By Max Constant
BANGKOK
A new policy by Thai authorities to use released former Malay Muslim insurgent leaders in brokering peace talks in the country’s violence-plagued south has left observers skeptical.
Matthew Wheeler, a Thailand-based researcher for the think tank International Crisis Group, expressed doubts Monday about the limited bearing the old rebels have on active insurgent groups.
“It seems doubtful that these releases can help much,” he told Anadolu Agency.
“It is possible that they have still some prestige, because they were arrested rather than accepting a deal with the authorities, but they are clearly from a different era than the current resistance,” he added.
On Friday, the Thai junta freed Haji Sama-ae Thanam, a 63-year-old former leader of the armed wing of the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO) – the main Malay Muslim rebel group in the 1970s and 1980s – under a special early release program.
Sama-ae Thanam had been arrested in 1997 and handed a life sentence in 2011.
The Bangkok Post cited security sources in reporting Monday that another former PULO leader, Haji Daoh Thanam, will be released this week.
Both former rebel chiefs are expected to help the Thai state “smoothen the way for talks with southern insurgent groups,” the Post said.
The southern insurgency is rooted in a century-old ethno-cultural conflict between the Malay Muslim living in the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat and some districts of Songkhla, and the Thai central state where Buddhism is de facto considered the national religion.
Armed groups were formed in the 1960s after the then-military dictatorship tried to interfere in Islamic schools, but went quiet from the end of the 1980s.
In 2004, a rejuvenated armed movement -- composed of numerous local cells of fighters loosely grouped around the Barisan Revolusi Nasional or National Revolutionary Front -- re-emerged. Since then, 6,400 people have been killed and over 11,000 injured, making it one of the deadliest low-intensity conflicts on the planet.
A peace dialogue had begun under the elected government of former Prime Mnister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2013, but was suspended in December that year due to political tensions in Bangkok.
The coup against Yingluck’s government last year that brought the junta to power added more uncertainty to a possible peaceful solution to the conflict, despite the military expressing commitment to pursue talks.
An adviser to Thailand’s defense minister and deputy-prime minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, also expressed reservation over the efficacy of using older leaders for brokering talks.
Panitan Wattanayakorn told the Post that he was not sure whether the younger generation of insurgents who are currently most active would heed their predecessors.
Six rebel groups, including PULO and BRN, have recently set up a Consultative Council of Patani, under the name MARA Patani, in order to coordinate for eventual peace talks. However, according to an International Crisis Group report published earlier this month, “BRN hardliners remain uncommitted.”
Even if the release of the aging rebel leaders and their involvement as intermediaries does please PULO members – albeit the organization has not welcomed the news so far – the same may not be the case for the BRN. An unnamed source within MARA Patani told the Post that the separatist movement -- one of the most active on the ground -- considers the move “as just another political gimmick.”
According to analysts, the two main obstacles to restarting the talks are the persistence of a purely separatist view among hardcore members of the BRN and the refusal of the military to discuss a possible devolution of political power for the southern provinces with the rebels.
