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Malaysia is losing its place in Islamic affairs overseas

THE MALAYSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER, Dato' Syed Hamid Albar, has told Thailand not to interfere in Malaysia's internal affairs. Why he needed to do so escapes me, when he did not interfere when the Thai prime minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, told Pak Lah off at the United Nations last month (September) about the situation in southern Thailand, in Dato' Syed Hamid's presence, and both did not respond. Why? It is no use playing to the gallery because UMNO general assembly is around the corner. For Malaysia's record in southern Thailand, where Thai Malays are fighting for independence from Thailand for more than a century, is based on the belief that Britain in the early years of the 20th century should have insisted on the Thai Malay provinces be given to the Malay peninsula. Malaysia has interfered in south Thailand from the early days of independence. I spoke to the PULO representative in the prime minister's department more than 30 years ago. (PULO is the fighting arm of the Thai Malays in southern Thailand.) Malaysia has internationalised the conflict by bringing in the Muslim nations, and brought in the global war on terror that the United States launched. Mr Thaksin has added the pressure recently and so has PULO. Southern Thailand in the East is not safe for the Malaysian. Recently, southern Thai separatists killed a Thai monk, one of several in recent months, and a friend whose mother is from southern Thailand was trapped for months when he went to visit his relatives across the border. It is unsafe to visit southern Thailand by crossing the Golok River In Kelantan state. This is a stream most of the year, and one can wade across into southern Thailand. It has now become a conflict also between Buddhists and Muslims, a religious war in what has been a territorial dispute.

But tensions have risen since Malaysia declared itself a Muslim state and internationalised the problem in southern Thailand. It is not Thai Malays but Thai Muslims now. Malaysia has translated the constitutional definition of a Malay to a racial definition in a foreign country. But by this definition, Kuala Lumpur has lost control of southern Thailand. What makes it worse is that Malaysian agents are more interested in money than in getting the job done. Pak Lah is not interested, and vaccilates. Unlike Tun Mahathir, his predecessor who was decisive. "It was a joy to work with him," said one agent on another matter, "You briefed him, and he asked for options, and once the decision was made, you went and did it. He never forgot it either and asked you about it when he next saw you." In Pak Lah's regime, you did not know who was in charge, or if the officer who was designated to receive your report was on the take - by foreign countries mostly - that would put the agent at risk. Do we place agents in foreign countries? Of course we do. I have met these agents from countries as disparate as New Zealand and Burma. And so other countries, both over and under cover. The Thais have their agents here. So do the Singaporeans. and every nation which has in intrest in Malaysia. The British. The Americans. The Chinese. The Russians. The Singaporeans. The Indians. The Middle Eastern nations. The Indonesians. With the embassies, or with private concerns. The is the way that the nations find out what a particular nation is doing, recruiting local citizens, both civil servants and private individuals.

The problem in south Thailand is similar. We should make it our business to know what is happening in southern Thailand. What Thailand objects to is Malaysia's involvement in the affairs of southern Thailand. Malaysia expelled a Singapore ambassador (he was politely asked to go) when a Singapore intelligence operative accepted Malaysian sensitive documents from a serving miliary officer in a public place. But the document was not as secret as Singapore assumed. The document was freely available. I asked the Ministry of Defence at that time for it and got it. Anyone could have asked for it. But that is the way the governments work. Thailland accepts (indeed, allows) Malaysia to gather information in southern Thailand. But Malaysia has looked upon southern Thailand as its lost arm, and has done everything possible to incorporate the Thai Malay provinces into it. Many Kelantanese have relatives across the border. The foreign Malaysian foreign and defence minister, Tengku Rithaudeen, is from there. Indeed Thailand had protested him becoming assistant defence minister but the then prime minister, Tun Razak, brushed it off. His uncle, once a Malaysian MP, was once head of the southern Thais. But he kept good relations with the powers that be in Bangkok. He met the Thai prime minister, his classmate, when the latter paid an official visit to Malaysia about thirty years ago.

Malaysia should not be publicly throwing barbs at Thailand, as Dato' Syed Hamid did yesterday. Not when it has lost its primary role. It lost some, if not most, of that when Thailand signed a peace treaty with Malaysia in 1976 removing Malaysian forces in southern Thailand, mostly in the West, basically preventing Malaysian troops to hunt MCP units in southern Thailand when Malaysia did not stop Thai Malay insurgency in the East and did not prevent them from crossing the Golok River and give them safe haven. The peace treaty with the MCP focussed Thai attention on the Thai Malays. Malaysia should have expected Thailand to focus its actions in the south on the Thai Malays, but did not. Other nations have egged both Thailand and Malaysia into the present conflict. Thailand's insurgency in the south is now wider. The Thai Malay provinces have received Islamic support, and Bangkok has given the Malay insurgency in the south added impetus, by bring it as Thailand's contribution to the US bases war on terror. It does not matter that Mr Thaksin is out of line with the guardians of the kingdom. He is Prime Minister. Our relations with Thailand is bad, and made worse by the insurgency in the south. If Thailand should cut the Kra Canal, it would cut the southern Thai provinces from the rest of Thailand. It was not prepared to do that in the past, but it is now ready to do it. Singapore has offered to build a port at either end of the Isthmus, which means even Singapore, which depends on its port, has taken it as inevitable.

This should have put Malaysia in a good light in southern Thailand. But it does not. The southern Thai Malay leadership, now Islamic, does not trust the Malaysians. They see themselves as Kashmir in the conflict between India and Pakistan: an independent state. With petroleum on its land and in the Gulf of Thailand adjoining it, with help from the Islamic states, it slowly rejects Malaysia and the president of the Organisation of Malay States, Pak Lah. The Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan, rejected Pak Lah's entreaties to him not to appoint Anwar Ibrahim on the board of an Islamic fund. As Malaysian Prime Minister and as chairman of the OIC, he is not able to prevent a Malaysian Muslim to the fund which handles millions of US dollars. Now he has lost his clout with the souhern Thai Muslims! It is time for Malaysians (not Malays!) to put their heads together what ails this country. It has to cut losses, and chart a deliberate and definite course of action. It would not be gained by its foreign minister, for whatever reasons, going public on a tit-for-tat with Thailand. And it has lost southern Thailand.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com