My Perspective on The Thai Government Policy on Zoning in the Troubled Southern Region

It just hit me when I heard on the news report about the PM Thaksin Shinawatra stating out his desire to end all the disturbances and trouble in the southern region of Thailand. After a complete election rout of the TRT party down south, he came up with an idea that since the Military has already created Zone of Influence in which they can allocate military personal adequately to the danger. Our PM decided that the spending of public money on improving villages would also be held with a similar fashion. In other words, zones that are designated as green are areas that are safe, and normal budget allocation would be done. In red zone, it means high rebellious elements exist, in which he said that coupled with higher military presence, a huge cut in villages with bad track record are recommended. He claims that the Government has exhausted all means of peaceful solutions and now is resorting to the stick method in solving the violence as villages will strive to be safer - inorder to be able to ask for budget to support basic infrastructure.

When I heard that, I was completely aghasted to hear such rationale. During my younger years in HighSchool - I happen to have hold of the Anarchy's Handbook. If you haven't heard about it, the Anarchy's Handbook is a collection of things that are usually deemed dangerous by governments. Topics in the handbook include the Bomb Making, Weapon Making, Communist Manifesto, Ways to Cause Rebellion, How to Sow Distress in the General Population, Phone Phreaking, Lock Picking, and other deviant behaviors - which is like a Beginner's Guide to Terrorism and Revolution. It is known that schools in the US backlist any student with that handbook as dangerous and quite able to commit vile acts - which reflects much on its heavy nature. Though the book was a rarity before, after the internet revolution, multiple copies of this handbook can be downloaded from various sites, which makes it much more of a common knowledge - though somewhat outdated.

One of my favorite articles on the handbook were on how to make revolutions in your country. In the articles on revolution, it mentions the scenarios in which it would be ripe for a mass uprising of a large scale. An uprising from the masses can only happen if there are a huge number of dissendents to the regime. Once there is dissent, it is the duty of the revolutionaries to try to create even more dissent by engaging in all forms of misinformation and trying hard to provoke heavy-handed incidents with authority in power. When there is suffering, it is noted in the revolution handbook not to help in aiding the local population if the local authority have slow. The rationale behind it was to show examples of how the local authority have been neglecting the needs of the population - and try to sow up dissent to the point of breaking over. With the cases and incidents to rally around, it would be possible to instigate a uprising from the population of a certain size depending on how ideal the environment around the revolution were. In addition to the Anarchy's Handbook, some of my favorite literature based on revolutions were biographies, history books on popular uprising, in which I find the Ho Chi Minh's struggle to free Vietnam from French Colonial rule to be one of the most fascinating modern history.

In my time as a highschool student, I did a number of uprising against certain school policies with rather mixed results. Though I managed to make the school change certain elements, I have to admit that the highschool students were not quite the right people to sell ideology of a better future to considering their mixed agenda. A very good example would be the question of freedom of religion in school, which my uprising was easily put down to apathy in the student body. Most of the student body were bribed by the religious teachers of high grade in being a sheep and threaten anyone who join my movement with low grades. In other words, with the threat of retailation in grades, the revolution was doomed from the start, though as an individual I managed to gain certain concessions from the school.

Talking about the lessons I learn from my own revolutionary endeavors, I just can imagine myself if I'm a seperatist in Southern Thailand, I would be eyeing with glee with the next mishap that the Thai Goverment has done. The dissolvation of many security organizations in the south has allowed sleeper terrorist cells to be active after decades of inactivity. The Tak Bok incident is a rallying cry and incident in which trouble-makers can rally along - much like the MiddleEast using Palestine as a rallying cry. The new Zoning directive, will further alienate the population. Instead of having one or two terrorist in each village, any village caught in the Red Zone would be denied fundings and support making them even more succeptible to convert enmass to swell the dissendent's rank which would be highly symphatetic to the seperatist cause. I suppose none of this scenarios should be an ideal situation for Thailand at all.

As another committed and worried Thai citizen with no agendas in this conflict, I also join in the long line of academics who have been highly critical of the zoning idea, in asking the government to listen to the voice of reason. I understand that TRT is still smarting from losing big time in the Southern Consititencies, but using this stick as a retailiation to their snub of TRT is certainly a path that will lead to ominous events in the future. To what extend - that is something I don't feel I want to discuss at this moment... Its too depressing...