The Journal of Contemporary Asia has made my extended discussion of the edited collection (Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager eds) Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand (NIAS PRESS) freely available
Below is an excerpt that discusses the valuable contributions made by Jackson and Sarun to understanding the Thai monarchy
A God-King for Our Times or a Fetish Commodified?
The opening chapter of the book is Peter Jackson's important critique of the “virtual divinity” of the monarchy. The chapter fans out to question the predominantly Buddhist image of Thailand, following Pattana Kitiarsa's (2005) revisionist argument that understanding Thailand's religious culture requires seeing it as fundamentally hybrid and fluid, free of state control. It is this latter condition that provides some understanding to the re-deification of the monarchy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jackson argues that we can understand the near god-king status of Bhumibol only as a product of several related processes, including the “spectralisation” of the world in the neo-liberal era. Contrary to Weber's secularisation thesis, modernity has delivered a vibrant mysticism in the form of capitalist prosperity cults that aim to solicit the aid of the spirit world in aggrandising wealth. Spectralisation partly connotes that such spirits and ghosts come to have a real existence, they inhabit people's calculations, they are worshipped, solicited and they become manifest in symbols or are embodied in otherwise real people; time is no longer linear but people experience a world awash with ghosts of the past. The king who embodies the historical syncretism of Thai cultural practices would seem to be a spectral figure, and monarchy haunts the Thai imagination as an idea that transcends time. This cultural non-ideological texture of Thai mentalities recurs in forms that defy linear progression, the bricolage of traditions surrounding the monarchy being symptomatic. In that sense, monarchical politics are not always instrumental or consciously activated; they draw on a deep reservoir of Thai cultural being, if we take culture to mean a mélange of life practices subject to the tensions of power and freedom.
For Jackson the king has become spectralised as a divine figure. How this has come about is the subject matter of his chapter. As such, he furthers our understanding of the wide-eyed awe that some Thais have for the king. He shows how Buddhist discourses of dhammaraja that envisaged virtuous rule of the Buddhist monarch have gradually been supplanted, or perhaps cross-fertilised, with Brahmanic discourses of god-kings, with the latter becoming increasingly prevalent. The surprising element to Jackson's claim is how capitalist social forces – the money-seeking middle classes of shop owners and small workshop owners and, in part, the middle layers of the professional classes – have paved the way to this divination by imagining King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1905) as an ancestor spirit with special powers. The Chulalongkorn cult has been articulated to Bhumibol in some popular religious paraphernalia, and this emerging conflation of kings, a work still in hydra-headed progress, puts Bhumibol in a reflected aura. Not that he needs to bask in the glory of others, for the elements of god-king status have long been in place. Many Thais already assume the king to be a sammuttithep, which Jackson describes as a “virtual deity,” a god by convention, rather than an actual god. Sammutthithep, he explains, “is a key concept in Thailand's hybrid Buddhist-Brahmanic discourse in which royal power is legitimated by the king's ritual performance of godlikeness rather than from an ascription of literal divinity” (p. 38). For Jackson, the dual images of kingship are not simply parallel processes, for they bear some intimate relationship. He notes that in the Hindu pantheon of Gods, Buddha Gotama is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu. So rather than seeing contradictory processes of traditions of kingship that defy orderly progression, Jackson advances an understanding of differential permutations of religious lineages, adding up to a present in which the past is always there. The question now is whether the king has moved from this virtual realm of divinity to the real in popular belief? Indeed, it is not clear if this distinction has had much purchase even among some royal admirers (p. 39).
One way of testing this blurring of distinction is to ask what attributes of power attach to the monarchy. Jackson suggests that there are three notions of power operative in Thailand: amnaat (raw power to act on things); barami (charismatic power of the virtuous); and saksit, described by Jackson as the “magico-divine power possessed by holy objects” (p. 33). Bhumibol is conventionally held to have an enormous store of barami, in keeping with conceptions of Buddhist kingship, but in recent years saksit has also attached to his person, giving him an aura of divinity. It is this development, Jackson (p. 34) contends, that enables Bhumibol to simultaneously aggrandise more raw power, against, we might add, a fourth notion of “procedural democratic power” that has emerged in struggles for democratic constitutionalism.
This god-making process is partly driven from below. Jackson tells the fascinating story of King Mongkut's conjuring of the protective deity Phra Siam Thewathirat to watch over the new capital in the nineteenth century (pp. 29-42), while noting that god-making around Bhumibol is no longer the preserve of the court. It has become demotic, for much of the holy view of the current king has been manufactured not in the workhouses of state identity agencies, but from the waves of mania and insecurity among social classes negotiating a pluralised spirit world and a life of commerce to create “occult economies.” If an early corporate aristocracy was suckled by the monarchy from the 1960s in highly specialised relationships (Gray, 1986 8), in a more developed form of capitalism it is fitting that a more numerous middle class seek favours by offering worship, whatever their chosen god.
For Jackson, what is most significant is that the state agencies have not resisted this process. Instead they have inserted the monarchy into the process by using “technologies of enchantment.” On this, contributor Martin Platt (p. 101) recounts seeing a video, set to modern folk music, on the Skytrain in Bangkok: “An elderly woman is showing reverential respects (or wai-ing) in front of a picture of the King. When her granddaughter asks who it is in the picture, the grandmother replies, “thewada thi mi lom hai jai” (a living, breathing angel). Visitors to Thailand are now greeted with a video presentation while waiting in line at the passport desk, telling them that the king “sees possibilities that no one else sees.” Such depictions depart from the more prominent rational discourses surrounding Buddhist kingship popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when both military dictatorships and elected governments sought to end people's reliance on superstition and the spirit world. Of the political impact of the new divinity surrounding the monarchy, Jackson notes that those who have promoted rational images of kingship and constitutionalism – advocates of “royal liberalism” – have done very little to protest these developments, viewing as they do the monarch's apparent anti-materialism as a support against the corrupt money politics that troubles them (p. 51). In as much as the monarchy is now a cult, the cult is about a spirit/ghost-in-the-world which is beyond control. In all, Jackson's piece helps greatly in imagining a social and anthropological place of the monarchy beyond the instrumentalism that some commentators have sometimes largely attributed to it.
The pseudonymous Sarun Krittikarn (Chapter 3) offers a counter-point to spectralisation by suggesting an inter-subjective reading of the monarchy that strips away the aura produced by the divination processes explored by Jackson. For Sarun, the king has become part of what he calls “entertainment nationalism.” This is defined as “a kind of nationalism channelled through the fleeting and volatile desires and emotions of sensation gathering and pleasure seekers” (p. 63). Sarun explores how the inter-subjective gaze between king/royals and subjects instantiates an identity in subjects that is dependent and childlike. In effect, the claim is that observance of royal performance can lead to the internalisation of the propagated discourse of family-like relations between the parental royal family and the childish subject. Just as the process implores the royal family to continually perform itself in royal guise, so the king has become a logo “easily turned into a fetishized commodity” (p. 77). For some, the king's gaze is “warm, protective, forgiving, full of self-sacrificing love and care” (p. 69). Still, for others, the gaze can involve “total subjugation to superior power” (p. 69). Sarun is at her/his interpretative best describing the celebrations of the King's sixty-year reign in June 2006:
At that moment [when a photo was taken by a member of the royal family during the 2006 celebrations] the abstract sadomasochist relationship was materialised into a tangible object of the photograph, the individuality of the people in the Royal Plaza was temporarily dissolved into a mass uniform larger Self the self of being Thai, under the protective royal patronage (p. 70).
Here, as Sarun notes, the gazer is the king looking out at the masses. He is the subject who provides the foundation of the collective subject of the nation. It/they in turn look back, getting a shot of nationalism refracted through the monarch. They see themselves. This electrifying essay carries with it the burden of all cultural critiques influenced by the aesthetics of the Frankfurt School on modern mass culture – its assumption of a mass psychology and a thinly disguised distaste of mass processes. So the conclusions should be read as critique, not empirical reality.
Sarun's essay touches on themes explored at a 2008 photographic exhibition entitled Waiting for the King, by Manit Sriwanichpoom, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia. Taken while a massive crowd waited for Bhumibol to appear during the 2006 June celebrations, the pictures are long, thin and grey. They show a tired heat-stricken people, some brushed by a slight wind. Rusty street barriers exclude the people from the path of the imminent royal procession. Despite the presumably joyous occasion, worrisome and furtive looks make up the bulk of dispositions. Is this a corralled people waiting for a glimpse of divinity or a people waiting for their own brand of entertaining nationalism? The gaze then might be in the eye of the beholder. Manit set the exhibition on opposing walls so that when viewers walked through the space it was as if they themselves were in the procession, perhaps becoming Sarun's looked-at-king who is fashioned by a disturbing assembly of people and consumers. Coming to the end of these images, viewers gazed upon enlarged photographs of children tied and bound in Thai flags. Further still, viewers confronted a picture of a slit-throated chicken hanging above the flag and dripping blood. And finally viewers were confronted by the jarring image of a pig's heart so red it could still be pumping, sitting nonchalantly on the flag. The image symbolises, perhaps, the entirety of the processes that have led to an exclusionary and corrupt politics of all nationalisms, not just the Thai brand (Manit, 2008 20)
The tensions between the varied reading of the monarchy by Jackson and Sarun are evident. How can we align the occult magico-power of the divine kingship as spirit in the world with the mundane gaze of gossip and celebrity implied by entertainment nationalism so stridently described by Sarun? That both authors seem to be saying contradictory things and yet are able to offer convincing accounts reflects the monarchy's multiple registers and interactions with different, and frequently even opposed, audiences.
Showing posts with label Nationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nationalism. Show all posts
December 9, 2012
December 30, 2007
Thailand: Another Country
Another Country:
Reflections on the politics of culture and the Muslim South
Michael K. Connors
School of Social Sciences
La Trobe University
Paper Presented at the Thai Update, Australian National University, September, 2006 (with some updated material).
A country in Southeast Asia: armed soldiers occupy Buddhist temple compounds protected by sandbags and barbed wire to protect themselves from insurgent attacks. The same security forces use sniffer dogs to search the homes and schools of local Muslims, well knowing that this is deeply offensive. Militants, some say inspired by perverted notions of the Islamic faith, behead victims, seemingly in emulation of so-called “jihadists” elsewhere. There appears to be some mercy though: the beheading take place after death. Young men, suspected of insurgent activity are released from custody and ‘disappear’. The whispered talk of the town in the small tea-shops that populate the main strip is whether there will be ‘an attack tonight.’ Welcome to the Malay-speaking ‘border provinces’ of southern Thailand: Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, where since 2004 over two and a half thousand people have died in a murky conflict between Malay-Muslim insurgents, criminal networks, and security apparatuses of the Thai state. It feels, in many ways, like another country.
For many outsiders, including myself, the deep South of Thailand has largely been a peripheral concern; studying Thailand has meant studying Buddhist and nationalist Thailand. For the most part, my own work has been motivated by an interest in how nationalism and ideology bind fissiparous social formations. Integrative and almost religious in their combined power, national identity and nationalism (the weapon and the bullet) continue to confound expectations of a post-national age. Thailand seemed to be a good example of this. This interest has led me to pursuing an overly narrow interest in the ‘success’ of Thai nationalism and its various expressions. Events in the South of Thailand, where some form of struggle for national recognition is underway, has brought home just how misplaced such an assumption regarding Thai nation-building can be. More than that, it has introduced to much of the world, including keen observers of Thailand, and Thais themselves, a largely mis-fitting part of that nation-state (as it is currently constituted): the Muslim majority provinces of the deep south.
On my first visit to Pattani in October 2005 I pursued an interest I was then developing in Thailand’s Ministry of Culture. I visited its provincial office on the fourth floor of the sala jangwat, the large building that brings together in one provincial location most of the offices of the Thai state. How, I wondered, would a ministry so identified with Buddhism and devotion to the monarchy, work in the Muslim South? This is something I am still working on, but my basic finding is that middle ranking provincial officials - Buddhist and Muslim - can be quite inventive in their interpretation of central dictate, becoming agents of a more sensitive and nuanced cultural policy. This has meant that provincial offices of the Ministry of Culture are now involved in the process of promoting Malay culture, rituals and the preservation of sites that give the deep provinces their distinctive character. And to indicate the complexity of cultural politics in the South, note that as officials from the Ministry of Culture belatedly promote Malay culture (kite flying, dance forms, theatre), supported by cultural networks, they face hostility from Islamic fundamentalists who outwardly reject Malay identity and who see Malay culture as a contaminating influence that preceded the coming of Islam to the region (field notes, October 2005, January 2006).
Moreover, this seemingly pluralist promotion of Malay culture takes place under the rubric of Thai identity, leaving provincial officials of the Thai state in the deep South caught at the borders of “Thainess”; they end up rhetorically supporting a nation-state project that has little experiential reference in the locality in which they work. This is especially so when they are compatriots of an ethnic grouping (ethnically Malay-Muslims) whose diverse ways of life fails to resonate with the triadic ideology of nation (Thai), religion (Buddhism) and monarchy (Buddhist and patron of all religions). With these thoughts in mind – that the South is a cauldron of competing projects, interests, identities - I’d like to make some general points about events in the South framed around the question of nationalism.
First let me signal where I am coming from: I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a nationalism in the South, which is really to say that there is a state-less ‘nation’ (a language and ethnic community), that is in the process of re-mobilisation and re-generation and perhaps still defining its form. The fact of this ‘nation’ will outlive the current insurgency, and any resolution to the current situation will be long-standing only if it comes to terms with this politically-made reality. That requires a will to undertake a critical examination of Thai-centric nationalism (even in its progressive disguise of localism) and to come to terms with a significant second national body (and perhaps others) within the borders of the Thai state. Whether that recognition comes - if it comes at all - from an internal and deliberative process of reform or is foisted through an insurrectionary act can not be predicted.
It will be well known to those who are familiar with Thailand that it is a deeply nationalist country, and in part this nationalism is refracted through attachments to Buddhism and the monarchy. More recently there has been a progressive evolution of that nationalism into one that has come to valorise local difference as part of the great diversity that makes up the Thai. This has found expression in terms of cultural diversity – now the official policy of the Ministry of Culture (see discussion in Connors 2005, 532-535). This idea was orthodox by the 1990s and seemingly opened a space in which repressed cultures could be recognised and flourish. This shift was matched, or perhaps driven by, democratic openings in the 1980s that provided an avenue for Muslim elites to enter the political sphere. By the early 1990s it was commonly believed that militant separatist groups were in terminal decline. Signalling this sentiment, in part, was the Thaksin government’s dismantling, in 2002, of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (SPBAC), the chief body that was charged with administration of the region and which incorporated local forces (for an overview see McCargo 2007, 35-68).
The liberalisation of policy can be seen in a somewhat schematic way by comparing policy thinking on the South. A 1988 publication by the SBPAC saw insurgent activity as a threat to national security and, to quote, “…geo-political stability which are chiefly dependent on the integrity of Thailand’s national religion, traditions, customs, language and culture, and monarchy” (SBPAC 1988, 10). The booklet set out national policy in the South which included promotion of Thai language, “to use more Thai as the medium of communication” , “to enhance positive attitudes toward being their [sic] ‘Thainess’, not members of a minor group” ( SBPAC 1988, 11). The organization also noted the centrality of the monarchy to incorporation of the ethnic Malay (or by the preferred nomenclature, “Thai Muslims”) into the national body. It notes that the king “appoints a respected Islamic religious leader as Chularajamontri, or Supreme Counsellor for Islamic Affairs”. And of the king’s sojourns at his Southern Palace it is said that “the warmth, the supreme happiness, and the charismatic effects always fill up the hearts of all Thai Muslim populace…” (SPBAC 1988, 20). A decade later, reflecting the shift in national culture policy, then deputy permanent secretary of the Interior Ministry Phalakon Suwanrat and Director of SBPAC noted
In the past the attempt to solve the problems in the Southern border provinces using assimilation has proven to be completely wrong…Today we must change from thinking ‘Thai people must be completely the same’ or ‘Unity is all being the same’ to ‘Thai people do not have to be the same’ and ‘Unity can arise in diversity’ (SBPAC 1999, p. ii ).
In this spirit, The National Security Policy for the Southern Border Provinces (1999-2003) states as its vision for the border areas: “Every person…will live in happiness, based on their specific religious and cultural identity, especially Thai Muslims.” (Office of the National Security Council 1999, p. 4). There is evidently some concession to difference here, but it is difficult to locate acceptance of a second national body in official nationalist discourse– hence the endless debates about how to designate the Malay-Muslims in the South (See Jory, 2006). What is apparent, and more on this below, is that “Thainess” can not escape its origins as an ethno-ideology (Kasian 1996 ) and while subordinate identities can flourish under it, none can stand equal to it. This surely is a part of the puzzle that continues to confound those seeking an explanation to recent events in the South.
The violence that has escalated since 2003-2004 has historic precedents, erupting throughout the twentieth century. The Malay Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand (and parts of Songkla) were once home to the Malay sultanate of Patani. Full administrative incorporation into the Thai nation-state in the early years of the twentieth century has led to quite unremarkable economic, cultural and political grievances among Malay Muslims (for background see Gilquin, 2005). I say “unremarkable” because they inevitably emerge given a situation marked by a predatory and largely chauvinistic state structure, and, more latterly, a pragmatic and opportunistic Muslim political class that has worked with that structure. In this context, no amount of social engineering (read token reconciliation) will eliminate the ebb and flow of separatist or militant-religious inspired politics in the South unless it moves beyond the contradictory strategy of incorporation of opportunist elites and low-level cultural recognition. The 1980s and 1990s is instructive in this regard. During that time, the SBPAC was held to have succeeded in delivering a burgeoning peace in the region, by incorporating Malay-Muslim elements into administrative structures and thus providing for some form of local elite input into governance structures; this at a time when the Thai state was heavily centralized. The SBPAC also embodied a two-decades social compact in the South that recognised, integrated and legitimised various interests. Although it was claimed that separatism was quelled by the late 20th century, one can detect many ebbs and flows through the period. Most startlingly, a read through the Thai-language magazine Muslim News from the 1990s reveals that its editors were publishing articles that narrate the history of Siam’s encroachment and, ultimately, annexation of ‘Patani’. This nationalist historiography was published under the nose of the SBPAC, while at an ideological level - in the identity producing agencies of the state at the centre - it was ignored.
The sources for an enduring nationalism in the South are fertile, if currently in flux and perhaps inchoate. But one thing is certain: no can one underestimate the contribution made to nation-formation by the subjective and communal experience of what may be experienced as a form of colonialism. Yes, I am alluding here to the idea that in some ways the experience of the southern provinces is analogous to that of a colony. From this standpoint, nationalism is, in part, worked into shape by the corrosive chisel of humiliation that inheres in the colonial encounter. Take but one example: how some local Muslim civil servants feel about the majority of officials in the region who are largely non-Malay speaking Buddhist Thais from elsewhere. The Thai bureaucracy has always seen itself in a paternal relationship to the rural populations across the nation (although it now embraces the language of clients and modern management shibboleths); in the South this assumes a hyper-civilising posture, seeing Malay-Muslims as a group of people who need to be economically and culturally developed (which includes acquisition of Thai language and culture). That the Thai elite have not similarly experienced a process of colonization by a foreign-tongued conqueror perhaps make some of them incapable of empathy.
Newly arriving officials in the South are presented with Primers and Manuals outlining the cultural specificity of the region (see SPBAC 1999; Interior Ministry, 2002). It’s as if they have arrived at a colonial outpost readily armed with manual providing directives on how to treat the natives. One can imagine that the people-to-civil- servant encounter has affinities to those encounters that characterised colonial trusteeship, and its underbelly of abuse, in the early to mid twentieth century. It goes without saying that many Muslims are integrated into this system, and so stand in an ambivalent position.
The sketch above is undoubtedly generalised, but it does reflect things on the ground. One informant, a civil servant, from Yala reported that local Muslim officials who came into touch with central Thai bureaucrats were often subject to the superior airs of their Thai Buddhist colleagues who were armed with the language, education, culture and authority of the centre (field notes April 2006). The SPBAC put in place cultural and language orientation activities for the constantly rotated band of Thai speaking and Buddhist bureaucrats. The same informant explained to me that those local officials charged with the cultural and language orientation of the newly arrived officials often sensed indifference and sometimes contempt for their efforts. The incentive to learn the local language and culture was not great for redeployed bureaucrats: for many the next posting would, hopefully, be elsewhere.
It is from such humiliations that the handmaiden of nationalism often emerges: resentment and anger. Recent events have done much to contribute to a hardening of religious-nationalist sentiment. On April 28th 2004, the anniversary of a brutal crackdown on Muslim dissidents in 1948 that left hundreds dead, over one hundred Muslim men, including many teenagers, armed mostly with knives, apparently and so far, to my mind, inexplicably staged doomed attacks on checkpoints and police stations. In one case they retreated into the sacred Krue Se Mosque, where over 30 were killed. In total 107 were killed during the attacks and subsequent retreat. Some of the attackers were summarily executed. On October 25 in Narathiwat province security forces arrested over a thousand protestors, and transported them to an army camp. En route, 78 people died, some by suffocation. This is the stuff from which militant nationalism is strengthened, and from which revenge flows. Military-run re-education camps that suspected insurgents or sympathisers are forced to attend are unlikely to diminish the historical memory of 2004.
The question now being asked is ‘when will the violence stop’? In June 2006, after a year of deliberation, Thailand’s National Reconciliation Commission (2006) released its final report on the causes and proposed solutions to the violence in the southern border provinces of Thailand. Led by former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, the NRC used the problems in the South as a platform upon which to note the deterioration of democratic rule in Thailand under Thaksin Shinatwatra (2001-2006).
The NRC report notes that the problems that exist in the South also obtain in other regions - poverty, abuse of power, flawed judicial processes. What distinguishes the southern border provinces, and what has thus led to the present low intensity conflict is that these problems play out in a context marked by religious, language and cultural difference. These provide all the necessary ingredients for a further deterioration if grievances are not addressed.
And, as the NRC notes, these grievances are also mobilised by non-ideological forces who use the opportunity provided by the securitisation of the conflict to continue with criminal forms of behaviour such as cross-border trade and drug trafficking. Interestingly, the NRC reports that in close to half of the so-called red-zone villages (where insurgents are held to be operative) conflict over resources is an ongoing issue, thus suggesting that economic issues continue to fuel unrest. Provincial level- statistics showing relative and improved wellbeing in the South, need to be taken lightly and broken down to the district-level to locate pockets of desperation.
While accepting the existence of militant networks, the NRC sees the violence in the South as a consequence of militant, criminal and state-based actors interacting with resource grievances and structural factors such as forms of rule that do not respond to local needs.
Working out who is behind the violence is no easy task (see Askew 2007; Connors 2006, McCargo 2007). While various organizational names are presented to the media, such as BERSATU, BRN, RKK, PUSAKA, few accounts can be definitive, not least because the intelligence forces offer contradictory accounts. The NRC report notes the lack of consensus among state officials. For example, in the first half of 2005, the Thai police were unable to determine who was responsible for around 80% of the violent incidents on record. Furthermore, the military claimed that only half of the violent incidents in the first quarter of 2004 were attributable to militants.
The key recommendation of the NRC is that an Act of Reconciliation be passed which brings into being three new organisations: the Border Provinces Area Development Council; the Peaceful Strategic Administrative Centre for Southern Border Provinces; and a permanent fund to support reconciliation work.
The proposed Border Provinces Area Development Council, which is seen as a response to more radical calls for autonomy, sounds good on paper; but as an advisory body only, with no official power, it fails to address local calls for more substantive reform. In not dealing with genuine political re-organisation, tensions on the nature of political rule in the deep South will continue. The second body, the Strategic Administrative Centre, essentially recreates the SBPAC that the Thaksin government disbanded in 2002. It is not at all clear that re-establishment of that organisation in all but name will end the crisis. SBPAC's success was not simply related to its organisational efficiency. It also embodied a two-decades social compact in the South that, as noted above, recognised, integrated and legitimised various interests. The last five years have seen those interests embroiled in conflict, violence and reconfiguration. The balance of power that held in the SBPAC cannot now be resurrected by simple administrative decree, as evidenced by the post-coup government’s limited success in this regard.
The NRC report also stresses the importance of working towards increased cultural understanding in the region, including the possible expansion of Sharia law. What this means practically will depend on local Muslim interpretation. The NRC also recommended making Malay a ‘working language’ in the region. The significance of such a proposal cannot be underestimated, nor can the immediate rejection of the proposal by the Thaksin government and figures such as Privy Councillor Prem Tinsulalond. As reported in The Nation (20 June 2006), NRC member Ahmed Somboon Bualuang called on the state,
to be more opened-minded and not feel threatened by the Malay language… Ahmed said Malay was an integral part of the southern community and was used in their daily lives - and in their teaching of Islam. Ahmed said the fact that nearly 300 million people in Southeast Asia speak the Malay language in various dialects should prompt the state to look at the idea as an investment in human capital and in economic prospects.
I want to say more on language. Thai is a minority language in border provinces, barring Satun, with a dialect of the Malay language spoken by upwards of 60-70% of the population. The trend, according to the Bureau of National Statistics is towards Malay. For example, in 1990 in Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and Satun, 70.5, 77.9, 62.4, and 2.8% of people spoke Malay respectively. By 2000 the figures had drifted higher (Pattani, 76.6; Narathiwat 80.4; Yala 66.1; and Satun 9.9%). The four provinces also experienced a several percentage point rise in the proportion of the resident Muslim population during the same period (this before the current rumours of an exodus of Thai Buddhists from the region). While it is true that many of those who report Malay as their primary language will also speak some Thai, it might be plausible to argue that there is a growing language divide in terms of usage because of two structural features: the first is the rural bias of ethnic-Malay settlement and thus distance from Thai speaking centres, and the municipal bias of Thai Buddhist settlement. Secondly, there is the continuing presence of Malay speaking informal schools and religious centres, and the non-presence of many Muslim school aged youth at Thai speaking state schools, especially in the rural areas (exacerbated by the current situation). For educational reformers in the South, language is key. A Malay-Muslim educational advisor who is involved in developing a promising bilingual curriculum told me that when he went to primary school in the 1950s he was hit for speaking Malay (field notes January 2006). Thai was the language of instruction to an uncomprehending class. The language divide is easily observable. I have attended meetings in Pattani where state officials speak Thai to a Malay-speaking audience. People leave those meetings or sit indifferently, as they can’t comprehend what is being said (field notes October 2005).
Culture is lived through language. Devaluing the language spoken by the majority of the people in the southern border provinces in the name of promoting national integration, has bred resentment and antagonism, entrenching a sense of alienation towards the state among some Malay-Muslims in the South. The NRC language recommendation has the potential to provide a long-term solution to the anomic violence that may, in part, flow from social exclusion. If you can't speak in your own voice, how can you be a citizen? The introduction of a new language policy would be an expansion of citizenship rights in Thailand.
The response to language from the government and figures such as Prem points to a more general point: the inability to imagine that a ‘nation’ may warrant some form of autonomous rule. This has proved a stumbling block for the NRC too, as its report failed to raise the question of autonomy for the South. In so doing, the Bangkok liberal elite and their Muslim interlocutors were incapable of working on a political solution, thus reducing the likelihood of halting the downward spiral of fear and hopelessness that, in turn, breeds insecurity, mistrust and violence.
Indicative of just how prevalent is mistrust in the region, travelling with colleagues in April 2006, we met and interviewed a respected Muslim Senator from one of the three provinces. He told us that the government, pursuing repressive measures with abandon, had alienated even the most moderate elements in the South. Even those working with state agencies had been rounded up and taken in for questioning. Asked what solution he foresaw he resolutely called for United Nations intervention. The call makes sense from the perspective of human security. To be a Muslim and a Malay speaker involved in community life is enough to get a person on one of the various blacklists that circulate among security forces – and if worse comes to worse that person becomes one of the “disappeared”. The head of a private Islamic College in Pattani province explained to me that even though he sits on various government committees and has a good relationship with state officials, the military still interrogated him. “If they can’t trust people like me, who can they turn to?” he asked me (field notes October 2005). It is precisely because of this indiscriminate suspicion that anger and mistrust grows, and the presence of a neutral peace-keeping force grows more urgent.
Police and security forces regularly carry out surveillance. A ustad, a religious teacher, in a so-called ‘red zone’ of alleged insurgent activity, told how the police regularly visit his pondok, an Islamic boarding school, ‘just to introduce themselves’. He says he is neutral in the ongoing conflict and all he wants to do is provide his students with Islamic guidance. The school is surrounded by basic brick huts that the students have built themselves. He wants to give them skills that they can take to the outside world (field notes October 2005). For the moment, religious teachers and students are high on the list of suspected militants.
Hundreds of citizens from the South have been charged on various counts only to be released or acquitted because of lack of evidence. Some see the arrests as pure intimidation, bereft of legal purpose. A prime example is that of Waemahadee Waeda-oh who was jailed in 2003 while awaiting trail for JI membership and plotting to bomb Bangkok. In 2005 he was acquitted and then went on to win a seat in the now aborted Senate election of 2006. His victory was not an endorsement of JI politics. Waemahadee symbolized a defiant rejection, by a mobilised population, of repressive government measures, including an emergency decree which virtually suspends due legal process in the southern border provinces, and which the United Nations has judged to be in violation of human rights. (Matichon, 2006)
Fear of course works both ways. Muslims who work closely with the state also fear attacks from militants – and indeed many of those killed by militants are officials or associates of local government with a Muslim background (see Srisomphob 2007, 89-111). A high level Muslim civil servant who works for the government in Pattani province told me that he never travelled at night, fearful of being targeted by militants as a collaborator (field notes August 2006). Lots of people carry private guns for protection with good reason: the insurgents have proven to be callous and monstrous in their effort to carry out symbolic killings as a means of coercing non-cooperation with the state (see Human Rights Watch 2007).
There is also the under-reported story of mass graves. In November 2005 news surfaced of hundreds of unidentified corpses being found in unmarked graves in the Southern border provinces. News on this has been surprisingly sporadic. Conflicting reports in the Thai language press suggest that there are 200 unidentified bodies in Yala and over 300 in Pattani province (Prachathai 2005)
Kraisak Choonhaven, then care-taker Senator, and Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, speaking at a public rally in Bangkok in May 2006 against then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, claimed that the graves may be linked to ‘missing’ Muslims (Prachathai 2006). In Melbourne, in late July 2006, Mr Kraisak spoke to me about unofficial death squads targeting blacklisted alleged militants. He claims that ‘people who complain have also disappeared’. Mr Kraisak says that the corpses in the mass graves are of recent origin, and are evidence ‘that indiscriminate suppression has become acceptable’. In March, the Bangkok based Nation newspaper reported an official saying that the bodies may well be those of Cambodian immigrants who locals described as having a “tendency to get drunk and fight’, a claim that Mr Kraisak describes as ‘preposterous’.
Islamic Councils in the provinces have indicated that exhumation of the deceased for the purposes of autopsy would be acceptable, but Thai forensic scientists efforts to undertake an investigation has been frustrated by government and bureaucratic stone-walling over budget allocation and jurisdiction (Phujutkan 2006). (Updated Note August 5th, 2008 - I am informed by a human rights activist that a budget is in place for this, but the forensic team is not in a position to begin its work because of the insurgency - apparently the team visited Indonesia to look at mass exhumation in preparation for their own work).
The majority of the bodies have been deposited in the graves by a local burial foundation, with little regard for registration. Kraisak told me that in 2004 security forces had a ‘semi-open policy’ of notifying the relatives of those it killed. This led to hatred and hostility among those relatives who came to collect the bodies. Now, death squads are simply leaving the body to be collected by foundations: “They [the killers] would prefer the families to have doubts about where they [the missing relatives] have gone to…”. While some of the bodies may well be a legacy from the ruthless war on drugs of 2003, there is a widespread belief that some of the deceased are “the disappeared” (Prachathai June 4, 2006).
Which brings us back to the question of cultural politics and the status of this “other country”. When life is so cheap (both ways), why should any one imagine cultural policy will make any difference? Indeed, a cultural policy that envisages diversity as a source of unity – as proclaimed national policy - is at odds with the very real political mobilization of nationalist sentiment by security and political forces and the mobilization of nationalist and religious myths by insurgents.
In a country where the nationalist establishment (the monarchy, palace patronised foundations, state agencies etc.) are intent on inculcation of Thainess, and where the population would seem to have largely embraced many of its elements, especially the “monarchy” as the soul of Thainess, the Malay-Muslims may well constitute an identity dilemma for the normative Thai. Consider a hypothetical Thai person: having been taught what Thainess is, and having internalised such notions as part of a personal identity, how does such a person confront a Thai citizen who speaks a different language, worships Allah, and who does not fully participate in rituals associated with elevating the embodiment of Thainess – the King? If they are not Thai, are they Malay? Are they trouble makers? While means of cooperation and co-existence and, indeed shared life, have been found at the local level among mixed Buddhist Thai and Muslim communities (as enduring periods of peace testify), the centralised highly ideological state currently provides no such means for co-existence as equals at the national level. Indeed the mechanisms of the state, and the actions of insurgents, are driving a wedge between communities – the stuff of communal resentment and ultimately an endless cycle of violence. This takes shape in stories that are passed from person to person – for example, stories that Buddhist shopkeepers must employ Muslims to work in shop fronts otherwise no Muslim customers will enter; or stories of Thai civil servants humiliating Malay Muslim men by speaking down to them, so that Muslim women take on tasks involving contact with the state. Other stories point to the possibility, in a distorted way, of shared fate and identity – the story of a Buddhist vocational teacher who is repeatedly warned by several of her Muslim students to avoid certain areas ‘tonight or tomorrow night’ because an “incident” is planned (field notes October 2005, January 2006).
It is unclear what lies ahead. Should the current flow of violence ebb and the insurgency move to a latent phrase, either as a result of a transitory political or military solution, it will be tempting for many strategic actors to put aside the difficult task of recognizing that another nation of language and culture exists in the South. In so doing they will be preparing the ground for a future insurgency or instability of some kind. Better to make the recognition of another nation (in whatever political form) the starting point of any process of peace building. Yet, as Thailand-based scholar Patrick Jory (2006, 43) has observed “within official discourses of Thainess while there is a place for Muslims, it appears there is no place for Malays”. Indeed, if one returns to documents prepared by the SPBAC under the auspices of the Interior Ministry one finds an explicit prohibition of recognising the Malay-Muslims as Malay:
Civil Servants and officials of the state in the border provinces should avoid the following behaviour: the use of words that create dissatisfaction or which create division between people who hold different religions. For example, calling Muslims “Khaek” or using words that make Thai Muslims understand that they are Malay, such as saying “orang maleyu” (SBPAC, 1999, p. 48).
The question remains of whether official Thai nationalism and its custodians can entertain some kind of autonomy or national federation in the long term. That starts with the Malay question in its national sense.
Bibliography
Askew M. (2007) Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand's Deep South, East-West Center Washington; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Connors MK. (2005) “Ministering Culture” Critical Asian Studies, 37,4, 523-551.
Connors MK. (2006) “'War on Error and the Southern Fire: How Terrorism Experts Get it Wrong', Critical Asian Studies, 38, 1, 151-175.
Gilquin, M. (2005) The Muslims of Thailand, Silkworm: Chiang Mai.
Human Rights Watch (2007) No One Is Safe Insurgent Attacks on Civilians in Thailand’s Southern Border Provinces Available at: http://hrw.org/reports/2007/thailand0807/
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Bangkok: Interior Ministry.
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pp. 95 - 117
Prachathai (2005) “Mo Phonthip daen na phisut 300 sop rai yat yeu fai tai ” [Dr Phonthip makes progress on the 300 unidentified victims of the southern fire] 24 November, 2005.
Phutjakan (2006) Ko. Ko. Isalam [Islamic Committee] May 30.
Srisompob Jitpiromsri1 and Panyasak Sobhonvasu (2006) “Unpacking Thailand's southern conflict: The poverty of structural explanations”, Critical Asian Studies, 38, 1, pp. 95-117.
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Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (1988), Thai Muslims in Southern Border Provinces, Yala: SBPAC.
Reflections on the politics of culture and the Muslim South
Michael K. Connors
School of Social Sciences
La Trobe University
Paper Presented at the Thai Update, Australian National University, September, 2006 (with some updated material).
A country in Southeast Asia: armed soldiers occupy Buddhist temple compounds protected by sandbags and barbed wire to protect themselves from insurgent attacks. The same security forces use sniffer dogs to search the homes and schools of local Muslims, well knowing that this is deeply offensive. Militants, some say inspired by perverted notions of the Islamic faith, behead victims, seemingly in emulation of so-called “jihadists” elsewhere. There appears to be some mercy though: the beheading take place after death. Young men, suspected of insurgent activity are released from custody and ‘disappear’. The whispered talk of the town in the small tea-shops that populate the main strip is whether there will be ‘an attack tonight.’ Welcome to the Malay-speaking ‘border provinces’ of southern Thailand: Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, where since 2004 over two and a half thousand people have died in a murky conflict between Malay-Muslim insurgents, criminal networks, and security apparatuses of the Thai state. It feels, in many ways, like another country.
For many outsiders, including myself, the deep South of Thailand has largely been a peripheral concern; studying Thailand has meant studying Buddhist and nationalist Thailand. For the most part, my own work has been motivated by an interest in how nationalism and ideology bind fissiparous social formations. Integrative and almost religious in their combined power, national identity and nationalism (the weapon and the bullet) continue to confound expectations of a post-national age. Thailand seemed to be a good example of this. This interest has led me to pursuing an overly narrow interest in the ‘success’ of Thai nationalism and its various expressions. Events in the South of Thailand, where some form of struggle for national recognition is underway, has brought home just how misplaced such an assumption regarding Thai nation-building can be. More than that, it has introduced to much of the world, including keen observers of Thailand, and Thais themselves, a largely mis-fitting part of that nation-state (as it is currently constituted): the Muslim majority provinces of the deep south.
On my first visit to Pattani in October 2005 I pursued an interest I was then developing in Thailand’s Ministry of Culture. I visited its provincial office on the fourth floor of the sala jangwat, the large building that brings together in one provincial location most of the offices of the Thai state. How, I wondered, would a ministry so identified with Buddhism and devotion to the monarchy, work in the Muslim South? This is something I am still working on, but my basic finding is that middle ranking provincial officials - Buddhist and Muslim - can be quite inventive in their interpretation of central dictate, becoming agents of a more sensitive and nuanced cultural policy. This has meant that provincial offices of the Ministry of Culture are now involved in the process of promoting Malay culture, rituals and the preservation of sites that give the deep provinces their distinctive character. And to indicate the complexity of cultural politics in the South, note that as officials from the Ministry of Culture belatedly promote Malay culture (kite flying, dance forms, theatre), supported by cultural networks, they face hostility from Islamic fundamentalists who outwardly reject Malay identity and who see Malay culture as a contaminating influence that preceded the coming of Islam to the region (field notes, October 2005, January 2006).
Moreover, this seemingly pluralist promotion of Malay culture takes place under the rubric of Thai identity, leaving provincial officials of the Thai state in the deep South caught at the borders of “Thainess”; they end up rhetorically supporting a nation-state project that has little experiential reference in the locality in which they work. This is especially so when they are compatriots of an ethnic grouping (ethnically Malay-Muslims) whose diverse ways of life fails to resonate with the triadic ideology of nation (Thai), religion (Buddhism) and monarchy (Buddhist and patron of all religions). With these thoughts in mind – that the South is a cauldron of competing projects, interests, identities - I’d like to make some general points about events in the South framed around the question of nationalism.
First let me signal where I am coming from: I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a nationalism in the South, which is really to say that there is a state-less ‘nation’ (a language and ethnic community), that is in the process of re-mobilisation and re-generation and perhaps still defining its form. The fact of this ‘nation’ will outlive the current insurgency, and any resolution to the current situation will be long-standing only if it comes to terms with this politically-made reality. That requires a will to undertake a critical examination of Thai-centric nationalism (even in its progressive disguise of localism) and to come to terms with a significant second national body (and perhaps others) within the borders of the Thai state. Whether that recognition comes - if it comes at all - from an internal and deliberative process of reform or is foisted through an insurrectionary act can not be predicted.
It will be well known to those who are familiar with Thailand that it is a deeply nationalist country, and in part this nationalism is refracted through attachments to Buddhism and the monarchy. More recently there has been a progressive evolution of that nationalism into one that has come to valorise local difference as part of the great diversity that makes up the Thai. This has found expression in terms of cultural diversity – now the official policy of the Ministry of Culture (see discussion in Connors 2005, 532-535). This idea was orthodox by the 1990s and seemingly opened a space in which repressed cultures could be recognised and flourish. This shift was matched, or perhaps driven by, democratic openings in the 1980s that provided an avenue for Muslim elites to enter the political sphere. By the early 1990s it was commonly believed that militant separatist groups were in terminal decline. Signalling this sentiment, in part, was the Thaksin government’s dismantling, in 2002, of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (SPBAC), the chief body that was charged with administration of the region and which incorporated local forces (for an overview see McCargo 2007, 35-68).
The liberalisation of policy can be seen in a somewhat schematic way by comparing policy thinking on the South. A 1988 publication by the SBPAC saw insurgent activity as a threat to national security and, to quote, “…geo-political stability which are chiefly dependent on the integrity of Thailand’s national religion, traditions, customs, language and culture, and monarchy” (SBPAC 1988, 10). The booklet set out national policy in the South which included promotion of Thai language, “to use more Thai as the medium of communication” , “to enhance positive attitudes toward being their [sic] ‘Thainess’, not members of a minor group” ( SBPAC 1988, 11). The organization also noted the centrality of the monarchy to incorporation of the ethnic Malay (or by the preferred nomenclature, “Thai Muslims”) into the national body. It notes that the king “appoints a respected Islamic religious leader as Chularajamontri, or Supreme Counsellor for Islamic Affairs”. And of the king’s sojourns at his Southern Palace it is said that “the warmth, the supreme happiness, and the charismatic effects always fill up the hearts of all Thai Muslim populace…” (SPBAC 1988, 20). A decade later, reflecting the shift in national culture policy, then deputy permanent secretary of the Interior Ministry Phalakon Suwanrat and Director of SBPAC noted
In the past the attempt to solve the problems in the Southern border provinces using assimilation has proven to be completely wrong…Today we must change from thinking ‘Thai people must be completely the same’ or ‘Unity is all being the same’ to ‘Thai people do not have to be the same’ and ‘Unity can arise in diversity’ (SBPAC 1999, p. ii ).
In this spirit, The National Security Policy for the Southern Border Provinces (1999-2003) states as its vision for the border areas: “Every person…will live in happiness, based on their specific religious and cultural identity, especially Thai Muslims.” (Office of the National Security Council 1999, p. 4). There is evidently some concession to difference here, but it is difficult to locate acceptance of a second national body in official nationalist discourse– hence the endless debates about how to designate the Malay-Muslims in the South (See Jory, 2006). What is apparent, and more on this below, is that “Thainess” can not escape its origins as an ethno-ideology (Kasian 1996 ) and while subordinate identities can flourish under it, none can stand equal to it. This surely is a part of the puzzle that continues to confound those seeking an explanation to recent events in the South.
The violence that has escalated since 2003-2004 has historic precedents, erupting throughout the twentieth century. The Malay Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand (and parts of Songkla) were once home to the Malay sultanate of Patani. Full administrative incorporation into the Thai nation-state in the early years of the twentieth century has led to quite unremarkable economic, cultural and political grievances among Malay Muslims (for background see Gilquin, 2005). I say “unremarkable” because they inevitably emerge given a situation marked by a predatory and largely chauvinistic state structure, and, more latterly, a pragmatic and opportunistic Muslim political class that has worked with that structure. In this context, no amount of social engineering (read token reconciliation) will eliminate the ebb and flow of separatist or militant-religious inspired politics in the South unless it moves beyond the contradictory strategy of incorporation of opportunist elites and low-level cultural recognition. The 1980s and 1990s is instructive in this regard. During that time, the SBPAC was held to have succeeded in delivering a burgeoning peace in the region, by incorporating Malay-Muslim elements into administrative structures and thus providing for some form of local elite input into governance structures; this at a time when the Thai state was heavily centralized. The SBPAC also embodied a two-decades social compact in the South that recognised, integrated and legitimised various interests. Although it was claimed that separatism was quelled by the late 20th century, one can detect many ebbs and flows through the period. Most startlingly, a read through the Thai-language magazine Muslim News from the 1990s reveals that its editors were publishing articles that narrate the history of Siam’s encroachment and, ultimately, annexation of ‘Patani’. This nationalist historiography was published under the nose of the SBPAC, while at an ideological level - in the identity producing agencies of the state at the centre - it was ignored.
The sources for an enduring nationalism in the South are fertile, if currently in flux and perhaps inchoate. But one thing is certain: no can one underestimate the contribution made to nation-formation by the subjective and communal experience of what may be experienced as a form of colonialism. Yes, I am alluding here to the idea that in some ways the experience of the southern provinces is analogous to that of a colony. From this standpoint, nationalism is, in part, worked into shape by the corrosive chisel of humiliation that inheres in the colonial encounter. Take but one example: how some local Muslim civil servants feel about the majority of officials in the region who are largely non-Malay speaking Buddhist Thais from elsewhere. The Thai bureaucracy has always seen itself in a paternal relationship to the rural populations across the nation (although it now embraces the language of clients and modern management shibboleths); in the South this assumes a hyper-civilising posture, seeing Malay-Muslims as a group of people who need to be economically and culturally developed (which includes acquisition of Thai language and culture). That the Thai elite have not similarly experienced a process of colonization by a foreign-tongued conqueror perhaps make some of them incapable of empathy.
Newly arriving officials in the South are presented with Primers and Manuals outlining the cultural specificity of the region (see SPBAC 1999; Interior Ministry, 2002). It’s as if they have arrived at a colonial outpost readily armed with manual providing directives on how to treat the natives. One can imagine that the people-to-civil- servant encounter has affinities to those encounters that characterised colonial trusteeship, and its underbelly of abuse, in the early to mid twentieth century. It goes without saying that many Muslims are integrated into this system, and so stand in an ambivalent position.
The sketch above is undoubtedly generalised, but it does reflect things on the ground. One informant, a civil servant, from Yala reported that local Muslim officials who came into touch with central Thai bureaucrats were often subject to the superior airs of their Thai Buddhist colleagues who were armed with the language, education, culture and authority of the centre (field notes April 2006). The SPBAC put in place cultural and language orientation activities for the constantly rotated band of Thai speaking and Buddhist bureaucrats. The same informant explained to me that those local officials charged with the cultural and language orientation of the newly arrived officials often sensed indifference and sometimes contempt for their efforts. The incentive to learn the local language and culture was not great for redeployed bureaucrats: for many the next posting would, hopefully, be elsewhere.
It is from such humiliations that the handmaiden of nationalism often emerges: resentment and anger. Recent events have done much to contribute to a hardening of religious-nationalist sentiment. On April 28th 2004, the anniversary of a brutal crackdown on Muslim dissidents in 1948 that left hundreds dead, over one hundred Muslim men, including many teenagers, armed mostly with knives, apparently and so far, to my mind, inexplicably staged doomed attacks on checkpoints and police stations. In one case they retreated into the sacred Krue Se Mosque, where over 30 were killed. In total 107 were killed during the attacks and subsequent retreat. Some of the attackers were summarily executed. On October 25 in Narathiwat province security forces arrested over a thousand protestors, and transported them to an army camp. En route, 78 people died, some by suffocation. This is the stuff from which militant nationalism is strengthened, and from which revenge flows. Military-run re-education camps that suspected insurgents or sympathisers are forced to attend are unlikely to diminish the historical memory of 2004.
The question now being asked is ‘when will the violence stop’? In June 2006, after a year of deliberation, Thailand’s National Reconciliation Commission (2006) released its final report on the causes and proposed solutions to the violence in the southern border provinces of Thailand. Led by former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, the NRC used the problems in the South as a platform upon which to note the deterioration of democratic rule in Thailand under Thaksin Shinatwatra (2001-2006).
The NRC report notes that the problems that exist in the South also obtain in other regions - poverty, abuse of power, flawed judicial processes. What distinguishes the southern border provinces, and what has thus led to the present low intensity conflict is that these problems play out in a context marked by religious, language and cultural difference. These provide all the necessary ingredients for a further deterioration if grievances are not addressed.
And, as the NRC notes, these grievances are also mobilised by non-ideological forces who use the opportunity provided by the securitisation of the conflict to continue with criminal forms of behaviour such as cross-border trade and drug trafficking. Interestingly, the NRC reports that in close to half of the so-called red-zone villages (where insurgents are held to be operative) conflict over resources is an ongoing issue, thus suggesting that economic issues continue to fuel unrest. Provincial level- statistics showing relative and improved wellbeing in the South, need to be taken lightly and broken down to the district-level to locate pockets of desperation.
While accepting the existence of militant networks, the NRC sees the violence in the South as a consequence of militant, criminal and state-based actors interacting with resource grievances and structural factors such as forms of rule that do not respond to local needs.
Working out who is behind the violence is no easy task (see Askew 2007; Connors 2006, McCargo 2007). While various organizational names are presented to the media, such as BERSATU, BRN, RKK, PUSAKA, few accounts can be definitive, not least because the intelligence forces offer contradictory accounts. The NRC report notes the lack of consensus among state officials. For example, in the first half of 2005, the Thai police were unable to determine who was responsible for around 80% of the violent incidents on record. Furthermore, the military claimed that only half of the violent incidents in the first quarter of 2004 were attributable to militants.
The key recommendation of the NRC is that an Act of Reconciliation be passed which brings into being three new organisations: the Border Provinces Area Development Council; the Peaceful Strategic Administrative Centre for Southern Border Provinces; and a permanent fund to support reconciliation work.
The proposed Border Provinces Area Development Council, which is seen as a response to more radical calls for autonomy, sounds good on paper; but as an advisory body only, with no official power, it fails to address local calls for more substantive reform. In not dealing with genuine political re-organisation, tensions on the nature of political rule in the deep South will continue. The second body, the Strategic Administrative Centre, essentially recreates the SBPAC that the Thaksin government disbanded in 2002. It is not at all clear that re-establishment of that organisation in all but name will end the crisis. SBPAC's success was not simply related to its organisational efficiency. It also embodied a two-decades social compact in the South that, as noted above, recognised, integrated and legitimised various interests. The last five years have seen those interests embroiled in conflict, violence and reconfiguration. The balance of power that held in the SBPAC cannot now be resurrected by simple administrative decree, as evidenced by the post-coup government’s limited success in this regard.
The NRC report also stresses the importance of working towards increased cultural understanding in the region, including the possible expansion of Sharia law. What this means practically will depend on local Muslim interpretation. The NRC also recommended making Malay a ‘working language’ in the region. The significance of such a proposal cannot be underestimated, nor can the immediate rejection of the proposal by the Thaksin government and figures such as Privy Councillor Prem Tinsulalond. As reported in The Nation (20 June 2006), NRC member Ahmed Somboon Bualuang called on the state,
to be more opened-minded and not feel threatened by the Malay language… Ahmed said Malay was an integral part of the southern community and was used in their daily lives - and in their teaching of Islam. Ahmed said the fact that nearly 300 million people in Southeast Asia speak the Malay language in various dialects should prompt the state to look at the idea as an investment in human capital and in economic prospects.
I want to say more on language. Thai is a minority language in border provinces, barring Satun, with a dialect of the Malay language spoken by upwards of 60-70% of the population. The trend, according to the Bureau of National Statistics is towards Malay. For example, in 1990 in Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and Satun, 70.5, 77.9, 62.4, and 2.8% of people spoke Malay respectively. By 2000 the figures had drifted higher (Pattani, 76.6; Narathiwat 80.4; Yala 66.1; and Satun 9.9%). The four provinces also experienced a several percentage point rise in the proportion of the resident Muslim population during the same period (this before the current rumours of an exodus of Thai Buddhists from the region). While it is true that many of those who report Malay as their primary language will also speak some Thai, it might be plausible to argue that there is a growing language divide in terms of usage because of two structural features: the first is the rural bias of ethnic-Malay settlement and thus distance from Thai speaking centres, and the municipal bias of Thai Buddhist settlement. Secondly, there is the continuing presence of Malay speaking informal schools and religious centres, and the non-presence of many Muslim school aged youth at Thai speaking state schools, especially in the rural areas (exacerbated by the current situation). For educational reformers in the South, language is key. A Malay-Muslim educational advisor who is involved in developing a promising bilingual curriculum told me that when he went to primary school in the 1950s he was hit for speaking Malay (field notes January 2006). Thai was the language of instruction to an uncomprehending class. The language divide is easily observable. I have attended meetings in Pattani where state officials speak Thai to a Malay-speaking audience. People leave those meetings or sit indifferently, as they can’t comprehend what is being said (field notes October 2005).
Culture is lived through language. Devaluing the language spoken by the majority of the people in the southern border provinces in the name of promoting national integration, has bred resentment and antagonism, entrenching a sense of alienation towards the state among some Malay-Muslims in the South. The NRC language recommendation has the potential to provide a long-term solution to the anomic violence that may, in part, flow from social exclusion. If you can't speak in your own voice, how can you be a citizen? The introduction of a new language policy would be an expansion of citizenship rights in Thailand.
The response to language from the government and figures such as Prem points to a more general point: the inability to imagine that a ‘nation’ may warrant some form of autonomous rule. This has proved a stumbling block for the NRC too, as its report failed to raise the question of autonomy for the South. In so doing, the Bangkok liberal elite and their Muslim interlocutors were incapable of working on a political solution, thus reducing the likelihood of halting the downward spiral of fear and hopelessness that, in turn, breeds insecurity, mistrust and violence.
Indicative of just how prevalent is mistrust in the region, travelling with colleagues in April 2006, we met and interviewed a respected Muslim Senator from one of the three provinces. He told us that the government, pursuing repressive measures with abandon, had alienated even the most moderate elements in the South. Even those working with state agencies had been rounded up and taken in for questioning. Asked what solution he foresaw he resolutely called for United Nations intervention. The call makes sense from the perspective of human security. To be a Muslim and a Malay speaker involved in community life is enough to get a person on one of the various blacklists that circulate among security forces – and if worse comes to worse that person becomes one of the “disappeared”. The head of a private Islamic College in Pattani province explained to me that even though he sits on various government committees and has a good relationship with state officials, the military still interrogated him. “If they can’t trust people like me, who can they turn to?” he asked me (field notes October 2005). It is precisely because of this indiscriminate suspicion that anger and mistrust grows, and the presence of a neutral peace-keeping force grows more urgent.
Police and security forces regularly carry out surveillance. A ustad, a religious teacher, in a so-called ‘red zone’ of alleged insurgent activity, told how the police regularly visit his pondok, an Islamic boarding school, ‘just to introduce themselves’. He says he is neutral in the ongoing conflict and all he wants to do is provide his students with Islamic guidance. The school is surrounded by basic brick huts that the students have built themselves. He wants to give them skills that they can take to the outside world (field notes October 2005). For the moment, religious teachers and students are high on the list of suspected militants.
Hundreds of citizens from the South have been charged on various counts only to be released or acquitted because of lack of evidence. Some see the arrests as pure intimidation, bereft of legal purpose. A prime example is that of Waemahadee Waeda-oh who was jailed in 2003 while awaiting trail for JI membership and plotting to bomb Bangkok. In 2005 he was acquitted and then went on to win a seat in the now aborted Senate election of 2006. His victory was not an endorsement of JI politics. Waemahadee symbolized a defiant rejection, by a mobilised population, of repressive government measures, including an emergency decree which virtually suspends due legal process in the southern border provinces, and which the United Nations has judged to be in violation of human rights. (Matichon, 2006)
Fear of course works both ways. Muslims who work closely with the state also fear attacks from militants – and indeed many of those killed by militants are officials or associates of local government with a Muslim background (see Srisomphob 2007, 89-111). A high level Muslim civil servant who works for the government in Pattani province told me that he never travelled at night, fearful of being targeted by militants as a collaborator (field notes August 2006). Lots of people carry private guns for protection with good reason: the insurgents have proven to be callous and monstrous in their effort to carry out symbolic killings as a means of coercing non-cooperation with the state (see Human Rights Watch 2007).
There is also the under-reported story of mass graves. In November 2005 news surfaced of hundreds of unidentified corpses being found in unmarked graves in the Southern border provinces. News on this has been surprisingly sporadic. Conflicting reports in the Thai language press suggest that there are 200 unidentified bodies in Yala and over 300 in Pattani province (Prachathai 2005)
Kraisak Choonhaven, then care-taker Senator, and Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, speaking at a public rally in Bangkok in May 2006 against then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, claimed that the graves may be linked to ‘missing’ Muslims (Prachathai 2006). In Melbourne, in late July 2006, Mr Kraisak spoke to me about unofficial death squads targeting blacklisted alleged militants. He claims that ‘people who complain have also disappeared’. Mr Kraisak says that the corpses in the mass graves are of recent origin, and are evidence ‘that indiscriminate suppression has become acceptable’. In March, the Bangkok based Nation newspaper reported an official saying that the bodies may well be those of Cambodian immigrants who locals described as having a “tendency to get drunk and fight’, a claim that Mr Kraisak describes as ‘preposterous’.
Islamic Councils in the provinces have indicated that exhumation of the deceased for the purposes of autopsy would be acceptable, but Thai forensic scientists efforts to undertake an investigation has been frustrated by government and bureaucratic stone-walling over budget allocation and jurisdiction (Phujutkan 2006). (Updated Note August 5th, 2008 - I am informed by a human rights activist that a budget is in place for this, but the forensic team is not in a position to begin its work because of the insurgency - apparently the team visited Indonesia to look at mass exhumation in preparation for their own work).
The majority of the bodies have been deposited in the graves by a local burial foundation, with little regard for registration. Kraisak told me that in 2004 security forces had a ‘semi-open policy’ of notifying the relatives of those it killed. This led to hatred and hostility among those relatives who came to collect the bodies. Now, death squads are simply leaving the body to be collected by foundations: “They [the killers] would prefer the families to have doubts about where they [the missing relatives] have gone to…”. While some of the bodies may well be a legacy from the ruthless war on drugs of 2003, there is a widespread belief that some of the deceased are “the disappeared” (Prachathai June 4, 2006).
Which brings us back to the question of cultural politics and the status of this “other country”. When life is so cheap (both ways), why should any one imagine cultural policy will make any difference? Indeed, a cultural policy that envisages diversity as a source of unity – as proclaimed national policy - is at odds with the very real political mobilization of nationalist sentiment by security and political forces and the mobilization of nationalist and religious myths by insurgents.
In a country where the nationalist establishment (the monarchy, palace patronised foundations, state agencies etc.) are intent on inculcation of Thainess, and where the population would seem to have largely embraced many of its elements, especially the “monarchy” as the soul of Thainess, the Malay-Muslims may well constitute an identity dilemma for the normative Thai. Consider a hypothetical Thai person: having been taught what Thainess is, and having internalised such notions as part of a personal identity, how does such a person confront a Thai citizen who speaks a different language, worships Allah, and who does not fully participate in rituals associated with elevating the embodiment of Thainess – the King? If they are not Thai, are they Malay? Are they trouble makers? While means of cooperation and co-existence and, indeed shared life, have been found at the local level among mixed Buddhist Thai and Muslim communities (as enduring periods of peace testify), the centralised highly ideological state currently provides no such means for co-existence as equals at the national level. Indeed the mechanisms of the state, and the actions of insurgents, are driving a wedge between communities – the stuff of communal resentment and ultimately an endless cycle of violence. This takes shape in stories that are passed from person to person – for example, stories that Buddhist shopkeepers must employ Muslims to work in shop fronts otherwise no Muslim customers will enter; or stories of Thai civil servants humiliating Malay Muslim men by speaking down to them, so that Muslim women take on tasks involving contact with the state. Other stories point to the possibility, in a distorted way, of shared fate and identity – the story of a Buddhist vocational teacher who is repeatedly warned by several of her Muslim students to avoid certain areas ‘tonight or tomorrow night’ because an “incident” is planned (field notes October 2005, January 2006).
It is unclear what lies ahead. Should the current flow of violence ebb and the insurgency move to a latent phrase, either as a result of a transitory political or military solution, it will be tempting for many strategic actors to put aside the difficult task of recognizing that another nation of language and culture exists in the South. In so doing they will be preparing the ground for a future insurgency or instability of some kind. Better to make the recognition of another nation (in whatever political form) the starting point of any process of peace building. Yet, as Thailand-based scholar Patrick Jory (2006, 43) has observed “within official discourses of Thainess while there is a place for Muslims, it appears there is no place for Malays”. Indeed, if one returns to documents prepared by the SPBAC under the auspices of the Interior Ministry one finds an explicit prohibition of recognising the Malay-Muslims as Malay:
Civil Servants and officials of the state in the border provinces should avoid the following behaviour: the use of words that create dissatisfaction or which create division between people who hold different religions. For example, calling Muslims “Khaek” or using words that make Thai Muslims understand that they are Malay, such as saying “orang maleyu” (SBPAC, 1999, p. 48).
The question remains of whether official Thai nationalism and its custodians can entertain some kind of autonomy or national federation in the long term. That starts with the Malay question in its national sense.
Bibliography
Askew M. (2007) Conspiracy, Politics, and a Disorderly Border: The Struggle to Comprehend Insurgency in Thailand's Deep South, East-West Center Washington; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Connors MK. (2005) “Ministering Culture” Critical Asian Studies, 37,4, 523-551.
Connors MK. (2006) “'War on Error and the Southern Fire: How Terrorism Experts Get it Wrong', Critical Asian Studies, 38, 1, 151-175.
Gilquin, M. (2005) The Muslims of Thailand, Silkworm: Chiang Mai.
Human Rights Watch (2007) No One Is Safe Insurgent Attacks on Civilians in Thailand’s Southern Border Provinces Available at: http://hrw.org/reports/2007/thailand0807/
Interior Ministry (2002) Khu Mue kanpatibatrachakan nai jangwat chai daen pak tai [Civil Service Manual for the Southern Border Provinces]
Bangkok: Interior Ministry.
Jory, P. (2006) “From Patani Maleyu to Thai Muslim”, ISIM Review, 18, pp. 40-43.
Kasian Tejapira (1996) Globalizers vs Communitarians : Post-May 1992 Debates among Thai Public Intellectuals." paper presented at ‘Direction and Priorities of Research on Southeast Asia’ at the Annual Meeting of the U.S. Associations for Asian Studies in Honolulu, 11-14 April.
Matichon (2006) "Yu en chee pho. ro. ko. lamaet sithi ‘human right’ [UN says the Emergency Degree Violates Human Rights] “Matichon (online) , 20 July.
McCargo, D. (2006) “Thaksin and the resurgence of violence in the Thai South: Network monarchy strikes back?”, Critical Asian Studies, 38, 1, 39-71
McCargo, D. (ed.) (2007) Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence, Singapore, Singapore University Press
National Reconciliation Commission (2006) Report of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC). Overcoming Violence Through the Power of Reconciliation, NRC: Bangkok.
Office of the National Security Council, Naiyobai kwammankhong haeng chat kieo kap jangwat chai daen pak tai (2542-2546) [The National Security Policy for the Southern Border Provinces, (1999-2003)], mimeograph.
pp. 95 - 117
Prachathai (2005) “Mo Phonthip daen na phisut 300 sop rai yat yeu fai tai ” [Dr Phonthip makes progress on the 300 unidentified victims of the southern fire] 24 November, 2005.
Phutjakan (2006) Ko. Ko. Isalam [Islamic Committee] May 30.
Srisompob Jitpiromsri1 and Panyasak Sobhonvasu (2006) “Unpacking Thailand's southern conflict: The poverty of structural explanations”, Critical Asian Studies, 38, 1, pp. 95-117.
Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (1999) Ekkhasan prakob kanprathumnithet jangwat chai daen pak tai pi 2542 [A Primer on the Southern Border Provinces, 1999]
Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre (1988), Thai Muslims in Southern Border Provinces, Yala: SBPAC.
September 8, 2007
National Anthems: the blank armband of amnesia
ABC Lingua Franca, broadcast 19 August, 2006
Transcript
Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week, striking a patriotic chord: Michael Connors on the lyrics of those national anthems most footballers failed to sing before their World Cup matches. But when Australia played Croatia, the Aussies in the crowd belted out 'Advance Australian Fair'.
'Advance Australia Fair' had been around for a century when, in a poll held in 1978, 43 per cent of Australians voted for it as our national anthem, ahead of 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'God Save the Queen'. Its idiom and its sentiments belong to the late Victorian era, although the phrase 'girt by sea' probably sounded as archaic and clumsy then as it does now.
Most national anthems were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to express the patriotism and chauvinism of the new nations emerging from the age of imperialism. So their lyrics, even if amended, tend to be at odds with the spirit of goodwill that international sporting contests such as the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics are supposed to embody.
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. When he watched the World Cup, the words of the anthems stuck in his craw.
Michael Connors: Whether it's the Olympics or the World Cup, the story's the same: beautiful games ruined by dirge- or Eurotrash-styled national anthems. What unites all these styles is the self-induced orgasm of national narcissism. Inside every national anthem is a soccer hooligan waiting to get out.
I'll admit to loving the soccer during the World Cup, and I thought the Socceroos did wonderfully, and yes, we was robbed. But why is it that yobbo-nationalism has to surround big sporting events?
By 'yobbo' I refer not to the hundreds of drunk fans revealing their hard-earned six-packs during excitable TV interviews, but to those opportunist politicians who positively hum over the flower of national sporting glory.
But there is some beauty to it all. Momentarily, as we saw during the World Cup, beautiful men bore the weight of the nation. Their private grief and public struggle somehow climaxed as a national story, in a mesmerising ball game of touch and go. Off the field, multicultural youth patrolled suburbs, beeping horns in homage. Young Asian students in the inner city carried the Australian flag. Loud blokes from the suburbs looked on approvingly. For a few weeks the multicultural nation seemed in communion.
Perhaps though, I am jaded. My blackest moments always came at the beginning of each game. Before a worldwide audience of billions, those beautiful men, possessing extraordinary personal prowess that normally transcends national borders, sang songs that should not be sung.
Some do the anthem thing with more dignity than others. Some are silent as the national anthem is played, preferring to look indifferently composed as the tune plays on. Others feel compelled to mouth words a second too late, like drag queens chasing a soundtrack.
During Australia's run in the World Cup we were subjected to two explicitly offensive national anthems and three fence-sitters. The former are Japan's and Australia's own; the latter the Italian, Brazilian and Croatian anthems. In the interests of international harmony nothing was said about them.
The current Japanese national anthem is the same as it was when it honoured the war criminal, Emperor Hirohito. That he was never charged along with those who ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb is another matter. Anyway the anthem hoped that the Emperor would be around long enough 'for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.' He's gone, but the moss is now creeping over historical memory, with right-wing nationalists seeking to revise the country's view of Japanese militarism.
During the World Cup millions paid respect to the Japanese national anthem. But in Japan, hundreds of teachers have faced disciplinary action for refusing to obey new flag-raising and anthem regulations in schools. What's more, there's an underground version of the anthem titled 'Kiss me' that eerily touches on the issue of wartime 'comfort women'.
This is a hauntingly deranged version which follows phonetically the official anthem. The Korean Times reports that 'Kiss me' is now being discreetly sung by Japanese students, even under the sabre-eye of their patriotic masters. That might give some pause to the Howard government's own flag-raising inclinations; after all, our own anthem is vulnerable to playground satire.
The phrase 'Advance Australia' has a provenance independent of its internment in the national anthem. Frederick Ludowyk, in a recent edition of the newsletter Ozwords, shows that during the colonial era the phrase was mustered to self-congratulate the embryonic nation on its road to greatness. As huts were converted to houses and roads were built, the war cry was 'Advance Australia'. After federation, Ludowyk tells us, the national motto came to serve the purposes of war. The Huon Times in 1917 put it like this, 'They have proved to the Hun that "Advance Australia" is not a mere phrase, but a virile, palpitating reality.'
'Advance Australia Fair' the anthem was written by a Scotsman around 1878. Its early popularity is partly explained by the fact that it spoke to the colonial mentality of the times. Take the original second stanza:
When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd,
To trace wide oceans o'er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England's flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
'Britannia rules the wave!'
'Advance Australia Fair' was favoured as the national anthem by a plurality in a 1977 poll that offered two other choices: 'God Save the Queen' and 'Waltzing Matilda'. In 1981 the National Australia Day Council cleared the decks and expunged three stanzas including the eulogy to Cook. In 1984 the anthem was proclaimed as official.
But despite the cast-off words, the anthem is still so grotesque that to sing it is to put pebbles girt by sea in one's mouth. 'Advance Australia Fair' is so unlike its people that those who sing it look like a dog sneaking a quick one in a public park. Or like an Australianised Hyacinth Bucket (sorry, Bouquet) straining to be dutiful.
It shows how little is on offer when one remembers that even John Howard voted for 'Waltzing Matilda' in the 1977 poll. He's since learned to live with 'Advance Australia Fair', perhaps with that expunged second stanza in mind.
Most Australians have now come to live with the anthem. To my mind it was the acute Kim Beazley in a doorstep interview in 2001 who best explained why this may be the case.
Brian Dawe: Mr Beazley, would the Republic support the national anthem?
John Clarke: Well the national anthem is not contradictory to an Australian republic, it is a multi-disciplinary national anthem that applies both to a situation whether a constitutional monarchy or a republic. I guess having got everybody to learn the words and the tune with great arduous endeavour in the Australian education system over the course of the last, what? 25, 30 years, it would be a bit inconvenient to try a new one.
Brian Dawe: Sandy McDonald says its boring, meaningless, should be scrapped. In this Federation year is it worth looking at a different anthem?
John Clarke: Well look, I stand up on behalf of girt. Girt by sea needs to be celebrated, and if we can't do that regularly when Australia enjoys its sporting triumphs, at the beginning of our school assemblies, I think something would be lost and it is new and decent and essential to the Australian character.
Mr Beazley ran out of breath, so we don't know exactly what would be lost.
The lesser national anthem offenders include Croatia, Brazil and Italy. Then again, every nation has its skeletons. But at least with these three, the lyrics are stirring or gentle as long as we ignore the bloodletting that accompanied nation formation. In Italy's case it's the glory of national liberation that is hummed; the national anthem celebrates the end of the Austrian Eagle's control over that country.
This eagle has drunk the blood of Italy,
Polish blood,
And Cossack blood.
But this has burned his gut.
Let us gather in legions
Ready to die!
Italy has called!
It sounds much better in Italian.
The Croatian anthem is charmingly pastoral and endearing, if patriarchal. The homeland is described as 'our fathers' glory' and the citizens are pledged to eternal love:
Yes, you are our only glory,
Yes, you are our only treasure,
We love your plains and valleys,
We love your hills and mountains.
Quite gentle stuff, as long as one blocks from memory the sounds of the Serb exodus during last decade's Yugoslav wars.
Brazilians, like us, share a view of the Southern Cross and under its dim light their anthem, like ours, glosses over the massacres of indigenous people. Instead, it dreams of futures to wipe out pasts:
By the promise of this equality
We could conquer by our mighty hand.
In thy breast, O Freedom,
Our heart defies death itself.
So what is an anthem other than the blank armband of amnesia? Anthems are the touch-up job that nations need, the botox jab, the shopping therapy, the national counselling session bulk-billed on Medicare.
Behind most national anthems lies shame, shame of a nation's conquering past or its humiliating submission. The quality of that shame is not unique, with each anthem ironically proclaiming a universal condition.
So are anthems of any consequence? They get sung at major events, they occasion tears. In some respects anthems are the emotive Constitution of a homeland. They are eulogies to national ideas. But what would happen if nations were legally held to their (badly) sung ideals?
What if anthems had the power of law, a tuneful Constitution so to speak. Surely supporters of refugees to this land girt by sea might have another option other than relying on the rump of liberals in the Liberal Party. Listen again. Is there not a case that those languishing in Australian detention centres are victims of false advertising?
For those who've come across the seas we've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia fair.
To be sure, the hummingbird of nationalism will flap its wings over beautiful flowers. But what of those demonised, those outcast as 'queue jumpers?' For them, there is nothing other than the flapping wings of alarmism and xenophobia, as the government excises territory from judicial oversight.
So what does all this have to do with the World Cup? Not much, unfortunately. More Australian tears have been spilt over those Italian legions and that unearned penalty goal than will ever be spilt over the wilting of lives in our own, Australian, sanitary gulags.
Jill Kitson: Michael Connors, senior lecturer in politics at La Trobe University. His talk was first published in the online magazine New Matilda. And thanks to John Clarke and Brian Dawe, for the Beazley doorstop. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
PS the Clarke/Dawe gig is taken directly from an actual Beazley doorstop.
Transcript
Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week, striking a patriotic chord: Michael Connors on the lyrics of those national anthems most footballers failed to sing before their World Cup matches. But when Australia played Croatia, the Aussies in the crowd belted out 'Advance Australian Fair'.
'Advance Australia Fair' had been around for a century when, in a poll held in 1978, 43 per cent of Australians voted for it as our national anthem, ahead of 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'God Save the Queen'. Its idiom and its sentiments belong to the late Victorian era, although the phrase 'girt by sea' probably sounded as archaic and clumsy then as it does now.
Most national anthems were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to express the patriotism and chauvinism of the new nations emerging from the age of imperialism. So their lyrics, even if amended, tend to be at odds with the spirit of goodwill that international sporting contests such as the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics are supposed to embody.
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. When he watched the World Cup, the words of the anthems stuck in his craw.
Michael Connors: Whether it's the Olympics or the World Cup, the story's the same: beautiful games ruined by dirge- or Eurotrash-styled national anthems. What unites all these styles is the self-induced orgasm of national narcissism. Inside every national anthem is a soccer hooligan waiting to get out.
I'll admit to loving the soccer during the World Cup, and I thought the Socceroos did wonderfully, and yes, we was robbed. But why is it that yobbo-nationalism has to surround big sporting events?
By 'yobbo' I refer not to the hundreds of drunk fans revealing their hard-earned six-packs during excitable TV interviews, but to those opportunist politicians who positively hum over the flower of national sporting glory.
But there is some beauty to it all. Momentarily, as we saw during the World Cup, beautiful men bore the weight of the nation. Their private grief and public struggle somehow climaxed as a national story, in a mesmerising ball game of touch and go. Off the field, multicultural youth patrolled suburbs, beeping horns in homage. Young Asian students in the inner city carried the Australian flag. Loud blokes from the suburbs looked on approvingly. For a few weeks the multicultural nation seemed in communion.
Perhaps though, I am jaded. My blackest moments always came at the beginning of each game. Before a worldwide audience of billions, those beautiful men, possessing extraordinary personal prowess that normally transcends national borders, sang songs that should not be sung.
Some do the anthem thing with more dignity than others. Some are silent as the national anthem is played, preferring to look indifferently composed as the tune plays on. Others feel compelled to mouth words a second too late, like drag queens chasing a soundtrack.
During Australia's run in the World Cup we were subjected to two explicitly offensive national anthems and three fence-sitters. The former are Japan's and Australia's own; the latter the Italian, Brazilian and Croatian anthems. In the interests of international harmony nothing was said about them.
The current Japanese national anthem is the same as it was when it honoured the war criminal, Emperor Hirohito. That he was never charged along with those who ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb is another matter. Anyway the anthem hoped that the Emperor would be around long enough 'for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.' He's gone, but the moss is now creeping over historical memory, with right-wing nationalists seeking to revise the country's view of Japanese militarism.
During the World Cup millions paid respect to the Japanese national anthem. But in Japan, hundreds of teachers have faced disciplinary action for refusing to obey new flag-raising and anthem regulations in schools. What's more, there's an underground version of the anthem titled 'Kiss me' that eerily touches on the issue of wartime 'comfort women'.
This is a hauntingly deranged version which follows phonetically the official anthem. The Korean Times reports that 'Kiss me' is now being discreetly sung by Japanese students, even under the sabre-eye of their patriotic masters. That might give some pause to the Howard government's own flag-raising inclinations; after all, our own anthem is vulnerable to playground satire.
The phrase 'Advance Australia' has a provenance independent of its internment in the national anthem. Frederick Ludowyk, in a recent edition of the newsletter Ozwords, shows that during the colonial era the phrase was mustered to self-congratulate the embryonic nation on its road to greatness. As huts were converted to houses and roads were built, the war cry was 'Advance Australia'. After federation, Ludowyk tells us, the national motto came to serve the purposes of war. The Huon Times in 1917 put it like this, 'They have proved to the Hun that "Advance Australia" is not a mere phrase, but a virile, palpitating reality.'
'Advance Australia Fair' the anthem was written by a Scotsman around 1878. Its early popularity is partly explained by the fact that it spoke to the colonial mentality of the times. Take the original second stanza:
When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd,
To trace wide oceans o'er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England's flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
'Britannia rules the wave!'
'Advance Australia Fair' was favoured as the national anthem by a plurality in a 1977 poll that offered two other choices: 'God Save the Queen' and 'Waltzing Matilda'. In 1981 the National Australia Day Council cleared the decks and expunged three stanzas including the eulogy to Cook. In 1984 the anthem was proclaimed as official.
But despite the cast-off words, the anthem is still so grotesque that to sing it is to put pebbles girt by sea in one's mouth. 'Advance Australia Fair' is so unlike its people that those who sing it look like a dog sneaking a quick one in a public park. Or like an Australianised Hyacinth Bucket (sorry, Bouquet) straining to be dutiful.
It shows how little is on offer when one remembers that even John Howard voted for 'Waltzing Matilda' in the 1977 poll. He's since learned to live with 'Advance Australia Fair', perhaps with that expunged second stanza in mind.
Most Australians have now come to live with the anthem. To my mind it was the acute Kim Beazley in a doorstep interview in 2001 who best explained why this may be the case.
Brian Dawe: Mr Beazley, would the Republic support the national anthem?
John Clarke: Well the national anthem is not contradictory to an Australian republic, it is a multi-disciplinary national anthem that applies both to a situation whether a constitutional monarchy or a republic. I guess having got everybody to learn the words and the tune with great arduous endeavour in the Australian education system over the course of the last, what? 25, 30 years, it would be a bit inconvenient to try a new one.
Brian Dawe: Sandy McDonald says its boring, meaningless, should be scrapped. In this Federation year is it worth looking at a different anthem?
John Clarke: Well look, I stand up on behalf of girt. Girt by sea needs to be celebrated, and if we can't do that regularly when Australia enjoys its sporting triumphs, at the beginning of our school assemblies, I think something would be lost and it is new and decent and essential to the Australian character.
Mr Beazley ran out of breath, so we don't know exactly what would be lost.
The lesser national anthem offenders include Croatia, Brazil and Italy. Then again, every nation has its skeletons. But at least with these three, the lyrics are stirring or gentle as long as we ignore the bloodletting that accompanied nation formation. In Italy's case it's the glory of national liberation that is hummed; the national anthem celebrates the end of the Austrian Eagle's control over that country.
This eagle has drunk the blood of Italy,
Polish blood,
And Cossack blood.
But this has burned his gut.
Let us gather in legions
Ready to die!
Italy has called!
It sounds much better in Italian.
The Croatian anthem is charmingly pastoral and endearing, if patriarchal. The homeland is described as 'our fathers' glory' and the citizens are pledged to eternal love:
Yes, you are our only glory,
Yes, you are our only treasure,
We love your plains and valleys,
We love your hills and mountains.
Quite gentle stuff, as long as one blocks from memory the sounds of the Serb exodus during last decade's Yugoslav wars.
Brazilians, like us, share a view of the Southern Cross and under its dim light their anthem, like ours, glosses over the massacres of indigenous people. Instead, it dreams of futures to wipe out pasts:
By the promise of this equality
We could conquer by our mighty hand.
In thy breast, O Freedom,
Our heart defies death itself.
So what is an anthem other than the blank armband of amnesia? Anthems are the touch-up job that nations need, the botox jab, the shopping therapy, the national counselling session bulk-billed on Medicare.
Behind most national anthems lies shame, shame of a nation's conquering past or its humiliating submission. The quality of that shame is not unique, with each anthem ironically proclaiming a universal condition.
So are anthems of any consequence? They get sung at major events, they occasion tears. In some respects anthems are the emotive Constitution of a homeland. They are eulogies to national ideas. But what would happen if nations were legally held to their (badly) sung ideals?
What if anthems had the power of law, a tuneful Constitution so to speak. Surely supporters of refugees to this land girt by sea might have another option other than relying on the rump of liberals in the Liberal Party. Listen again. Is there not a case that those languishing in Australian detention centres are victims of false advertising?
For those who've come across the seas we've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia fair.
To be sure, the hummingbird of nationalism will flap its wings over beautiful flowers. But what of those demonised, those outcast as 'queue jumpers?' For them, there is nothing other than the flapping wings of alarmism and xenophobia, as the government excises territory from judicial oversight.
So what does all this have to do with the World Cup? Not much, unfortunately. More Australian tears have been spilt over those Italian legions and that unearned penalty goal than will ever be spilt over the wilting of lives in our own, Australian, sanitary gulags.
Jill Kitson: Michael Connors, senior lecturer in politics at La Trobe University. His talk was first published in the online magazine New Matilda. And thanks to John Clarke and Brian Dawe, for the Beazley doorstop. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
PS the Clarke/Dawe gig is taken directly from an actual Beazley doorstop.
The National Interest
Cartoon by http://www.fionakatauskas.com
When the Chips Are Down, the Gulls Get Pecking
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 17 August 2005
New Matilda
Nations are selfish by constitution. Exclusive, and often boys' clubs, they function to win people over to the narcissistic idea that there is a national character and a national interest that must be preserved. But this is not fruit we are talking about - nicely jarred in some rustic kitchen. No, the 'national interest' animates political life: commercialized sport is its stupid aspect, war its most malicious.The 'national interest' is advanced by, among other things, the covert state, the military state, and diplomatic gymnastics. Sometimes the national interest advances through breathtaking pragmatism - witness the 'no we won't sign, yes we will' position of the Australian Government regarding ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Episodes such as this are as enlightening to the true nature of the beast as watching seagulls fight over castaway chips on St Kilda beach.
Alexander Downer (a seagull in stockings?) has long been underestimated by those who glorify the legacy of the ALP's Gareth-Gareth Evans. He can squawk with the best of them - when the chips are down he goes in for the peck. He plays the game, and has won some mighty things. Thankfully, during Downer's tenure as Foreign Minister there is none of the dovish indulgence that featured in the preening days of Evans.
Gareth Evans, with Bruce Grant, wrote Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s (MUP, 1995). The book was an unabashed eulogy to Evans's foreign policy and became the standard text in university foreign policy courses. That's like reading history only through the memoirs of its vainglorious makers. It poisoned the critical mind of a generation of scholars and students with the idea that a government in power might do something good in the world if it could balance, prudently, morality and national interest. In his own reckoning, it seemed as if Evans was at the centre of every progressive development in international politics while he was Australia's Foreign Minister.This is what the mass of former diplomats miss the most, having a leader who gave their cause nobility. Downer has turned the diplomatic corps into second-hand car dealerships, soap-boxing for Australia's 'national interest'.
There is no shame in what Downer does: if we must go to war on totally false pretenses to maintain the US alliance, then that is what we must do. How more refreshing could it get? Downer has knifed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of its rhetorical fat, and given us a lean, mean machine of national interest. Downer spares us the huggish language of international good citizenship. He spares us having to cringe at a duplicitous policy shrouded in the language of noble intent: think the ALP, Evans and East Timor. Instead, Downer knows that the business of foreign policy is not to get elected to the UN Secretary General's position with barrels of idealist trash, but to get at the chips before the other bastards do. As he said in a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, in May 2002, 'To borrow the words of English realist Martin Wight, “A foreign minister is chosen and paid to look after the interests of his country, and not to delegate for the human race.”'
When Alexander Downer is seen as a paragon, the prudent foreign policy sage in all his pedestrian venality, we know something is wrong not just with the player but with the rules of the game. Indeed, let's go so far as to say something is wrong with the game itself.Do we really want to cling to a vision of the world based on map-lines that are materialized, very selectively, by passports and visas, and which are enforced by war machines? Should birth on the wrong side of a border have to entail starvation, as the world's nations judge famine to be low down in their priority list of national interest, even as they applaud themselves for their altruism on debt relief?
But what is the national interest? One answer is that those who have the power to define it, do so as they see fit. If this is so, we should understand foreign policy, contra textbook definitions, as 'the externalization of vested interest presented as the outcome of a national mandate'. That stamp - the mandated national interest - is more virtual than real because of the manufactured indifference to world affairs inherent in a consumer citizen. There is no real national mandate for foreign policy, only a slothful mandate at the best of times. For example let's take the typical consumer citizen: Epiphany, the sister of Mercedes and Paris, knows there is something wrong with the world when the petrol for her Landcruiser, which she needs to get her to rock-climbing classes at her inner-city gym, costs more than a meal in London. As she drives away from the petrol bowser, she hopes the US hurries up and wins the war in Iraq. Another example: Phillip, who enjoys knitting and delivering meals-on-wheels, is more upset by the number of times he has to knock on the door to rouse his soporific clients, than he is by ASIO's right to break down his neighbour's doors and take them in for questioning.
The whole character of contemporary life is geared towards the inane not to rational engagement with the world. Big Brother was not meant to be the spectator sport of watching characters with poorly-formed morals stumble through 24 hours of invited, benign surveillance. It was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of surrendering hard-won civil liberties at a time of crisis. But the state doesn't need the real Big Brother (except in reserve, for those few who escape the loop of inanity) as long as its dilettante cousin, TV, delivers the Weapons of Mass Stupefication.Apart from fleeting interest, the massacres, tragedies, betrayals and struggles that play out around the world, rarely touch us. Instead of hearing in the wind the sigh of humanity, we wonder if the wind portends rain and whether we should fetch an umbrella. In our inane world, tragedy and joy ring out equally from the cash register. It's a world of the envied nip-and-tuck as observed on TV; of fib and fuck in cricket; and of a squib of global havoc on SBS news.
I am not running the familiar 'the masses are stupid' argument. We are not. Rather, the system we currently labour and love under allows self-aggrandizing elites to ascend the ladder of opportunism, while ensuring there are enough crumbs to keep the masses at bay.It is a smart game, but not one the Establishment always wins. Millions protested the illegal war in Iraq, Americans are currently turning against Bush, and Blair remains under pressure despite a bomb-induced national piety.
As for Howard, we have a case of knowing what we've got: he softens an impending economic downturn by digging the quarries for the China boom, while shoo-ing concern for human rights into a private bilateral dialogue with the Chinese leadership; he keeps the national budget surplus by never allowing a line to be drawn in the rightful place across the Timor Sea; he signs and signs Free Trade Agreements with all and sundry to enable us to do what, by constitution, he deems we should do: produce and consume - in the national interest. On Thailand, where I am currently based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, I did not hear a pip-or-squeak from the Australian Government over the 'war on drugs' in 2003 that left close to 3000 people dead, nor was there any public statement against the mass killing of Muslim protestors in October 2004. Well of course I didn't hear anything - Australia was in the middle of negotiating and implementing a Free Trade Agreement with the Thai Government.
The 'big-quiet' on Thailand makes me wonder why Australia was reported as having concerns about ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and its principle of non-intervention/interference in the internal affairs of a member state. After all, when it comes down to it, Australia seems quite exemplary at keeping its hands off and its nose clean.Break down this stupor of the 'big-quiet' and we may succeed in seeing the crooked ways of a world bound by national boundaries and conceits, and recognize how such boundaries limit what we see and say. We may well be able to say that foreign policy is not in our name, only in our credit cards' name. Then we could begin the process of undoing the dissemblance of foreign policy and of the 'national interest'. We could construct policies that speak to our real selves as members of a broad human community, beyond the exclusive borders that enslave us to national accounts.Were that the case, the London bombings would not have led to the shameful liberal hysteria that recently arose around multiculturalism. Instead, we would look beyond national boundaries and ask what is wrong with ourselves and the world. At the very least, we would find that part of the answer lies in the national boundaries that imprison us all, and we might realize that if anything is in the national interest, then chances are it's wrong.
By: Michael ConnorsWednesday 17 August 2005
New Matilda
Nations are selfish by constitution. Exclusive, and often boys' clubs, they function to win people over to the narcissistic idea that there is a national character and a national interest that must be preserved. But this is not fruit we are talking about - nicely jarred in some rustic kitchen. No, the 'national interest' animates political life: commercialized sport is its stupid aspect, war its most malicious.The 'national interest' is advanced by, among other things, the covert state, the military state, and diplomatic gymnastics. Sometimes the national interest advances through breathtaking pragmatism - witness the 'no we won't sign, yes we will' position of the Australian Government regarding ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Episodes such as this are as enlightening to the true nature of the beast as watching seagulls fight over castaway chips on St Kilda beach.
Alexander Downer (a seagull in stockings?) has long been underestimated by those who glorify the legacy of the ALP's Gareth-Gareth Evans. He can squawk with the best of them - when the chips are down he goes in for the peck. He plays the game, and has won some mighty things. Thankfully, during Downer's tenure as Foreign Minister there is none of the dovish indulgence that featured in the preening days of Evans.
Gareth Evans, with Bruce Grant, wrote Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s (MUP, 1995). The book was an unabashed eulogy to Evans's foreign policy and became the standard text in university foreign policy courses. That's like reading history only through the memoirs of its vainglorious makers. It poisoned the critical mind of a generation of scholars and students with the idea that a government in power might do something good in the world if it could balance, prudently, morality and national interest. In his own reckoning, it seemed as if Evans was at the centre of every progressive development in international politics while he was Australia's Foreign Minister.This is what the mass of former diplomats miss the most, having a leader who gave their cause nobility. Downer has turned the diplomatic corps into second-hand car dealerships, soap-boxing for Australia's 'national interest'.
There is no shame in what Downer does: if we must go to war on totally false pretenses to maintain the US alliance, then that is what we must do. How more refreshing could it get? Downer has knifed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of its rhetorical fat, and given us a lean, mean machine of national interest. Downer spares us the huggish language of international good citizenship. He spares us having to cringe at a duplicitous policy shrouded in the language of noble intent: think the ALP, Evans and East Timor. Instead, Downer knows that the business of foreign policy is not to get elected to the UN Secretary General's position with barrels of idealist trash, but to get at the chips before the other bastards do. As he said in a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra, in May 2002, 'To borrow the words of English realist Martin Wight, “A foreign minister is chosen and paid to look after the interests of his country, and not to delegate for the human race.”'
When Alexander Downer is seen as a paragon, the prudent foreign policy sage in all his pedestrian venality, we know something is wrong not just with the player but with the rules of the game. Indeed, let's go so far as to say something is wrong with the game itself.Do we really want to cling to a vision of the world based on map-lines that are materialized, very selectively, by passports and visas, and which are enforced by war machines? Should birth on the wrong side of a border have to entail starvation, as the world's nations judge famine to be low down in their priority list of national interest, even as they applaud themselves for their altruism on debt relief?
But what is the national interest? One answer is that those who have the power to define it, do so as they see fit. If this is so, we should understand foreign policy, contra textbook definitions, as 'the externalization of vested interest presented as the outcome of a national mandate'. That stamp - the mandated national interest - is more virtual than real because of the manufactured indifference to world affairs inherent in a consumer citizen. There is no real national mandate for foreign policy, only a slothful mandate at the best of times. For example let's take the typical consumer citizen: Epiphany, the sister of Mercedes and Paris, knows there is something wrong with the world when the petrol for her Landcruiser, which she needs to get her to rock-climbing classes at her inner-city gym, costs more than a meal in London. As she drives away from the petrol bowser, she hopes the US hurries up and wins the war in Iraq. Another example: Phillip, who enjoys knitting and delivering meals-on-wheels, is more upset by the number of times he has to knock on the door to rouse his soporific clients, than he is by ASIO's right to break down his neighbour's doors and take them in for questioning.
The whole character of contemporary life is geared towards the inane not to rational engagement with the world. Big Brother was not meant to be the spectator sport of watching characters with poorly-formed morals stumble through 24 hours of invited, benign surveillance. It was supposed to be a warning about the dangers of surrendering hard-won civil liberties at a time of crisis. But the state doesn't need the real Big Brother (except in reserve, for those few who escape the loop of inanity) as long as its dilettante cousin, TV, delivers the Weapons of Mass Stupefication.Apart from fleeting interest, the massacres, tragedies, betrayals and struggles that play out around the world, rarely touch us. Instead of hearing in the wind the sigh of humanity, we wonder if the wind portends rain and whether we should fetch an umbrella. In our inane world, tragedy and joy ring out equally from the cash register. It's a world of the envied nip-and-tuck as observed on TV; of fib and fuck in cricket; and of a squib of global havoc on SBS news.
I am not running the familiar 'the masses are stupid' argument. We are not. Rather, the system we currently labour and love under allows self-aggrandizing elites to ascend the ladder of opportunism, while ensuring there are enough crumbs to keep the masses at bay.It is a smart game, but not one the Establishment always wins. Millions protested the illegal war in Iraq, Americans are currently turning against Bush, and Blair remains under pressure despite a bomb-induced national piety.
As for Howard, we have a case of knowing what we've got: he softens an impending economic downturn by digging the quarries for the China boom, while shoo-ing concern for human rights into a private bilateral dialogue with the Chinese leadership; he keeps the national budget surplus by never allowing a line to be drawn in the rightful place across the Timor Sea; he signs and signs Free Trade Agreements with all and sundry to enable us to do what, by constitution, he deems we should do: produce and consume - in the national interest. On Thailand, where I am currently based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, I did not hear a pip-or-squeak from the Australian Government over the 'war on drugs' in 2003 that left close to 3000 people dead, nor was there any public statement against the mass killing of Muslim protestors in October 2004. Well of course I didn't hear anything - Australia was in the middle of negotiating and implementing a Free Trade Agreement with the Thai Government.
The 'big-quiet' on Thailand makes me wonder why Australia was reported as having concerns about ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and its principle of non-intervention/interference in the internal affairs of a member state. After all, when it comes down to it, Australia seems quite exemplary at keeping its hands off and its nose clean.Break down this stupor of the 'big-quiet' and we may succeed in seeing the crooked ways of a world bound by national boundaries and conceits, and recognize how such boundaries limit what we see and say. We may well be able to say that foreign policy is not in our name, only in our credit cards' name. Then we could begin the process of undoing the dissemblance of foreign policy and of the 'national interest'. We could construct policies that speak to our real selves as members of a broad human community, beyond the exclusive borders that enslave us to national accounts.Were that the case, the London bombings would not have led to the shameful liberal hysteria that recently arose around multiculturalism. Instead, we would look beyond national boundaries and ask what is wrong with ourselves and the world. At the very least, we would find that part of the answer lies in the national boundaries that imprison us all, and we might realize that if anything is in the national interest, then chances are it's wrong.
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