Thai jungle yields its outlawed communists

Press, 9 February 1983, Page 22

Thai jungle yields its outlawed communists

From BRIAN EADS, in Bangkok

Military rulers in Thailand, once slated as the domino most likely to tumble after the United States defeat in Indochina, believe they have broken the country's outlawed Communist Party. On January 25, after a series of mass defections from the party's demoralised ranks, several thousand - ‘returnees” from insurgent life in the northeastern provinces were the guests at a large party hosted by the Prime Minister, Prem Tinsulanond.

Already many have received gifts of money and land in 'return for surrendering their weapons.

The venue for the festivities was chosen with care. It was That Phanom, a district named after an ancient, much-revered Buddhist shrine, where' 17 years ago Thai Communists fired the first shots of their “armed struggle."

From a high point in 1978, the year when the Communist Party of Thailand boasted 15,000 fighters who engaged in almost 1000 military encounters with Govenment troops and police, they are now said to number fewer than 6000.

In the north-east and the north, once dotted with “liber-

ated areas," all save three are captured or abandoned. Only in the deep south, where the party is virtually autonomous, are the insurgents still a force to be reckoned with.

Little has changed in Thailand’s political and economic circumstances to explain such a collapse. There are still grotesque inequalities of wealth and opportunity. In the countryside indebtedness, and loss of land among peasant farmers continue to spread. “Death squads,” to which the Government turns a blind eye, are said by human rights groups to have been responsible for the death or disappearance of 43 rural and labour leaders, radical journalists, and student activists last year.

The Government itself is still at the mercy of generals, big business, and foreign investors. Only a fortnight ago Bangkok nerves were rattled by veiled threats of a coup unless schemes for a return to democratic, civilian rule were shelved.

The Government’s “amnesty” programme for defecting Communists is making their reentry into society as easy as possible, but the reason they should wish to return is found elsewhere.-

Primarily the Thai Communist Party is a casualty of .the continuing conflict in IndoChina. Chinese support has waned with Peking's efforts to reassure Thailand and its nonCommunist neighbours. Camps and training facilities in neighbouring Laos, and support from Vietnam, are denied because of the inflexibly Maoist line of the Thai party’s veteran leadership. Of the thousands of young students and intellectuals who took to the jungle after the bloody coup of October, 1976, all save a fraction have come out. Physical and ideological exhaustion, disillusionment with a lack of progress, the horrors of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and frustration with an outdated stratey to “surround the cities from the countryside” are all cited as reasons. One note of caution is sounded by the more taciturn of Thailand’s counter-insur-gency specialists. The call for greater revolutionary effort in the urban areas has been loudest among those elements that have quit the jungle to return to the cities, towns, and villages. It might prove that leverage on the Thai domino has not ended, but only changed direction. Copyright, " London Observer Service.