Graham Lees | Bio | 27 Jun 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive
SINGAPORE — Evidence is growing that threads of homespun Islamicextremism in seven countries of Southeast Asia are weaving links amongeach other. Malay Muslim insurgentsfighting an increasingly violent conflict in southern Thailand, forexample, now appear to be receiving assistance from Islamists elsewherein Southeast Asia.
The thread appears to loosely wind through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Cambodia and even tightly controlled Burma.
Mention of terrorism in this region and the international community automatically thinks of the Bali bombings, which killed 202 vacationers in October 2002. But the violence is far worse in southern Thailand, where barely a day has gone by in the last year without several people shot, blown up or even beheaded. This violence is perpetrated in the name of a radicalism that ultimately seeks a separate Islamic state, or at least autonomy, forged from Thailand’s southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia. The majority there is ethnic Malay.
The Thai authorities estimate that about 2,300 people — mostly civilians but also, increasingly, conscripted soldiers — have died since the militant resurgence of a decades-old Muslim-Buddhist conflict begin in 2004.
Bangkok’s political and military leadership have long denied that Thailand’s Muslims were anything other than a local problem. But now a senior Thai military officer and adviser to the coup-installed government in Bangkok, General Boonsang Niempradit, has publicly alleged that radicals from Cambodia’s Muslim minority are being recruited to fight the Thai army in Thailand’s deep south.
Ironically, while petulantly denying that any Cambodians are involved in overseas violence, Phnom Penh Prime Minister Hun Sen accused Thailand of trying to internationalize a domestic problem. Nothing could be further from the Bangkok military’s collective mind, say observers.
Thailand’s army chief and leader of last September’s military coup, Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, said just last week that the Thai government needs to improve relations with the Organization of the Islamic Conference — notably Malaysia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which currently have key stewardship of that body — to keep it from becoming embroiled in the southern insurgency.
Sonthi, who is also head of Thailand’s Council for National Security, told a National Defense College meeting that Bangkok needs the OIC’s help in curbing the most radical links between southern Thailand’s religious schools and the Middle East. He said he believes the Malay Muslim militants want to internationalize the conflict.
Thailand’s interim prime minister pending elections, Surayud Chulanont, admitted only a few days ago that efforts to make contact and conduct open talks with the militants had so far failed.
Meanwhile, as Indonesia claimed some success this month with the arrest of two senior figures of the radical Islamic group Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed for the Bali bombings, the Singaporean authorities disclosed they have arrested five radical Muslim Singaporeans.
The city-state’s Home Affairs Department alleges that some of the five visited militants in Malaysia and the Philippines, where several armed Muslim groups are engaged in a long-running separatist campaign focused in the southern island of Mindanao.
Without giving details, Singapore claimed that one of the five arrested, Ishak Mohamed Noohu, had been in the Philippines while Mohamed Yassin went to a militants’ camp in Malaysia.
Both are alleged to have received some form of “training.”
Four of the five detained are allegedly members of Jemaah Islamiyah.
But the Singapore Home Affairs Department also claims that a new element of extremism has crept into the tiny country, something it calls “self radicalization.”
The Singapore Institute of International Affairs says Singapore has maintained a tough stance against radical Islamic influences creeping in from outside since the detention of Jemaah Islamiyah suspects in 2002. “Now it has to contend with internal radicalization by those who learn from Internet sources,” notes the institute in a report on regional radical trends.
The claim is that one of the arrested five, Abdul Basheer Abdul Kader, had been influenced by “extremist propaganda” on the Internet and planned to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Singapore institute describes this Internet link as “worrisome.”
Sources in Singapore speaking on condition of anonymity say it is probably unlikely that the five arrested men will be brought before a public court. Like Malaysia, the Singapore state has draconian indefinite detention without trial powers under its Internal Security Act. In fact, it appears that the suspects were arrested over four months ago, in February.
For some civil libertarians in Singapore, just as worrisome is the implication that the authorities may have been monitoring Internet use, and could use this incident to tighten even further government media controls.
The Singaporean allegations have led to another firm denial of a radical Islamic thread running through Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur said Mohamed Yassin could not have been trained by Islamic militants in Malaysia. Chief of police Musa Hassan told Malaysian media he had “never received any reports of a JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] or Al Qaeda movement in [Malaysia].”
That’s a claim many people find difficult to swallow.
Observers of the conflict in southern Thailand say that despite officially friendly relations between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, the Thais are well aware that arms and funds are crossing the border to supply the Thai Malays.
It’s a poorly kept secret that a chain of spicy soup restaurants operating across northern Malaysia called Tom Yum Gung, are owned by Thai Malay exiles who donate money for the separatist cause.
“There is no doubt about connections between radical Muslim groups across Southeast Asia,” said a Western embassy military analyst in the region who spoke to World Politics Review on condition of anonymity.
“Cambodian Muslim groups are passing into Thailand every day. Many of these are poor and go to do work not even the poorest Thai Muslims will do, but they still earn more than back home. Some of them move into the religious schools and some of them end up being radicalized.
“Cambodians have a reputation for mindless brutality and some people think they are responsible for the beheadings that occur in attacks in southern Thailand.”
Muslims of the Rohingya ethnic tribe in southwest Burma, near the border with Bangladesh, are also moving illegally into southern Thailand, said the analyst, although many are economic migrants and try to move on into Malaysia where they can earn better money.
“Radical Muslims from Cambodia and Burma tend to be uneducated rural people easily indoctrinated. They would become the foot soldiers in places like southern Thailand,” said the military analyst.
“The radicals in Singapore, although tiny in number, are educated and they are the kind of people who provide leadership.”
Although there is some evidence that some Filipino Muslim radicals have had contacts with the Middle East, even taking refuge there in the past, the OIC has previously used its influence to temper both sides in the Philippines conflict. At one point, it threatened to block oil supplies to the Philippines unless the Manila government negotiated with the Muslims — a fact which perhaps the Thai authorities should remember.
A report on the Thai conflict published earlier this year by the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, a research group under the auspices of the U.S. Defense Department, said the United States is constrained in the help it can offer the Thais, in part because of the coup nine months that deposed an elected government.
“The United States should encourage Bangkok to improve good governance in the south and pass on counterinsurgency lessons learned from its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq,” suggests the report’s author, Ian Storey.
“Most observers would agree that transnational terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah have played no operational role in the [Thai] conflict thus far,” said Storey, although he said the Indonesia-based group has tried.
Because of the essentially local nature of their conflicts, neither Thai nor Filipino Muslims seem to be interested in Jemaah Islamiyah’s idealistic goal of a pan-Southeast Asian Islamic state encompassing parts of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.
But as analysts monitoring current events point out, a breakaway Islamic mini-state carved out of southern Thailand would doubtless provide a convenient base for such ideas to develop, especially on the doorstep of Malaysia’s most fundamentalist region.
Graham Lees, WPR’s Asia contributing editor, has worked in several countries in East Asia over the last ten years covering regional business and political affairs.
