Insurgency in Southern Thailand - a brief background

The problems in southern Thailand go back a very long way (hundreds of years) and are extremely complex. I have only a limited knowledge of the situation but I know enough to understand what I don't know. The part of the Malay Peninsula that currently forms the southernmost Thai provinces has historically been more closely aligned to Islamic Malaysia and Indonesia than Thailand.

At one time, Pattani was an independent Muslim state with its own sultan rulers until it was formally annexed by Siam in 1902. Prior to that, much of present day southern Thailand was part of the ancient Srivijayan empire based in Sumatra.

In the era of European colonialism, King Rama V ceded four states to British Malaya in an effort to keep the British out and to keep them sweet so they would help Thailand resist efforts from other European powers to colonise the country - notably the French.

In WW2 Thailand allied itself with Japan and was occupied for a time by the Japanese. The Japanese army overran British-ruled Malaya and Singapore very easily and thus had total power in the region.

To reward the Thais for their help, the Japanese allowed Thailand to 'reclaim' the four previously ceded states. However, after the Allied victory in WW2, these states were returned to British Malaya.

I hope I have got my facts right but the point I am trying to make is that throughout history the border between Thailand and Malaysia has gone up and down and, as a result, the people living in the area have been used like sacrificial pawns in a big chess game.

As I said, most people in the area are more aligned to Islamic countries; the majority are Muslim and they even have their own language known as Yawi. Various Thai governments haven't respected this very much though and have tried to force mainstream Thai culture upon them.

The analogy I make - and this is probably quite controversial - is the situation between England and Scotland. Both are part of the United Kingdom with a common government but the culture is very different.

If the UK government decided to move the border up a little and told people living in southern Scotland they were now English, how would they feel?

What if they were told to drop their Scottish names, start speaking with an English accent and what if the school curriculum was changed to start teaching the English version of Scottish history?

It's quite simple really. There would be such an outrage it could almost lead to a civil war. Governments have to respect people's culture and ancestry.

There has been no civil war in Thailand over this and most of the Thai people living in the region - whether they be ethnic Thai, Malay or Chinese - get along fine. There have always been radicals though and in recent years the troubles have been spurred on by American foreign policy.

The world, it seems, is now divided between Muslims and non-Muslims and this has been taken as an opportunity by a few extremists to up the ante in southern Thailand. The troubles aren't new but they flared up again at the beginning of 2004. In addition to American foreign policy, Thaksin's heavy-handed policies also made the situation worse.

Hat Yai

The three affected provinces are Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani but the problems have also crept into Satun and Songkhla. Hat Yai is by far the biggest city in the south and it is an obvious terrorist target. Some years ago, a bomb exploded at the railway station, I believe. When the troubles started again in 2004 the authorities immediately put measures in place to protect Hat Yai.

Security guards were posted at every supermarket to check bags and motorcycles for bombs, and motorcycles were banned from parking outside certain buildings. These measures seemed to work quite well and there was only one lapse on Sunday 3rd April 2005 when three bombs exploded. One was at Hat Yai airport, the second at Carrefour supermarket, and the third at a hotel in Songkhla.

The effect of the bombs was to completely decimate the weekend Malaysian tourist trade that so many locals rely on. The Malaysians and Singaporeans just stopped coming. It took a good year to begin to restore confidence. When Hat Yai hotels were 100% full at Songkran 2006 it seemed as if things might be back to normal.

Saturday 16th September 2006

I got a call from Iss (who was still working) at 9:20pm to tell me there had been bombs downtown. She had heard them and seen lots of people running in the street. Details were sketchy but Lee Gardens Plaza was mentioned.

She was a few hundred meters away but two bombs went off within 30 meters of where she used to work and she used to spend a lot of time outside on the street trying to get customers into the shop.

Terrorists don't often seem to know what they really want but settle for causing death and disrupting life. To disrupt life in Hat Yai, bombs around Lee Gardens Plaza on a Saturday night when everywhere is jam packed with Malaysian tourists will do the trick.

Later reports said that five people had died and 50 had been injured. Various friends called me with different reports but it seemed that it had been a coordinated attack and several bombs had gone off within a short period of time.

Sunday 17th September 2006

I went to look around the affected area the morning after. A bar underneath Odean shopping centre on Thamnoonvithee Road had been hit. It looked as if the bomb had exploded outside and judging from the wreckage - with lots of disintegrated motorcycle parts everywhere - it looks as if the bomb had been planted in a parked motorcycle.

Just around the corner, outside the entrance to the Odean car park was some damage to the pavement where another smaller blast had occurred. The worst damage though - and the scene of the deaths - was outside a massage parlour further along Thamnoonvithee Road. Incidentally, this area is packed full of bars and is the main farang expat hangout in Hat Yai.

The scene outside the massage parlour was similar to outside the bar. The damage to the tarmac on the road gives an indication just how powerful the blast was. If these devices can cause this much damage to tarmac they can kill very easily.

The first report I read said that five men who were on their way into the massage parlour were killed. I heard later that they were Malaysians. However, on Sunday morning I was told that the revised death count was four. Two Thai girls working at the parlour were killed, as well as a Canadian and a Malaysian.

From outside Lee Gardens I couldn't see any bomb damage. I am told that another bomb went off at Diana department store but that it was relatively small and reports say that Big C was also affected.

Life in Hat Yai stopped temporarily. The streets were blocked off and empty. The tourists who remained took photos before they went home. There were lots of police and TV news crews around. Electricians fixed up emergency electricity supplies for the mobile TV news vans.

The Canadian killed was named later as Jesse Lee Daniel. I subsequently met a Filipino teacher who he used to work with at Ponwittaya school in Hat Yai Nai. As he had no relatives in Thailand, she was asked to identify his body at Hat Yai hospital. Not a pleasant task, as you can imagine, and as a result she had trouble sleeping for weeks afterwards.

Apparently, he was inside a bar when the first explosion went off and upon hearing it he went outside to take photographs. Another bomb went off causing a piece of shrapnel to fly straight through his eye.

What now?

Once again, the Hat Yai tourist industry will take a huge dive just as it had started to get back on track. There are thousands of Thai people working in hotels, restaurants, beauty salons and massage parlours in Hat Yai which exist only for the Malaysian and Singaporean tourist trade.

Many Thais from elsewhere in the country have moved to Hat Yai to support this industry. They not only come from elsewhere in southern Thailand. Go to any massage parlour in Hat Yai and you will find that most of the workers are from the north and north-east.

Most, but not all, of the workers are girls and they live frugal lives many miles away from their loved ones so that they have money to send back to their poor families. These latest blasts in southern Thailand will have far-reaching consequences hundreds of miles away.

The solution

Well, if I knew this I would probably be getting a Nobel peace prize but sadly I don't. All I do know is that these crude bombs are very easy to make from easily available materials. They can be placed in a motorbike and detonated by a timer or mobile phone.

You can check motorbikes going into buildings but you can't check every motorbike being parked on the street. It is just impossible. Trying to prevent people from setting bombs off with mobile phones is also impossible.

It is a requirement to register your mobile phone now but evil people will always find a way to get around such restrictions. All they have to do is steal a phone, or steal someone else's ID and use it to make a false registration.

If terrorists set their minds to explode bombs there isn't a lot we can do. What needs to happen is for governments to completely change their way of thinking. This isn't something you can fight against, especially with suicide bombers who don't care about losing their own lives.

Dialogue is the only way. I am still not clear about what it is the terrorists actually want so asking their representatives that question would be a good starting point. What they want is probably unattainable, and it would also probably be economic suicide as well, but knowing the answer would be a good starting point.

This evil killing can never be condoned but the terrorists must have grievances. A strength of the Thais is compromise and their ability to find ways to make both parties involved in a dispute happy without confrontation. This is what needs to happen now. Trying to prevent reoccurrences won't work and going in heavy-handed (as happened before under Thaksin) will only make things worse.

The sign above is located just outside where one of the bombs went off. Reading the words, it seemed quite poignant.

Inevitably, the question will be raised regarding how safe Hat Yai is from terrorist attacks now and I would like to look at it logically without any emotion. In this most recent attack there were six bombs and last year there were two (the third was in Songkhla). It is almost three years since the problems flared up again so let's say, on average, there have been three explosions a year.

The motorcycle bombs yesterday had an effective radius of 20m so a quick Πr² tells me that the danger area was about 1,256m² for each one, or 3769m² for three.

Hat Yai is a pretty big place so what are the chances of you being in any one of three 1,256m² danger areas at exactly the time the bomb goes off? If you walk past 30 seconds before or after it won't affect you; you have to be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. I don't know how to work this out statistically but the odds are pretty long.

However, this is not how people think and they get carried away by emotion. People worry about terrorist bombs but not about road accidents, which are far more likely to injure you in Thailand than anything else.

People don't worry about diseases which kill millions of people each year, such as malaria, but they cancel travel plans because of bird flu which kills a handful of people each year.

The effects have been immediate. Later in the day I went to Carrefour which is normally packed solid at weekends, as are the other big supermarkets. The Thais like to hang out at these places, not least because they are air-conditioned. It was pretty deserted.

On this occasion, two big shopping centres were targeted, as was Carrefour last year. They are primary targets and just like last year after the Carrefour blast, the locals stop going because they are afraid. After the blast last year I was told to avoid supermarkets and already people have been giving me the same advice.

Not that I will be heeding it. I worked in London during the IRA terrorist campaign and my attitude is that terrorists will not alter the way I live my life.