Published on July 16, 2005

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s sweeping and absolute powers to handle the increasingly turbulent deep South could plunge the whole of Thailand into something much darker than the widespread blackout in Yala caused by simultaneous terrorist attacks Thursday night.

It’s threatening to be a far bigger blow to the nation’s already fragile peace and harmony than any bomb planted by the militants. It could result in a lot bigger death toll than the one brought about so far in the troubled region. And the yawning divide between the state and its Thai Muslim citizens could expand past the point of no return.

Such power is against the principles of human rights. It tramples upon the spirit of the 1997 “People’s Constitution”. And it represents the very things that have spawned our beloved motherland’s biggest modern-day crisis in the first place - ignorance, prejudice and political imprudence of the grandest scales.

Mistrust, which is at the core of this delicate problem, will only widen. Dissent will grow. Killings and revenge killings could become a vicious circle.

This is not to say that Islamic extremism and separatist ideology are not to blame. But why have things been deteriorating so fast in just over a year?

How come “a small group of bandits” has turned into something that required 60 million paper birds to be showered from the sky; warranted a crazy political idea of withholding state budgets for thousands of villages; and made virtually all Buddhists in the region lock themselves in their homes after sunset?

Are we dealing with a really shrewd seditious element that in a matter of months has gained the support and sympathy of hundreds of thousands, if not more, of Thai Muslims in the southernmost provinces? Or are we having a gullible administration that has easily fallen into one trap after another? Thursday night’s raids in Yala were undoubtedly a cause for the highest security alarm, but is the government responding in the right manner? The government may argue that the authorities have done everything they can, but how can the new measures to come under the prime minister’s special power - arresting people without charging them, and banning sales of newspapers for unwanted reports - solve the problem?

The government has been unable to get Thai Muslims in the lower South to trust the state, a failure that contributed to the deteriorating situation. It defies logic to see how the government believes that Thaksin’s absolute power - which will surely magnify the distrust - is a good solution. Any goodwill or semblance of it that the government has tried to send is evaporating and now the National Reconciliation Commission, led by former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, has been rendered irrelevant by the return of the hawkish approach.

That a government with virtually absolute control of the House of Representatives has decided to forgo the parliamentary process in enacting such a blatant and potentially abusive law to deal with such a potentially explosive and delicate situation just sums up the dismal state of Thailand. And it will be no surprise if, somewhere in the deep South, some “bandits” are celebrating.

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