Thailand is supposedly one of the great economic and social success stories of 20th-century development. But as poor old East Timor (the region’s newest state) struggles to restore stability, the state of the Thai nation isn’t looking so great either.
After months of foot-dragging, officials have ordered a government forensics team to exhume 300 unmarked graves in Pattani province. Human-rights activists suspect that these unknown corpses might include suspected Muslim insurgents who were abducted and executed by government death squads. Nearly 1,300 people have died in the 30 months since violence re-erupted in Thailand’s impoverished deep south, home to some three million Muslims.
The area was not much more than a century ago an independent sultanate, Pattani, something that the Thai state has since tried to suppress. I didn’t adequately realise at the time, but when the Bangkok Post ran, about a decade ago, a feature on the archaeology of the area and the sultanate, it was displaying some political courage.
The Thai “national story” runs that very nearly everyone is “Thai” – some 95 per cent – a figure that makes no sense at all as you get to know the country, for not only are there the Muslims in the South, but a great many Khmer and Laos in Isaan (the northeast) and what are known as the “hilltribes” in the North.
In the “nationbuilding” of the past 150 years all of those realities have been suppressed. But I fear that has stored up future trouble. Were you to be a young journalist looking to set up a base as a stringer, to be in the right place at the right time, Thailand might not, sadly, be a bad choice.
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