Tearing apart the land: Islam and legitimacy in Southern Thailand

DUNCAN McCARGO

Tearing apart the land: Islam and legitimacy in southern Thailand

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 264 pp.ISBN 978-0-8014-7499-6, pb US$24; 978-0-8014-4527-9, hb US$59.95

Reviewed by Tomas Larsson, University of Cambridge

Duncan McCargo has written a highly informative study of the enigmatic conflict in southern Thailand, which from 2004 to March 2009 has claimed more than 3,400 lives. The book, which is based on a year of field work in the region, aims to provide a ‘full elaboration of the Southern Thai conflict, rooting that conflict in Thailand’s persistent failure to establish legitimate participatory rule in the Malay-Muslim majority provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat’. While a ‘full’ elaboration may not be possible within the confines of any academic book, Tearing apart the land does provide what is clearly the most detailed study yet of the recent spate of violence in the south.

The book is organised into four main sections. Chapter 1 on ‘Islam’ addresses the question of the nature of the link between conflict and religion. According to McCargo, the conflict is not caused by religious grievances as these are commonly understood. However, Islam does play a role as a rhetorical resource and, more importantly, as an institutional field. In this chapter, McCargo links the upsurge in violence to increasingly fragmented and weak Islamic institutions. The growing insecurity of Islamic institutions is, in turn, related to increasing competition between rival Islamic schools of thought (with syncretic traditionalists pitted against Wahhabi-inspired modernists); the introduction of competitive elections for imams, mosque committees, and provincial-level Islamic councils; the transformation of traditional Islamic boarding schools (pondok) into government-subsidised private Islamic schools offering both Islamic and secular instruction; and the cooptation and manipulation of ulama by the Thai state. McCargo argues that the cumulative effect of these processes was that Malay-Muslim society ‘lost its moral center’ and the collective ability to identify legitimate religious authorities, thus leaving the field open for ‘extremists, separatists, jihadists, and advocates of violence’. According to McCargo, the latter groups tend to be associated with traditional forms of Islam with deep local roots, rather than the more recently introduced Wahhabi varieties of Islam.

Chapter 2 on ‘Politics’ focuses mainly on the rise and shortcomings of electoral politics in the region. Perhaps unexpectedly, the increase in violence coincides with the triumph of electoral politics (as enshrined in the 1997 constitution which was ripped up following the 2006 military coup) and the rise to prominent national positions of power by Malay-Muslim politicians such as Den Tohmeena and Wan Muhammad Nor Matha. In a parallel development at the local level, political decentralisation resulted in elected Muslim leaders taking charge of local government authorities. In short, political inclusion rather than exclusion of the Malay-Muslim minority was the order of the day leading up to the upsurge in violence. McCargo explains that the problem with this process of political assimilation was that it took place on ‘Thai’ terms and conditions, and in the process alienated important segments of the population in the southern provinces.

Chapter 3 on ‘Security’ provides a strong critique of the weak and poorly coordinated Thai state authorities, with a particular focus on the justice system and the security forces. While few insurgents have been found guilty of any crimes, McCargo argues that the criminal justice system has become characterised by ‘structural harassment’ of Malay Muslims. While the judicial system has been unable to provide an effective response to the violence, it is the Thai army and police which are the more important sources of local grievances. Sources of grievance range from excessive violence (as illustrated by the Kru-Ze and Tak Bai incidents) by Thai troops, to their sexual relations with Muslim women. McCargo argues that provocative actions by the Thai police provided the sparks for the upsurge in violence in 2004. He makes clear that intra-bureaucratic rivalries, infighting, and politicisation have served as serious obstacles to any coherent response to the southern challenge to the Thai state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. McCargo believes that the Thai state’s security policies add up to little more than ‘a lamentable catalogue of criminal blunders, negligence, incompetence, lack of coordination, and sheer misdirection’.

In Chapter 4 on ‘Militants’ we finally get closer to the enigmatic movement that has provided the background for the previous three chapters. McCargo characterises the militant movement as a ‘loose network rather than a structured hierarchy’. Behind the violence – much of which has targeted fellow Muslims – stand small cells of young men (known as yuwae) who are animated by historical myths about ancient Patani, insecurities about their identity as Malays living in a Thai state, Islamist rhetoric, and local grievances. Old-style separatist organisations such as the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) have played a limited role in the recent spate of violence, argues McCargo.

In the concluding chapter, McCargo suggests that his study’s two most significant findings may be negative. First, that the conflict is not about Islam. Second, that the conflict in southern Thailand is not part of a global jihad. McCargo characterises the militant movement as a ‘fiercely nationalist struggle’ which thrives ‘because the Thai state lacks sufficient legitimacy’.

This book is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the conflict in southern Thailand. There is, however, a methodological issue which it might have addressed in order to provide a more compelling explanation of the phenomenon under scrutiny. McCargo doesn’t avail himself of important opportunities that southern Thailand presents for comparative analysis.

The first such opportunity is found within Thailand itself. While insecurity of Islamic institutions and political reforms (as described in chapters 1 and 2) may be thought of as necessary conditions for the upsurge in violence, they are probably not sufficient. The population living in the neighbouring province of Satun, which is Thailand’s fourth Muslim-majority province, would have been subject to many of the same religious and political processes, but there violent conflict is conspicuous only by its absence. If we extend McCargo’s argument, this would suggest that the Thai state has succeeded in establishing a sufficient degree of legitimacy in one out of four Muslim-majority provinces that are conceived by the nationalist militants to have been part of the ancient Patani sultanate. How are we to understand this curious outcome?

The second opportunity for comparative analysis relates to similar movements in other parts of Southeast Asia. Given that McCargo believes this to be a nationalist movement with a separatist agenda, many readers would probably have found it extremely useful if he had sought to situate his work in relation to earlier studies of this type of political phenomena in Southeast Asia, and particularly, the important body of work that has been produced in recent years by scholars of the Philippines and Indonesia.* In what ways does the Thai case support or challenge the arguments made in this literature on the nature and causes of violent nationalist militancy?

If this book’s greatest strength is its empirical depth, its limited comparative ambition may perhaps be regarded as its main source of weakness.

* On the Philippines, see Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the formation of the Philippine nation-state, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000; Thomas M. McKenna, Muslim rulers and rebels: everyday politics and armed separatism in the southern Philippines, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. On Indonesia, see Edward Aspinall, ‘Violence and identity formation in Aceh under Indonesian rule’ in Anthony Reid (ed.), Verandah of violence: the background to the Aceh problem, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2006; Jacques Bertrand, Nationalism and ethnic conflict in Indonesia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Geoffrey Robinson, ‘Rawan is as rawan does: the origins of disorder in New Order Aceh’, Indonesia 66 (1998).