority of the violence was indeed insurgency-related.

The last statement at the press event was made by the only representative of Thai officialdom present, the spokesman for Lieutenant General Udomchai Thammasarojrat, Fourth Army region chief. He asserted improbably that only 20% of violent events in the south were committed by insurgents.

Insurgents have hardly shaken in their shoes at Amnesty's demand to cease their attacks on civilians judging by the continued killings in the weeks since the report's release. To its credit, Amnesty appended to its report a response by Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which categorically disagreed with the assessment that the situation met the criteria for an "Internal Armed Conflict".

MFA argued on the grounds that no single group claimed responsibility for the violence, assailants operated in secret, and that there was no identifiable leadership of their armed forces.

Further, MFA asserted that the violence was sporadic, confined to particular districts, and that 80% of it was connected with private disputes and crime. The fact is that the Thai state will not allow international involvement in domestic affairs on the issue of the south, and the violence is simply not of a scale to provoke international pressure. Moreover, Thailand is not a "state party" to the Rome Statute, which allows the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in cases of war crimes.

It is equally clear that the level of violence in the south, although reduced since its peak of 2007, is utterly unacceptable for any civilized country that claims to uphold law and order. No amount of tinkering with the relative proportion of violence committed for ideological, private, or criminal ends can avoid the fact that the number of recorded murders occurring last year in the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala was four-to-five times higher than any province of equivalent size in the country.

Amnesty's report reflects widespread concern that something must be done to end the debilitating violence wracking Thailand's south, but pushing the envelope with unworkable and improvable international legal classifications will likely have little impact.

Marc Askew is Senior Fellow in Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Melbourne University and Associate Professor in the Asian Studies Program at Walailak University Thailand. He is undertaking ongoing research in the southern border provinces.