BANGKOK — In a move that could bring new momentum to efforts to end one of the region’s longest-running clashes, Thailand’s military regime has agreed to give legal immunity to a group of Islamist rebels and allow them to travel for peace talks to end an insurgency in the south that has killed 6,000 people on all sides during the past 12 years.
The immunity and travel protection for the rebels provide a rare ray of hope that the talks can grapple with more serious issues in the conflict, such as the denial of justice and local participation for Muslims in the economically depressed area, and deny global jihadi groups such as the Islamic State a new recruiting opportunity.
“The military will never defeat the guerrilla tactics of the insurgents,” a Bangkok Post editorial said Thursday. “The obvious stalemate cries for a political solution.”
The peace talks, however, do not allow discussion of the Muslim insurgents’ demands for autonomy within Buddhist-majority Thailand or for an independent nation ruled by Islamic law.
In a sign of the continuing tensions, two rubber tree plantation workers — a Muslim and a Buddhist — were gunned down in separate locations in Yala province this week. After the Buddhist worker was killed, “his body was set on fire and left charred,” local police Col. Praponwat Khantiwaranant told Agence France-Presse.
Similar killings over the past decade have been used to pressure farmers to flee so the rebels can take over the south’s rubber production.
Thailand’s 70,000 security forces patrolling the south include armed local villagers and civil servant volunteers, police, conscripted troops and career soldiers. They are battling an estimated 10,000 ethnic Malay-Thai insurgents, Maj. Gen. Nakrob Boonbuathong said.
Gen. Nakrob leads face-to-face peace negotiations from the military regime’s Internal Security Operations Command.
“We never discuss anything about sovereignty or autonomy” for the Muslim-majority southern provinces of Patani, Yala and Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, Gen. Nakrob said in a rare news conference describing the talks. But he said the government was not setting preconditions that could undermine the negotiations before they start.
“We never ask for an ultimatum that, ’You have to do a cease-fire first, then you can have the peace talks,’” he said.
“They asked for immunity for their people who sat down at the table for the talks, so that they are not to be arrested during the talks.”
Last year, several Islamist insurgent groups joined a bloc called Mara Patani, or Patani Consultative Council, to reconvene the talks.
Mara Patani includes hard-line representatives from the powerful National Revolutionary Front, or Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN).
Abdul Karim Khalib, a senior BRN member who is wanted on a Thai arrest warrant, attended peace talks with Thai officials only in 2013 in Malaysia, where he is suspected of hiding.
“The peace talks cannot be trusted not to repeat the deception the [Thai] colonizers carried out in the past, because the colonizers are known for manipulation and terrorism,” Mr. Abdul Karim said in a video last year.
Abu Hafez al-Hakim, representing Barisan Islam Pembebasan Patani insurgents, said in a separate one-hour interview last year with Prachatai TV that his group was demanding an independent Islamic state that will implement the Islamic law in the southern provinces.*
The public worries that Islamic laws will “cut your hands” off, he said in English, describing Shariah laws as “preventive in nature, rather than primitive.”
“Non-Muslims should not be worried,” Mr. al-Hakim said. “We are not separatists; we are freedom fighters. We want to liberate our land.”
Mara Patani also demands that Thailand release all imprisoned rebels and allow foreign governments and organizations to attend the peace talks. The government in Bangkok has rejected those demands.
The Thai army fears that internationalizing the dispute may result in demands for a U.N.-supervised referendum on the status of the southern provinces, which could prove a majority of Muslims want to break away from Thailand.
“We have not lost our land yet, but if we are complacent and let the U.N. intervene and hold a referendum, then we are finished,” Gen. Dapong Rattanasuwan, the deputy army chief, said in 2012.
The peace talks have been facilitated by Muslim-majority Malaysia, which borders Thailand’s southern war-torn provinces and is sometimes used by insurgents as an illegal escape route. The conflict has been a persistent source of tension between the countries.
Thailand’s military seized power in May 2014 by ousting the elected civilian government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Ms. Yingluck’s administration pushed the insurgents toward peace talks in 2013.
But thanks to the bloodless coup, the army is now better qualified to solve the insurgency because the takeover sidelined opportunistic politicians, Gen. Nakrob said.
Politicians “try to win the votes of the people so they can be elected as the local politician, or as the national politician,” he said. “Have you seen any members of parliament from the south try to solve the problem of the south? Almost none.
“But the army ourselves, we have no benefits from the south. We don’t get anything from it. We only die from the area because we send the troops, and then they protect the country and then they die.”
*The original version of this story misidentified the television network which conducted the interview. The story has been corrected.
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