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POLITICS-THAILAND: Muslim Minority Shows Anger Through Ballots
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
NARATHIWAT, Apr 21 (IPS) - On the morning after his remarkable triumph at the elections for Thailand's upper house, Dr. Waemahadi Waedaoh had the smile of the vindicated. From being a wanted terror suspect and a prisoner for two years, he has become the new senator for this troubled region in the south.
His victory was all the more impressive given the votes cast in his
favour at Wednesday's senate elections by the Malay-Muslim community that makes up nearly 80 percent of the population in this province, which shares a border with Malaysia. Waemahadi received 97,514 ballots out of the 294,609 polled. The candidate who won the second senate seat, a Muslim woman, received only 30,096 votes.
''I want to represent the people to fight for justice,'' the 44-year-old general practitioner said at his first press interview as Narathiwat's new senator. ''I have direct experience with injustice. I want to improve the justice system.''
His arrival on the political scene comes with a touch of irony, thanks to the abrasive manner in which the government of then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has gone after the members of this country's Malay-Muslim minority suspected of having terrorist links. ‘'I was not interested in politics before. I was only interested in helping the community,'' said Waemahadi, a man of slender build, who sports a small goatee. ‘'But because
of my case, I wanted to enter politics.''
In June last year, the doctor, along with three other Muslims from the south, was acquitted for lack of evidence by the criminal court after spending two years in a Bangkok prison. They had been arrested by Thai authorities on charges of being involved in an alleged plan to bomb western embassies, including those of the United States and the Britain and popular tourist haunts in this South-east Asian country.
The 200-member senate serves to check the powers of the more powerful lower house, which has 500 seats, and as a result of a controversial parliamentary election in early April will be dominated completely by Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai ûTRT) party. Over 1,400 candidates contested for the seats to the upper house, which is also mandated to select members to serve on independent commissions to monitor corruption, graft, human rights violations and any violations of the country's constitution.
The place Waemahadi has secured in the senate, however, has broader
implications rooted given the violence that has gripped this predominantly Buddhist country's three southern provinces, home to the Malay-Muslim minority. Over 1,300 people have been killed since Jan. 4, 2004, when unknown assailants stormed a military camp, stole 380 M-16 rifles, and torched many schools.
The message delivered by the voters in the southern provinces of
Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat echoes a pattern that has already been
established during two previous polls, the parliamentary elections on Apr. 2 and the parliamentary polls in February last year. In both cases, the candidates for the governing TRT received a drubbing. It is a picture that contrasts sharply with the impressive victories scored by TRT candidates in these provinces at the parliamentary elections in January 2001.
And there is little mystery to community leaders, human rights activists and politicians in the area to explain what lies at the heart of this shift against the ruling TRT. They attribute it to a community's reaction to the harsh manner in which the Thaksin administration has tried to quell a simmering insurgency that shows little sign of abating.
‘'The people have voted against the Thai Rak Thai because of the
violence,'' Prasert Phongsuwansiri, a member of the opposition Democrat Party and one of the few Buddhist politicians in the south, told IPS. ‘'Thaksin has said they can solve the problem for the past two years but he has not done so. The people know he is not telling the truth.''
Others, like Ismail Lutfi Japakiya, rector of Yala Islamic College,
concede that insecurity in the Muslim community is widespread and a
cause for disenchantment. ‘'The fear among the people is still the same. It has not changed over the past two years,'' he said during a
discussion at his school, a private institution offering degrees in
Islamic law, among others.
The political undercurrent that flows across this region has been shaped by such measures as a harsh emergency decree that Bangkok enforced in July last year, giving the country's armed forced sweeping powers to arrest and hold in custody Muslim men suspected of being linked to the insurgency for long periods and guaranteeing them impunity from criminal or civil disciplinary actions in case of excesses.
Such an intimidating climate has seen villagers in the area being
arrested for arbitrary reasons and there have also been ''cases of
disappearances,'' a human rights activist told IPS. One non-
governmental organisation has on record 21 cases of disappearances, with the youngest among them being a 21-year-old Muslim boy from a village in Pattani.
At the same time, the suspected Malay-Muslim separatists involved in
this campaign of violence have indiscriminately targeted both Buddhists and Muslims, with the latter suffering more. The targets have included teachers, Buddhist priests, village headmen, civil servants, rubber tappers, soldiers and policemen. In 2005, there were some 1,703 incidents of violence, a marginal drop from the 1,843
incidents of violence in 2004, the year this spiral of attacks and
counter attacks began.
The mystery surrounding the suspected separatists - since no group has
openly claimed responsibility for waging a sessionist campaign against
Bangkok û stands in contrast to the separatist groups like the Pattani
United Liberation Organisation (PULO), which had been active in the late
1960s through the 1970s.
Government excesses, on the other hand, have included the death due to
suffocation of 78 Muslim boys and men in military custody in October
2004 following a street demonstration they had mounted in the village of
Tak Bai, in Narathiwat.
The current low-intensity conflict here is only the latest phase in a cycle of
violence that goes back decades. It is rooted in the sense of injustice
the Muslim minority feels for the manner in which successive Thai governments since
the 1950s have, through policies and by force, denied them the space
they clamour for to express their distinct cultural and religious identity. Unemployment and economic marginalisation has also fed this disenchantment.
The three southern provinces were part of the Malay-Muslim kingdom of
Pattani that was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.
Although the unrest here has not exploded to the scale of other ethnic
conflicts in Asia, such as in Sri Lanka, the fault lines that are
deepening and widening between the two communities due to the violence
are reasons for concern among well-respected citizens in this area.
''Better understanding is needed. You cannot impose solutions from the top, seeking a quick fix agenda,'' Anusart Suwanmongkol, who was also elected to the senate at Wednesday's poll and the only Thai-Buddhist among the five senators from the south, told IPS. ''The resentment felt by the Muslims will take a long time to resolve. But it is not impossible.'' (END/2006)
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