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Thailand Insurgency
By the late 1980s, armed insurgency--a national problem that
had plagued a series of Thai governments and dominated police and
army activities for more than twenty years--had been virtually
eliminated. From a peak strength of about 12,000 armed insurgents
in the late 1970s, the number of armed guerrillas and separatists
had declined to fewer than 2,000. Careful and coordinated
government efforts combining military and police actions with
social and economic policies had succeeded in reducing the level
of insurgency. In addition, in the 1950s the United States had
provided extensive military aid and technical assistance to the
counterinsurgency program.
A number of insurgent elements had enjoyed fair success in
the 1970s. They included the armed Communist Party of Thailand
(CPT), Malaysian Communist Party (MCP) guerrillas, disaffected
hill tribes people, and Muslim separatists. Their ranks had been
increased by an influx of youthful, idealistic supporters who
turned to the insurgents as a result of the 1976 military coup
and the conservative policies of the Thanin Kraivichien
government that followed it. By the mid-1980s, however, the
government's coordinated counterinsurgency program had succeeded
in eliminating all but a few small pockets of rebels.
Foreign observers disagree on the importance of communist
ideology to the insurgency
(see Ethnic and Regional Relations
, ch. 2). Neglect by past governments, whose primary interests and
attention were centered on the capital city of Bangkok, had
alienated many rural inhabitants and particularly many ethnic
minorities in peripheral areas of the country. Communist
militants were able to exploit the discontent that grew steadily
during the 1960s and 1970s in those remote regions.
The Thai communist movement had begun in the late 1920s.
Dominated by ethnic Chinese, the movement also appealed to other
neglected minorities, including the various hill tribes, the
Malay, and the Vietnamese
(see Ethnicity, Regionalism, and Language
, ch. 2). Despite their long residence in the country,
these groups had not been accepted by the Thai, who regarded them
with suspicion and distrust. In December 1942, a number of small
ethnic communist groups merged to form the CPT under
predominantly Chinese leadership.
Outlawed by the Anti-Communist Act of 1933, the party began a
clandestine existence, surfacing briefly when the act was
rescinded in late 1946 but going underground again in 1952, when
legislation prohibiting communist political action was adopted.
The 1952 law also banned the communist-controlled Central Labor
Union, the majority of whose 50,000 members were of mixed
Chinese-Thai ancestry. When Sarit Thanarat took control of the
government in October 1958, he abolished the Constitution,
declared martial law, and intensified the government's
anticommunist drives. Nonetheless, the CPT continued its
clandestine activities in schools and associations that had large
Chinese-Thai memberships and among villagers in border regions.
In 1959 the party began to recruit and train limited numbers of
Hmong hill people in the North geographical region for use as
cadres in antigovernment activities.
The CPT also sought support in the Northeast, appealing to
both Thai-Lao and non-Tai minorities, and among the Malay in
southern Thailand. Promising a better future to rural peasants in
the historically neglected Northeast, the CPT tried to exploit
antigovernment sentiments in the area, which for decades had been
the center of political dissidence. As a result, the Thai media
accused the international communist world of conspiring to break
off fifteen northeastern Thai provinces and integrate them into a
Greater Laos. In the peninsular provinces adjoining the Malaysian
border in the South the CPT sought to capitalize on Malay
minority sentiments for a separate state or a union with
Malaysia. This effort was enhanced by popular perceptions of
Bangkok's long history of neglect of the socioeconomic
development of the Muslim minority.
Despite these countrywide efforts, the CPT failed to gain
widespread popular support and sympathy. For one thing, the
country's long history of national independence made it difficult
for the CPT to present itself as an anticolonial, nationalist
movement--a tactic that had been successful in other Asian
countries. The large influx in the 1980s of refugees from
Cambodia and Vietnam, with their stories of hardship and
repression under communist rule, cooled potential popular support
for communism
(see The Indochinese Refugee Question
, ch. 2). For
many Thai citizens a sense of shared language, customs, and
traditions, together with an ingrained attachment to the king and
the Buddhist religion, also presented a psychological barrier to
adopting communist goals.
Consequently, the principal energy for the CPT came from
external Asian sources. As early as 1959, and particularly after
the early 1960s, China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
(North Vietnam) began providing Thai cadres with training, money,
and materiel for insurgency, subversion, and terrorism. Training
camps were set up in Vietnam, in the Pathet Lao-controlled areas
of neighboring Laos, and in Yunnan Province in China. In early
1962, a clandestine radio station--the Voice of the People of
Thailand (VOPT)--began broadcasting from Kunming in Yunnan,
transmitting Thai-language propaganda opposing the Bangkok
government, as did Radio Hanoi and Radio Beijing.
In the 1960s, because of growing evidence that the CPT was
building support structures among villagers in the Northeast, the
government began to institute limited countermeasures designed to
improve both the defense and the living conditions in villages in
threatened areas. Information teams sought to identify villagers'
problems and needs and to establish better communication with
local authorities. Mobile development units dispatched to
vulnerable areas attempted to establish the government's presence
and improve its image among isolated villagers. The units were
designed to stimulate village self-help and to meet immediate
local health, educational, and economic needs by furnishing
guidance, materials, and tools. Failure to complete many of the
projects, however, limited the effectiveness of the program.
In 1964 Thai authorities further increased their counter-
measures. As a follow-up to the mobile development unit scheme,
they initiated an accelerated rural development program in
security-sensitive areas, constructing roads, wells, market-
places, health clinics, and schools. Despite these initial
government steps, insurgent activity increased steadily after
1965.
Insurgency also became much more active in the South, where
dissidents staged ambushes and held propaganda meetings in
isolated villages along the Thai-Malaysian border. Many of these
rebels were remnants of the MCP that had been driven north across
the border into the jungles of southern Thailand by British
counterinsurgency action against the MCP in the late 1950s.
Roving groups of bandits compounded the security problems in the
area. The leading Muslim separatist movement in the South after
the early 1970s was the Pattani United Liberation Organization
(PULO), whose objective was the formation of an independent
Muslim state. PULO enjoyed support from radical Muslims in both
southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. The MCP, CPT, and
several Muslim separatist organizations, as well as opportunistic
bandit groups, all conducted operations against Thai security
forces and area residents.
By the mid 1970s, the multifaceted insurgency had become a
part of life in the kingdom. The Thai government and the United
States had spent vast amounts of money to combat the various
insurgencies, but success was limited at best. When the United
States withdrew from the counterinsurgency effort in the
mid-1970s, a stalemate set in. The infusion of substantial funds
by the United States (estimates for the 1951-76 period range from
a low of US$100 million to a high of US$1 billion) had failed to
gain "victory." There had been too great a diffusion of
responsibility among the myriad Thai and American agencies
planning and carrying out counterinsurgency operations. In
addition, the 1976 coup had sent as many as 5,000 students into
the jungles to join the CPT. Total CPT strength was estimated at
12,000 armed fighters in the peak year of 1979.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Thai government tried to
increase the effectiveness of its counterinsurgency operations.
In 1974, in order to eliminate the customary competition for
power among government agencies, a new coordinating and command
agency, the Internal Security Operational Command (ISOC), was
established directly under the military's Supreme Command. In
1987 Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda took over as director of a
reorganized ISOC, signaling an increased emphasis on political
rather than military counterinsurgency programs.
In the early 1980s, the operational policy of Thai
counterinsurgency forces had also changed. Rather than
concentrating on military actions designed to kill insurgents,
the counterinsurgency focused on neutralizing CPT tactics by
reclaiming remote areas and their people from control by the
communists. The approach demanded increased and better use of
coordinated civic action, police, and military operations.
In 1980 the government also began a new policy addressing the
complex political and social aspects of the insurgency problem. A
directive from the prime minister laid out the broad political
strategy, which featured an offer of amnesty to all insurgents
and a promise to accord them respect and security. The document
also outlined measures to improve the social and political
conditions that had contributed to CPT strength. A companion
directive issued in 1982 called for a coordinated offensive
against insurgent centers in the remote mountainous areas. King
Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX, 1946- ) had played a role in
formulating this strategy, and his enthusiastic support for it
quickly spread throughout the military and civilian agencies
implementing it.
The government's new approach--referred to as communist
suppression rather than counterinsurgency--resulted in the
surrender of more than 2,000 insurgents during the first ten
months. Many who rallied to the government side during this
period were students who had fled to the remote jungles and
joined the CPT forces after the repressive action of the Thai
police at Bangkok's Thammasat University in early October 1976
(see Thailand in Transition
, ch. 1). Some had grown disillusioned
with CPT goals and tactics. Others were simply tired of the
hardships endured in years of fighting under spartan conditions
in the remote countryside. Former student leader Thirayuth
Bunmee's surrender after 5 years with the CPT gained wide
publicity for the amnesty program, as did the mass defection of
250 armed insurgents and hundreds of unarmed family members and
supporters at Mukdahan in December 1982.
At the same time, the Thai armed forces conducted selective
but increasingly aggressive and effective operations against
longtime guerrilla bases in the Northeast and North. The capture
and destruction in 1981 of the Khao Khor base astride the border
between Phetchabun and Phitsanulok provinces in the North was a
serious blow to the insurgency. In the South, more aggressive
Thai military operations, political and social strategy, and a
series of combined operations with Malaysian armed forces exacted
a similar toll on the MCP, CPT, and Muslim separatists. By 1981
MCP strength had declined by one-third, to about 2,000. The
steady pounding by the military and the political defections also
rapidly depleted CPT strength. By the end of 1982, the number of
armed CPT forces had decreased from 12,000 in 1979 to fewer than
4,000 countrywide. The coordinated military, political, economic,
and social strategy had proved successful.
The phaseout of materiel support from China also weakened the
insurgency. The rift in Sino-Vietnamese relations in Asia
benefited Thailand. Beginning by closing the clandestine
guerrilla radio station (VOPT), which had broadcast for years
from Yunnan Province, China eventually halted virtually all
support for the CPT and minority separatists. At the same time
the CPT, plagued for many years by factionalism and ideological
differences, was paralyzed by a break between Maoists and
Leninists. Faced with the loss of border sanctuaries in Laos and
China and deprived of Cambodian sanctuaries by the Vietnamese
invasion, CPT cadres faced ever-increasing hardship, and only the
most dedicated revolutionaries remained in the field. Thai
authorities expressed concern over the emergence of a small,
Vietnam-oriented faction of the CPT, but that faction posed
little threat to stability in the country.
In mid-1987 the government estimated that there were about
600 armed, active communist insurgents operating in Thailand. Of
this number, approximately 65 to 70 were thought to be in the
North, 85 to 115
in the Northeast, 260 to 350 in the South, and 55 to 60 in the
Center
(see
fig. 13). The MCP, which had been reduced to fewer
than 1,500, operated in two factions along the Thai-Malaysian
border. Muslim separatists--PULO and the smaller Barisan Revolusi
Nasional (National Revolutionary Front)--numbered between 350 and
400 altogether.
Although, by the late 1980s most of the insurgencies had been
defeated, dedicated revolutionaries remained, both within
Thailand and abroad. The government was particularly concerned
about a new CPT strategy that stressed urban operations.
Moreover, there had long been a suspicion that not all the
heralded defectors had indeed renounced their communist beliefs.
Nonetheless, the Thai government had achieved significant success
in defeating an array of insurgents during the 1980s.
Data as of September 1987
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