Thailand, Myanmar can learn from Manila's move on its restive south

THE insurgents in southern Thailand who killed 15 people (including a police officer and several village defence volunteers) last week served a grisly, but timely, reminder that the region remains a restive and dangerous place.

Early this year, insurgents killed two Buddhist monks at a temple; the same day, bombs were set off against Thai soldiers. The conflict has its roots in the attempt to impose civil law in the Muslim-majority Thai provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat in the 1940s. It led to demands that the southern provinces be allowed to continue to be administered by Islamic law. These unmet demands gradually turned violent over the years. Things took a turn for the worse from 2004. About 7,000 people have been killed in rebel-related violence since then. Estimates of the number of insurgents vary from as few as 500 to as many as 15,000. Bangkok has deployed 60,000 troops to maintain order in the region and has made some peace overtures to the rebels, but to no avail.

The danger for the rest of South-east Asia is that this local conflict may again prove irresistable for Middle-Eastern jihadis. In Syria late last month, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State, killed himself and his two children when he was cornered by US forces converging on his hideout in north-west Syria. Turkish forces captured his wife, sister and brother-in-law. But everyone is agreed that IS and its credo are far from dead. Indeed, IS fighters may once again turn their eyes to this part of the world.

Arab Salafist groups have had great sympathy for marginalised Muslims in this part of the world. In turn, local insurgents have welcomed material and moral support from them. Indeed, Al Baghdadi's declaration of a caliphate on June 29, 2014 injected renewed energy into extremist Philippine networks in the south and among some Indonesians. Ceremonies pledging loyalty to Al-Baghdadi took place across both countries, ultimately leading to the formation of the Indonesian Ansharut Daulah in 2015 and IS' East Asia Province in the Philippines in 2017. IS supporters in Indonesia conducted attention-grabbing attacks in Jakarta in 2016 and Surabaya last year. But Jakarta has managed to quickly get on top of the situation with tough counter-insurgency measures.

A catastrophic failure of intelligence led to the Marawi siege in May 2017. It lasted five months, at the end of which the southern Philippines city lay in ruins. About 300,000 people were forced to move out of their homes into temporary shelters outside the city. Many foreign fighters, from Malaysia and Indonesia as well as Yemen and Chechnya, were among those who fought there. Fortunately since then, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has pushed for a peace settlement through the Bangsamoro Organic Law, which seeks to grant autonomy to Muslim-majority regions under a federal system. The Duterte administration and the Nur Misuari-led Moro National Liberation Front insurgents are reported to be working on ways to lay the foundations for a lasting peace.

Both the insurgents in southern Thailand as well the beleaguered Rohingya, now mostly in refugee camps in Bangladesh, have the sympathy of jihadis looking for a new front in their global campaign. The Thai and the Myanmar governments would do well to take a leaf from the settlement in Mindanao and find their own way to calm their own troubled regions and their angry minorities. Peace and tranquility in the rest of South-east Asia is at stake.