Page 2 of 2 BOOK REVIEW Light on a dark conflict Tearing Apart the Land by Duncan McCargo
Reviewed by Jason Johnson
McCargo's overall account is authoritative, bolstered by his year-long stay in
the region during which he conducted over 270 interviews, and supplemented with
his typical sharp analysis of Thai politics. But while his core thesis argues
that many Malay Muslims may feel alienated from the local elite, it's not clear
how many of these ordinary people he actually interviewed. Among his Malay
Muslim sources, he draws heavily from politicians, religious experts and, to a
lesser extent, victims and perpetrators of the
violence - all subjects from whom he was likely to find strong nationalist
sentiment.
This does not mean that ordinary people in the region do not resent the Malay
Muslim elite and others excelling in Thailand's mainstream economy. But one
must keep in mind that local politicians' known aspiration for greater
political authority hinge on successfully mobilizing ethno-nationalist
sentiment and convincing Bangkok that this sentiment is widespread. By
successfully conveying that they have lost their legitimacy because ordinary
people view them as mere pawns of the Thai state, political entrepreneurs have
a strong case to request more political autonomy while redirecting blame away
from themselves.
Meanwhile, many religious teachers - the main disseminators of Malay Muslim
nationalist teachings - are said to frequently devalue and negatively sanction
those who speak Thai and excel in secular education. It would thus be in the
interests of these religious teachers to claim that ordinary people in the
violence-prone provinces are just as upset about these matters. It is possible
that led McCargo to over-represent their perspectives in his book.
Indeed, McCargo's heavy reliance on a Malay Muslim intellectual perspective is
evident in the book's introduction, when he suggests that the Malay Muslims are
very proud of their history, hailing from the ancient Kingdom of Patani, and
share an affinity with their neighbors in Malaysia (p 4). Although Malay Muslim
intellectuals and politicians invariably project similar portrayals, these
characterizations do not necessarily reflect the dispositions of many
less-educated Malay Muslims.
This writer has personally observed several educated Malay Muslims express
frustration about less-educated Malay Muslims' scant knowledge or interest in
the history of the Kingdom of Patani. Anthropologist Saroja Dorairjoo quotes
the same disappointment in a 2001 posting on the Patani United Liberation
Organization's (PULO) insurgent group's website. As one PULO member wrote:
"Those citizens of this land ... have forgotten their beginnings. They have no
true self. They have forgotten history. They admit themselves as Siamese ...
The uneducated villagers constantly say 'our Siamese country'."
Meanwhile, several other researchers have found that many less-educated Malay
Muslims who migrate to work in Malaysia's more lucrative service sector have
had negative experiences servicing middle-class ethnic Malay Malaysians,
thereby heightening their distinction from their supposed ethnic brethren
across the border and at the same time accentuating their sense of belonging to
Thailand.
This is not to altogether understate the significance and persistence of Malay
Muslim identity. As one of McCargo's informants said: "Scratch a Malay Muslim
and you find a separatist underneath." But while many Malay Muslims may possess
and conceal strong nationalist sentiments, many ordinary people may not always
share those same strong feelings.
Hence McCargo's argument that the current situation in southern Thailand
reflects a "crisis of legitimacy" for the Thai state could be turned on its
head. Instead, the situation might more accurately be a sign of a crisis of
legitimacy for Malay Muslim nationalists, which would help to explain why
slightly more than half of the casualties of the violence have been Malay
Muslims.
In the book's preface and conclusion, McCargo discredits terrorism experts and
others who habitually produce alarmist accounts of the role of Islam in
southern Thailand's violence. But his twin efforts to denounce this generally
poorly researched scholarship and mitigate concerns for "radical" Islam leads
to a strictly domestic interpretation. This in itself is not problematic, but
McCargo's caveats for not giving attention to the international dimension of
Islam are perhaps too dismissive in the light of contradictory evidence.
A previous generation of scholars, including Wan Kadir Che Man, the former
leader of an umbrella group for Malay Muslim separatist groups who received his
PhD from Australian National University in the late 1980s, detailed and
analyzed the significant role that religious experts' associational activities
in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia played in fomenting Malay Muslim
nationalist consciousness and garnering separatist groups' material support
from abroad from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Even now, many religious teachers active in the region, many of whom have
graduated from Islamic schools in the Middle East and South Asia, are widely
believed by Thai authorities and analysts to be the primary individuals
cultivating Malay Muslim nationalist sentiment. McCargo's effort to downplay
the significance of this international dynamic leads to his somewhat nostalgic
and introverted portrayal of Malay Muslim nationalists.
In this regard, while McCargo's book may be lauded for its unparalleled
analysis of the link between national-level politics and social divisions
within the Malay Muslim population, which he argues underlies the recent
revival of separatist activity, his analysis is also exemplary of the
problematic politics of representation guiding and limiting research on the
situation in southernmost Thailand.
In light of the highly charged public, policy and academic debates centering on
Islam and the United States' global "war on terror", analysts are often divided
into either one camp of area studies specialists and human-rights activists
portraying Malay Muslims as victims of the Thai state's heavy handed
integration and counter-insurgency policies, and another of media alarmists and
so-called terrorism experts who prioritize the real or imagined relationship
between separatists in southern Thailand and radical Islamic groups elsewhere
in the world.
Whether driven by a liberal sympathy for the Malay Muslims or by a security
focused concern for the spread of radical Islam, research on the Malay Muslim
separatist movement remains enmeshed in this ideological divide. And while
McCargo's book clearly falls on the side of the more sympathetic area studies
accounts, it shines valuable new light on one of the region's darkest and most
inscrutable conflicts.
Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in southern Thailand by
Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8014-7499-6. Price
US$21, 264 pages.
Jason Johnson is a researcher and PhD student in the political science
department at Northern Illinois University. He is currently based in Pattani
province and has worked as a consultant for The Asia Foundation's programs
focused on Thailand's Malay-Muslim dominated provinces. He may be reached at
jrj.johnson@gmail.com
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