Peace in Southern Thailand: Malaysia as a Mediator

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Malaysia as a mediator
The peace dialogue between Malaysia and Thailand government was an important parts in achieve peace in Southern Thailand. Thus, the initiative dialogue has been reflect to the personal interest of Prime Minister Najib Razak, and it was led by semi-retired senior official by Datuk Seri Ahmad Zamzamin Hashim (McCargo, 2014). Zamzamin is the former director of the research division in the prime minister’s office, and he has an intelligence background in handling this such as this issues. For that reason, it is clear that Malaysia has a vested interest in helping to resolve an ethnic conflict that taking place on its northern border. For example, it is an open secret that tens or hundreds of thousands of Malay Muslims in border areas are actually illegally hold dual Thai and Malaysian nationality. Then, many current or former leaders of Patani militant groups live in Malaysia, and most of them is under the watchful eye of the Malaysian special branch and intelligence Malaysia services (McCargo, 2014). This is the reason why Zamzamin’s team was being able to assemble a group of BRN negotiators to join the peace process. In addition, Zamzamin has strong support from eight senior officials in the National Security Council, which is through the concerning of primarily agency with the internal security, that constitute a secretariat for the smooth process.
In handling any conflict that happen, we need to lesson from others comparable conflict is that neighbouring countries that are historically can be implicated that need to be brought on board in order to reduce a violence towards the community. Many Patani militant leaders are unconvinced about Malaysia’s role as a mediator in solving the ethnic conflict between M...

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... of the dialogue partners. These was also includes in reaching out to the different groups of PULO, that whose been signed a November agreement to take part in the future talks, as well as to visiting Indonesia to participant in representatives of talks in other militant parties (McCargo, 2014). Furthermore, it was also giving talks and press conferences in Thailand to drum up more support for the dialogue process in February 2014 (McCargo, 2014). However, none of these efforts has been succeeded in reviving through the face to face talks. Then, with the high-profile progress of the Mindanao peace talks, Malaysia was also involved as a mediator, and it has increased a pressure on Zamzamin to deliver the goods in Southern Thailand, that has though in reality this is not a fair comparison given to the much longer investment of time in the Philippine process as well.

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