The new head of the Thai negotiation team in peace talks with the Mara Patani, an umbrella organisation of insurgent groups in the deep South, yesterday insisted that any decision on autonomy in the region was the sole prerogative of Bangkok.
Udomchai: Thailand has final say
Gen Udomchai Thammasaroraj made his comments after Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad suggested Thailand should try offering southerners a certain level of autonomy to persuade them to give up their struggle for independence.
Dr Mahathir gave an interview to local media last week during a visit to Thailand to receive an honorary doctorate degree in the field of social leadership, entrepreneurship and politics from Rangsit University.
Gen Udomchai said Malaysia had only suggested the possibility of granting more autonomy to Thailand's far South as a way of dealing with the violence, insisting that Thailand is the only party which will have the final say on the idea.
He said Malaysia only serves as the facilitator of the peace talks between the Thai government's team and the Mara Patani.
Gen Udomchai, however, said it is possible to bring the matter up to be discussed at the next round of peace talks so that officials will have a clearer scope of what kind of "autonomous region" the insurgents may be interested in.
The government's team will also want to hear their opinions on the current decentralisation policy and how much they really know about autonomous administrative divisions, he said.
There are various forms of autonomous administrative divisions, while only the general idea has been mentioned, he said.
Details of the idea should be further discussed and examples of autonomous administrative divisions such as Xinjiang's Uighur Autonomous Region in China and Catalonia, an autonomous part in Spain, should be studied to give a clearer picture of an ideal autonomous administrative division, he said.
Asked if the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) has agreed to take part in new peace talks, he said they still have not responded to the invitation and Malaysia is trying to persuade them to do so.
BRN guerrillas are believed to be a core group behind the unrest.
Gen Udomchai said peace talks will next be broken into two parts -- one for the non-guerrilla groups and the other specifically for the guerrillas -- to obtain clearer information as to how these two different clusters view the southern problem and possible solutions to it.
He said no one in the BRN had ever openly mentioned floating the idea of autonomy in order to pressure the Thai peace talks team to agree to the idea before entering the talks.