The idea to grant amnesty to militants in the far South is a positive gesture for national reconciliation and the restoration of peace in the troubled region - but only if the military-installed government is able to fine-tune the process.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont got the idea from Fourth Army Region Commander Viroj Buacharoon. The same concept was used successfully to weaken the Communist movement in the 1980s by granting fighters amnesty and welcoming them back home to help develop the nation.

Article 7 of the now abolished anti-Communist law, granted amnesty for members of the Communist movement who joined the insurgency in the jungle without committing any crimes.

The amnesty imposed with Prime Minister's Order 66/2523, during Prem Tinsulanonda's administration, aided political efforts to defeat the Communists.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, who was then a junior soldier, probably got a good impression from that triumph, as he saw a massive defection of Communist fighters - notably former student activists who joined the Communists after the massacre at Thammasat University in October 1976 - emerge from the jungle in the early 1980s.

The approach was regarded as a great success and was then applied to separatists in the deep South two years later, when Prem issued Prime Minister's Order 65/2525 to grant amnesty for Malay separatists. This proved a major setback for the Muslim separatist movements.

The Patani United Liberation Organisation, Barasi Revolusi National, Bersatu and other separatists were hit hard by the amnesty.

While authorities in Bangkok may be very eager to utilise such a strategy, they should also realise that this policy alone was unable to bring down their enemies twice - another key factor was that the international attitude to the Communists and separatists changed.

International support for the Communists and the separatists declined dramatically due to internal conflicts within their respective worlds.

However, the current situation in the restive South is totally different from Prem's time.

The militants have completely changed from those that Thai officials confronted previously. In the 1980s, the government had a clear picture of what Communists - and later, separatists - looked like. Their guerrilla wars might have had their own rules but it was not beyond the ability of a uniformed army to take them on.

They had ideologies, organisations and territories to be traced and tackled. The Communists and separatists, more or less, killed their enemies during fighting but as long as the government deemed the struggle a "war", rather than a "crime", it was not difficult to grant amnesty.

The new generation of southern militants is a different story and the government, both the current and the previous administration, has never treated them as an enemy in a war - but merely culprits who commit crimes against security forces, and sometimes simply against individual security officials.

The authorities these days still have little clear idea who their opponents are. A spate of violence erupted three years ago, but there has been no manifesto from the militants to say who they are and what they want.

From a legal point of view, those who surfaced to create violence in the restive region were people who clearly committed crimes. Killings, shooting, bombing and arson are all crimes under the Penal Code.

For those who have not yet committed a violent crime - an amnesty is unnecessary.

However, the boundary between crime and terrorism

in the context of the deep

South is blurred.

It remains unclear as to whether people who have not killed others, but are accused of masterminding violence in the predominantly Muslim region - such as Spae-ing Basoh, the former principal of Thammawithaya school in Yala - should be able to apply for amnesty.

The fugitive Spae-ing, with a Bt10 million bounty on his head, is wanted in connection with many violent crimes in the restive south, but his arrest warrant doesn't say he has killed anybody or planted any bombs himself.

If the authorities take a criminal view of him, the amnesty might not be applicable.

However, one group that should apply for Surayud's amnesty are the militants' supporters and sympathisers, who helped provide logistics, distributed anti-government leaflets, lay spiked nails along roads or staged demonstrations to demand the release of suspected militants.

However, if authorities are strict about criminal laws as they were previously, these people would be supporters of crime, and so an amnesty would not help them get off the hook.

The amnesty is not a bad idea, however, if the government takes a new perspective and does not act like the police in assessing people's involvement from a criminal point of view.

It is worth considering amnesty for people like Spae-ing also, if the authorities believe he is an influential person who can manipulate violence in the region - or at least get many young militants to listen to him.

To grant him amnesty would also boost the possibility of dialogue between the authorities and militant leaders, which could pave the way to end the conflict and create real national reconciliation.

Supalak Ganjanakhundee

The Nation