Bangkok bombing: blame game played a little too quick and easy

Tony Abbott understandably says Australians should continue to visit Thailand, despite the shocking bombing in the capital’s centre.

While the Prime Minister’s sentiment — we will not be dictated to by terrorists — is laudable, we will only know if that advice is sensible when we learn who carried out the bombing and why, and, most importantly, whether it is a one-off or the beginning of a campaign.

Thai officials said they had identified a suspect from the northeast who was a supporter of the anti-government red shirts.

This seems a little too neat and easy.

It is the preferred explanation of the Thai military because it is the depredations of the red shirts, real and alleged, which justified the imposition of military rule in the first place.

The haste with which the Thai authorities declared that this bombing was not the work of the Islamist insurgency in the south is also the opposite of reassuring.

It recalls the Spanish government declaring dogmatically that the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 were definitely the work of Basque separatists, when they later turned out to be the work of Islamist extremists.

Bangkok bombing

This is a terrible moment for modern Thailand, and a great threat to a struggling economy, which relies on 25 million tourists visiting per year, among them nearly a million Australians.

Despite what the Thai authorities say, the bombing actually bears many of the hallmarks of the southern Islamist insurgency.

In the southernmost provinces of Thailand, a large, unhappy population, which is ethnically Malay and religiously Muslim, wants a separate homeland. The people have struggled for this for decades. But over the past 10 years it has been a particularly vicious and deadly conflict.

It is one of the most violent conflicts in Southeast Asia, mostly ignored by the international media because it has mainly been localised.

But it has been extremely bloody and cruel, with the beheading of schoolgirls, attacks on teachers and religious figures, as well as on police and more traditional targets.

The government of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to crack down on the insurgency in 2004, but its efforts were so ham-fisted that they provoked greater activism by the separatists.

Nonetheless the separatists are a shadowy and difficult group to get good intelligence on.

They are no longer led by the old Pattani United Liberation Organisation. Instead they are atomised into many different shadowy groups, seemingly lacking a central command. There are warlords and criminal bosses involved often in money-making exercises as well as political warfare.

Up until relatively recently they have resisted efforts to integrate them into wider international jihadist movements such as al-Qa’ida or Islamic State, or before that Jemaah Islamiah.

In this they have resembled the Islamist separatists of Indonesia’s Aceh. They are Islamist in ideology, but their chief claim is for an independent territory, not to be part of a worldwide caliphate or jihad.

However, there are increasing signs that this may be changing, especially with Muslim Thai students who go to study Islam in the Middle East.

The blast at Erawan Shrine resembles almost exactly the sorts of attacks the southern separatists often undertake, planting bombs designed to kill innocent civilians in large numbers.

Up until now, the southern separatists have not taken their struggle to Bangkok itself, partly calculating, presumably, that the Thai state would get more help in confronting them from the international community if they were killing large numbers of foreigners in the capital.

Nonetheless, Southeast Asian and Western intelligence agencies have long been waiting for the separatists to bring their struggle to Bangkok. At the same time, intelligence agencies know that other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah, have established an infrastructure in Bangkok.

Nonetheless the motive for the latest attack remains obscure.

I stayed in the hotel next to the Erawan Shrine in February and while there were plenty of foreigners around, it was a place you would mainly find Thais. If the target really was foreigners, a nightclub or disco would seem a more obvious target.

Similarly, the bomb seems to have been set at the edge of the shrine, designed to kill passing civilians rather than to destroy the shrine. The southern separatists have often attacked Buddhist sites, but rarely notionally Hindu ones.

This intersection is also the site of deadly conflict in the past between red shirts and yellow shirts.

One line of analysis has it that the bombing method could indicate a hot-headed person who grew up in the southern insurgency, as it were, but adopted Islamic State or al-Qa’ida ideology in the Middle East more recently.

But this is only speculation.

When I was staying next to the Erawan Shrine in February there was an unexplained explosion not far from the latest outrage, but it killed nobody and seemed designed to kill nobody. Its purpose was also unclear. Some cynical analysts believed it could have been set by some agency within the national security establishment to underline the justification for military rule.

But nobody believes any national security agency would plot an attack as murderous as this latest bombing.

There is even a line of analysis that the bombing could be related to the recent deportation from Thailand of a group of Chinese Uighur separatists, though there is no evidence for this.

What we know is that this bombing was an outrage against human innocence, and a savage blow to a Thai society already coping with profound divisions.