Thailand (Lonely Planet, 13th Edition) - China Williams [605]
Sumatra’s Srivijaya kingdom, a confederation of maritime states, annexed southern Thailand and Malaysia in the 7th century and held the land until the 13th century. The kingdom became hugely wealthy from tolls extracted from traffic through the Strait of Malacca. As the Islamic sultanate of Kedah rose and assumed power near the present Thai-Malay border, the majority of Thailand (including Tambralinga and nearby states) adopted Buddhism. Islam was well woven into the region’s fabric of society by the 14th century, spreading as far north as present-day Songkhla. The Malay dialect of Yawi became the main language of the Deep South and Islam replaced Buddhism throughout the region. This religious and linguistic boundary further cemented the great rift between these future provinces and the rest of Thailand further north.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, after the fall of Ayuthaya, the Malay sultanate of Pattani acted as a fully independent entity until 1909 when the Anglo-Siamese Treaty divvied up the blurred borders of Pattani and Kedah. Pattani went to the King of Siam, as did Narathiwat, Yala, Satun and Songkhla. The rest of the region went to the British and would later become part of Malaysia.
Culturally quite different from the rest of the country, these provinces were comprehensively neglected by the central government over the next 50 years. Islamic traditions and the Yawi language were discouraged by the region’s non-Malay administrators, and systematic abuses of power contributed to growing separatist sentiments.
In 1957 Muslim resentment against the ruling Buddhist government reached boiling point and separatists initiated a guerrilla war with the aim of creating a separate Muslim state in southern Thailand. The main armed faction was the Pattani United Liberation Organisation (PULO), which launched a campaign of bombings and armed attacks throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The movement began to decline in the 1990s, when Bangkok presented a peace deal consisting of greater cultural freedom and autonomy for the south.
Current Events
After many years of relative peace, the Thai government reduced the strength of their grip in Pattani by annulling their police state–like control. In 2004 tensions quickly heightened as separatist sentiments flourished anew. These antigovernment feelings came at a time when job numbers were dwindling as corporate fisheries ploughed through, wrecking family-run operations. Terrorist attacks had a distinctive communist slant reminiscent of demonstrations many decades ago.
The first major incident that signified a notable rise in antigovernment sentiments occurred in late April 2004, when a string of organised attacks blasted through 11 government buildings across the region at dawn. Insurgents gathered in the Krua Se mosque and held off military forces for nine long hours until the army wore them down and killed everyone inside. Critics argued that such severe force was completely unnecessary and that negotiations should have taken place before the mass killing. Only six months later, at the end of 2004, the Tak Bai incident further created a worrisome rift between the government and its Muslim citizens. Upon the arrest of six southern men, crowds of young locals gathered to demand their release. The demonstrators were met with brute military force and were promptly rounded up and taken to nearby Pattani. Over 80 locals died during the ordeal from severe beatings and mistreatment.
By 2006, when a political coup ejected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra from office, the death toll in the border provinces had reached over 1400 victims. Unfortunately, the sudden shift in government did not put an end to the violence in the south. By mid-2007 the body count had virtually doubled to roughly 2600, despite the resurrection of the Southern Border Provinces’ Administrative Centre (dismantled by Thaksin in 2002) and a public apology to the local Muslim population by Surayud Chulanont,