REGIONAL
In Thai Peace Talks, a Challenge to Military Dominance In the internal struggle over who’s in charge of ending a decade-old insurgency in Thailand’s south, the powerful army appears to be losing out By MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR / PATTANI, Thailand
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t a recent event to mark the first anniversary of a landmark peace dialogue in Thailand’s troubled south, the mood was more uncertain than celebratory. The conflicting views of the main parties at the talks—the National Security Council (NSC), heading the Thai government’s delegation, and exiled members of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Coordinate (BRN-C), speaking on behalf of the strongest Malay-Muslim insurgent movement in Thailand’s southernmost provinces—were one obvious source of this unease. But beyond this, there were also worries rooted in the attitude of Thailand’s powerful military toward such a dialogue. The words of Maj.-Gen. Nakrob Boonbuathong, a ranking member of the Internal Security Operation Command (ISOC), an influential branch of the military, went some way toward allaying these concerns. “The security community supports the peace process and for the dialogue to find a solution,” he told a panel discussion held in a packed lecture room at Pattani’s Prince of Songkhla University. Such words from a general known to be a hawk were not lost on analysts of the insurgency that has bloodied the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, home to predominantly Buddhist Thailand’s largest minority, the Malay-Muslims. “It is a good
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sign, at least verbally,” remarked one Pattani-based analyst. “The military seems to have accepted that this process will go ahead and it wants to have a role.” Yet, even such analysts prefer to be guarded, given the military’s dominant role in combatting the BRN-C-led insurgency and the sway it enjoyed during four previous efforts at peace talks since this latest cycle of violence erupted in January 2004. The latest talks have exposed the manner in which the military has wrested control from other arms of the Thai state to determine the political agenda in this region along the Thai-Malaysian border, making the question of whether it is on board with the current peace process the focus of much fraught speculation. The turf war over who sets the agenda in the south has come increasingly out into the open since the signing of the “General Consensus on the Peace Dialogue Process” on Feb. 28, 2013, between Lt.-Gen. Paradorn Pattanatabut, head of the NSC, and Hassan Taib, an exiled political representative of the BRN-C. According to Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, the author of reports about the insurgency for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group from 20082012, “The military sent a message to the government not to sign the Feb. 28 ‘General Consensus’ with the
BRN-C. Gen. Nakrob often said that the army was being kept at a distance by Paradorn and [other allies] of the government.” The extent of this tussle was April 2014