The resurgence of violence in Thailand’s southern border provinces, including Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, and four districts in neighbouring Songkla, presents distinct political and socio-cultural contexts. Nonetheless, this decade-long phenomenon shares one similarity with political conflicts in other parts of the world: hostility and vigorous discursive contention among protagonists with unequal resources. It is in this contentious and complex setting that news practitioners operate, along with other protagonists in the conflict. Thus, similar to the analyses of other players’ actions and movements, the performance of Thai journalists and journalism has also been constantly evaluated.
Notwithstanding existing findings on Thai journalism’s shortcomings in response to the phenomenon, this book attempts to argue and demonstrate that journalists do not always act as passive players who simply report, or “mediate,” the southern conflict. There appear to be pivotal moments when the news media “mediatize”1 the on-going violence, which sometimes results in productive consequences or adverse repercussions. At the same time, as the violence progresses, journalists demonstrate professional reflexivity2 – a development that sometimes signals their aims to carry out constructive roles with respect to political conflict and violence.
This introductory chapter is divided into four parts. The first discusses the disparate interpretations of the conflict to provide the political and socio-cultural setting, as well as the underlying outlooks, wherein Thai journalists operate. The second and third parts look at key theoretical approaches used in this study, namely, the sociology of journalism and the relations between news media and conflict. The last part lays out the outline of this book, which presents findings and discussion concerning news media content and journalists’ performance in the southern conflict.
A contested sphere: contending discourses of the southern conflict
To understand the re-emergence of violence in Thailand’s southern border provinces, it is crucial to be sensitised to discussions on the long history of political struggles and movements in the region that involved Malay nationalism and its distinctive Islamic nuance (Thanet 2007; Wattana 2007; Funston 2008; McCargo 2008, 2012). The region is home to the predominantly Muslim and Malay-ethnic population (Malay Muslim),3 which has been cast as the minority in the Buddhist-dominated kingdom. The region itself has been recognised as one of the country’s significant battlefields of political struggle, from the royal dispute over sovereignty during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries,4 to the Malay separatist- and Communist-driven armed conflicts in the mid-twentieth century. This means that the re-emerged violence does come from a cultural vacuum; it reflects the conflicting views that have long been entrenched in the Malay Muslim and remaining Thai communities.
The histories of the Patani5 empire were eclipsed when the central Thai administration enforced a number of national assimilation (or “Thai-ification”) policies (Kajadpai 1983; Che Man 2005, pp. 88–89; Connors 2007, p. 145) to ensure the standardised practices and customs of what it claimed to be “Thai-ness” when the territory became subsumed under the Thai kingdom. The implementation of “cultural regulation” as part of the civilised nation-building scheme was ever more rigorous in the era of nationalist and military-groomed Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkram, from 1938 to 1944. The government intervention into many Islamic Malay traditions marked a pivotal point in the relations between the central administration and the southerners. In particular, the state’s interference in the practice of adat melayu (Malay customary law) and the registration of pondok (community-based Islamic religious school) (Thanet 2007, p. 33, 57; McCargo 2008, pp. 39–41) resulted in the conflict that descended from the elite locals to the middle class and grassroots communities in both Thai and Patani society (Thanet 2007, p. 33, 57).
Lacking an official and formal forum to voice their dissatisfaction, while being under-represented in centralised politics and administration systems,6 the locals attempted to challenge the central power via unconventional means. Nevertheless, the accounts of political struggles in the deep South from Thai and local perspectives were inconsistent. The Thai officials’ version implied that the arrest of and the treason charge against prominent religious leader Haji Sulong Abdulkader7 and the “Dusun Nyor Rebellion”8 were the triggering points for separatist movements in modern politics. On the contrary, locals, and later academics, argued that the Duson Nyor incident in 1948 was the villagers’ attempt to guard themselves against the Chinese Communist Party of Malaya and was unrelated to separatism movement (Chaiwat 2007).
During the 1960s and 1970s, separatist movements sprang into action, and violent incidents were prevalent. A number of armed insurgent groups were formed, including the three most prominent: the National Front for the Liberation of Patani (Barisan Nasional Pembebasan Patani – BNPP), the National Revolutionary Front (Barisan Revolusi Nasional – BRN), and the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO) (Funston 2008, p. 9). Founders and members came from varied backgrounds and deployed different approaches,9 but they all pursued the same goal: independence for the Patani state. However, in the 1980s, the Prem Tinsulanond government initiated a set of policies, similar to ones used to suppress Communist militant activities in late 1970s, to minimise insurgent movements and enable Malay Muslims, particularly those in the top echelon of the community, to enter politics (McCargo 2008, p. 2). Analysts saw the situation had taken on a positive turn, as violence subsided afterward. For the following two decades, the region remained relatively undisturbed, as former separatists were given amnesties and underwent rehabilitation programmes. Meanwhile, two state agencies, the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (SBPAC), and the Civil-Police-Military joint command unit 43 (CPM 43), were set up in the region to gather intelligence and maintain security, while slowly working towards installing a fair and efficient administrative system and establish public trust in the hopes of bridging the wide and deep rift between the locals and the authority (Funston 2008, pp. 15–18).
The violence abated during the 1980s and 1990s before resurfacing in the twenty-first century during the first term of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who took office in February 2001. The patterns of the re-emerged unrest have differed markedly from those of previous uprisings (Funston 2008; Liow and Pathan 2010). From December 2001 to 2003, the region saw sporadic attacks on police posts and school torching (McCargo 2008, p. xxiii). The event that marked the beginning of the new round of political violence was the large-scale weapons heist at a military armoury depot in Narathiwat on January 4, 2004. Thereafter, attacks and killings have become more frequent, and with discernible patterns. Some studies and investigative reports concluded that the administration’s incompetence in intelligence-gathering and its failure to foster a good relationship with the southern inhabitants and local religious leaders facilitated the growth of anti-state sentiment and insurgent movements (King-oua 2006; Deep South Bookazine 2007a; Deep South Bookazine 2008). The Thaksin government’s disbandment of the southern-based SBPAC and CPM 43 during his first term was believed to have contributed to the deficiency in southern governance. Nonetheless, Mark Askew argues that during the 1990s, both entities gradually lost their grip in regional intelligence gathering. With this argument, he indicates that the abolishment of both agencies did not strike the final blow to the region’s relatively violence-free decades, because the conflict had been brewing in the region long before 2004, even under the two agencies’ purview. The violence, however, was accelerated by the Thaksin administration’s iron-fist policies, since the insurgency resurfaced during this time (Askew 2007, pp. 38–53).
Disparate stakeholders, including academics, have different readings of the current phenomenon and its causes, and, consequently, offer diverse solutions to the problem. Here, three discourses10 concerning the southern conflict – crime and conspiracy, minority’s grievance, and Malay nationalism and Islamism – are highlighted due to their prevalence in media reports, academic literature, and public debates. These discourses will be later used to analyse news content and journalists’ understandings of the conflict.
Crime and conspiracy
The notion of various influential cliques competing with one another to maintain their interests in the southern border region is not entirely new, given the long history of power struggles and periodic violence prior to 2004. Thus, when the mass weapon heist occurred in Narathiwat in January 2004, then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra called the incident an act of “banditry and lawlessness” (McCargo 2008, p. 6). Authorities also came up with a convoluted version of conspiracies, where local vested interest groups – organised crime syndicates involved in illegal drug, cross-border trades, and human trafficking, as well as state officials and influential local politicians – teamed up to stir up unrest in the region to gain and protect their interests. The belief that the web of local high-profile public figures were behind the insurgency led to surveillance of these people and treason charges against veteran politicians and local elites in the early years of resurgent violence (see Appendix B). Such a perspective resulted in the enforcement of a hard-line approach that relied heavily on crime control, security measures, and the state’s long-time reluctance to hold open dialogues with insurgent groups. The following interview excerpt of a regional army commander best reflects this discourse.
Lieutenant General Udomchai Thammasarorat, commander of the Region 4 Army, said the current unrest situation is caused, up to 80%, by “additional threats,” which are underground vested interest groups, drugs lords, illegal dealers of fuel and other products. [The incidents caused by] actual separatist movement was only 20%.
The illegal interest groups hired armed forces from the “jihadist” (which means to enter warfare and willing to sacrifice for religious belief) separatist groups to instigate various types of violence, especially bombing attacks, to cause concerns among officers or lure them into pouring forces into any particular spot, which will then pave way for other routes or areas to be used in trafficking illicit drugs and illegal products.
“We have obtained evidence of money transfer from illegal traders to accounts of members of separatist networks. When I have received this information, I ordered to arrest them all. Therefore, there are frequent bombings to retaliate [the army’s action] recently,” the Region 4 Army chief indicated.
[…]
Lt.Gen. Udomchai pointed out that [separatist] perpetrators, accounted for 20% [of the overall perpetrators], were not innate criminals, but were instilled with wrong historical and religious beliefs, prompting them to take up weapon and fight the state. Therefore, he proposed “amnesty” to be granted to this group of people. They should then be brought into rehabilitation training to change their attitude. At the same time, every group of people who have been affected by the unrest is to be treated, and the military should oversee the entire process.11
Authorities also claim that poverty, caused by unemployment and drug addiction, particularly among the youth, also contributed to violence. As a result, apart from offering perpetrators amnesty and rehabilitation as the incentive to end violence, the Thaksin administration and its successors have proposed economic development schemes in the region as a way to eradicate poverty and restore peace.12
Although the unfavourable ramifications of the government’s iron-fist approaches, as described in the previous section, cast doubts on the problem diagnosis, a study by Marc Askew (2007) asserts that the explanation of the conspiring networks of illegal business operators and influential figures may still be valid, given that the perpetrators of violence, and their modus operandi, have been kept clandestine and obscure. The schemes to generate unrest, Askew argues, might have been devised in the southern border region by groups who share similar interests, from underground crime syndicates to local politicians and state officials. Therefore, there is a possibility that “the competing, fissured, and predatory agencies of the Thai state ...
