Traven, in a comment in this post stated:

Little of that progress trickled down to the ordinary southern Thai Muslim citizen. Indeed, that increased Muslim political representation that you talk about had a great deal more to do already comparatively wealthy Muslims conspiring with mainstream Thai parties to tap the exchequer for their own betterment.
....
So one has to ask, what progress?

COMMENT: That is a fair question. I suppose that depends on how you quantify "progress". In a previous post, I looked at "political progress", or perhaps more accurately on how a number of southern Muslims had obtained important political positions over the last 15 years. Again, you could argue, as Traven does, that little of the progress has trickled down to ordinary Thai Muslims, but wasn't at least partly due to Thai Muslims themselves choosing a bunch of money hungry politicians and re-electing them each time. Finally, for a variety of reasons voters did vote most of those politican's out of office in 2005. They had the power to do so before 2005, but didn't.

One type of progress which is much easier to quantify with statistics is economic progress which I will primarily look at in this post.

I will excerpt this article: Dr Srisompob Jitpiromsri and Panyasak Sobhonvasu,   "Unpacking Thailand's southern conflict: The poverty of structural explanations" Critical Asian Studies 38:1 (2006), p95-117, with some of my own commentary and other reports/statistics. The excerpt is from p102-104 and starts below:

According to the National Statistics Office (NSO), the populations of the three southern border provinces (Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat) in 2003 amounted to about 1,803,306.Of the total population, 21.8 percent are Buddhists and 78.2 percent Muslims. A survey conducted in nine districts of the three southern provinces identifies various problems that local Muslim communities face. These include poverty, unemployment, lack of education, substandard infrastructure, inadequate supplies of land and capital, low quality of living standards, and other economic-related problems.

Source: Dr Srisompob's article. Click on the image to enlarge - this applies to some other images below. 

The performance of the deep South’s economy has improved markedly in the past few decades. Between 1983 and 2003, for example, the gross provincial products (GPP) for Pattani rose from 7,840 million baht to 33,300 million baht, while those of Yala and Narathiwat increased from 6,745 million baht and 8,737 million baht to 24,437 million baht and 28,646 million baht, respectively. During the same period, the average per capita income of Pattani grew from 9,340 baht to 57,621 baht, while that of Yala and Narathiwat also increased from 14,987 baht and 10,340 baht to 52,737 baht and 38,553 baht, respectively. Notwithstanding these positive developments, the region fared poorly compared either with neighboring Malaysia, or with Songkla Province, the thriving commercial and industrial center of the Thai South. In 2000, for example, the GDP per capita of Malaysia was RM 14,582 (more than 140,000 baht) and that of Kelantan, its poorest state, was RM 6,137 (over 60,000 baht). The proportion of GPP contribution of the deep South provinces to the overall GPP of the southern region during the past two decades remained substantially small or stagnant as compared to that of Songkla.

The poverty picture is a complicated one. In terms of average household income, none of the three southern border provinces is particularly poor. According to official figures for 2000, Narathiwat, the poorest of the three, ranked twenty-first from the bottom, while Pattani and Yala were in the middle group of Thailand’s seventy-six provinces. Many northeastern provinces and some northern ones had significantly lower average household incomes.

COMMENT: I actually think the Malaysia and Songkla comparisons are part of the problem because the southern provinces certainly don't have the lowest incomes as this 2007 UNDP report (PDF):

Also, from the 2007 UNDP report, the monthly household incomes were 11,694 baht for Pattani, 11,880 baht for Yala, and 9,214 for Narathiwat. The change in household income for 2002-2004 was  21.99%, 19.27%, and 21.28% for the 3 provinces respectively. This is compared to average change over the same time period for all of Thailand which was 9.4%, for the southern region it was 16.98%. Out of Thailand's 76 provinces, Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat are ranked 17th, 55th, and 56th respectively as the below chart shows (1st having the highest income):

 

Those in the 3 southern border provinces are hardly the poorest in Thailand and their incomes were also rising up until 2004.

Dr. Srisompob's article continues:

However, nearly half of the Southerners officially living below the poverty line — 47.05 percent of them — reside in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Another set of figures from a 1998 National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) report showed that 152,777 Yala people, or approximately 37 percent of the total population, had incomes below the provincial poverty line of 845 baht per month. The same report also points to a large number of Muslims in the other two border provinces still living in poverty, ranking Narathiwat as the poorest province in southern Thailand with 46 percent of the total population, or more than 193,000 persons, living below the poverty line (808 baht a month) compared to 20.7 percent or about 125,440 people in Pattani (818 baht per month).

COMMENT: On poverty there are newer statistics available.

From a World Bank Report in 2005:

While the World Bank report doesn't break down the regions by provinces, this spreadsheet (Excel file, Thai language) from the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) - NESDB are the World Bank's source - does. I have created the below charts based on the NESDB figures:

NOTE: Those who are categorised as "poor" are those who are living below the poverty line.

COMMENT: In terms of raw numbers and also as a percentage, the two above charts show the number of poor/those living below the poverty line is falling as well.

The below chart shows that the overall percentage of poor/those living below the poverty line in the 3 southern border provinces is also falling.

 

 

There were 1.36 million poor persons in total in the 14 southern border provinces in 2000, but 610,500 of those lived in the 3 southern border provinces. This meant that 45% of all poor Southerners lived in the 3 southern border provinces. For 2002, it was 53%, for 2004, it was 48% as the chart below shows.

NOTE: Southerns should read Southerners in the above chart.

COMMENT: On one hand, the above chart is concerning as it shows that the number of poor/those living in poverty in the 3 southern border provinces is decreasing at a lower rate than those in the rest of the South. However, given that the number of poor (as well as the percentage of the poor) in the 3 southern border provinces is also decreasing I don't think this chart is too worrying. It would be easy to say that the government should invest in education and infrastructure in the 3 southern border provinces, but the terrorists are bombings such places at the moment so it is not as easy as that.

There are also other factors which help explain why incomes are low or why it is proving difficult to reduce the number of poor as Dr Srisompob's article continues:

In other words, of approximately 1.3 million Muslims in the three provinces, about 470,000 or 36 percent were living below the poverty line. Overall, people in the southern border provinces are poorer than people elsewhere in the South, but their income levels are broadly comparable with Thais in many other parts of the country. Though an important objective correlative, this observation offers little comfort to Muslims in the three provinces, who are wont to compare their economic circumstances with those of fellow Malays in Malaysia, or of Buddhist Thais in Songkla and other more affluent parts of the South.

The official data also indicate that most Muslim people in the three border provinces lack educational and employment opportunities. Muslims in the deep South are more disadvantaged than their Buddhist counterparts in educational attainment, despite their status as the majority population in the region, and their strong background in religious education.

NSO data from the national census of populations and housing in 2000 reveal that, in terms of the highest level of educational attainment, 69.80 percent of the Muslim population in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces have only a primary school education, compared with 49.6 percent of Buddhists. However, levels of participation by Muslims decline strongly at the higher levels. For instance, 9.20 percent of Muslims have completed secondary education, compared to 13.20 percent of Buddhists. At this time, the NSO figures did not distinguish between government secondary schools and the private Islamic schools, which enroll large numbers of local Muslims. Nevertheless, the picture becomes even clearer at the tertiary level: only 1.70 percent of the Muslim population have a bachelor’s degree, while 9.70 percent of Buddhists hold undergraduate degrees.

Despite being the majority population in the three provinces, Muslims are seriously underrepresented in educational attainment. Furthermore, attempts to implement a variety of programs of socioeconomic growth and development seem to have made much improvement at the macro-level and in service and public sectors, but this has not translated into jobs nor substantially improved standards of living for the great majority of the Muslim population. Figures for 2000 indicate that of all the 766,000 working residents in the three border provinces, only 6.6 percent were employed as government officials. Muslim government officials comprised only 2.4 percent of all working Muslims in the region, compared with 19.2 percent of all working Buddhists. In addition, the 2000 national census also reports a rather high rate of illiteracy (30.4 percent) among the local Muslim population. While Thai government statistics assert that unemployment is very low in the three southern provinces, many local Muslims view serious unemployment, underemployment, or the need for seasonal migration across the border to neighboring Malaysia as ever-present realities.

COMMENT: I think it is slightly unrealistic for Muslims in the southern border provinces to compare themselves to those living elsewhere in Thailand given their level of educational achievement is much lower comparatively than the rest of Thailand as this chart from the UNDP report shows below:

One of the problems for many Thai Muslims, even those with some education, is that they lack many necessary skills in employment as this report states:

This is primarily because jobs in the Thai public sector are difficult to obtain for those Muslim students who did not ever fully accept the Thai education system or learn the Thai language.

COMMENT: Part of the reason behind Thai Muslims lacking the necessary skills is self-created. A number of Muslims students studying at Islamic schools spend large periods of time studying Arabic and the Koran - which well let's be honest do not specifically advance most employment opportunities - so it is hardly surprising that their employment opportunities in Thailand are limited. Many can work in Malaysia because they speak the language. I really don't want to say too much more about fixing the education in this post as that it is another post in the works (see the ICG report of March 2007 for a starters).

One the biggest problems for the government is that the more terrorism there is, the less investment and educational opportunities there will be. The terrorists are attacking economic targets, or as this writer states the terrorists seem have graduated to "spectacular economic terrorism".  With insurance rates sky-rocketing, many educated people leaving the area, and with businesses being targeted etc, who would actually invest any money in the 3 southern border provinces?

Attack the government schools and you only have Islamic schools in various forms to go to. Now, many certainly offer general education courses, but if your Arabic is better than your Thai, does this really help you get a job?

So while some, including the Malaysian government, can claim that socio-economic factors are one of the root causes for the insurgency, I just think this is a little too convenient. Even in the 60s/70s when businesses weren't frequently targeted by the insurgents/terrorists, the violence would still have been deterrent to investment because it added risk and costs. If you note from Dr Srisompob's figures above, between 1983-2003 when there was very little political violence, the average per capita income in the 3 southern border provinces increased at roughly the same rate as the rest of the southern region. I doubt incomes have increased at the same rate since 2004, but then whose fault is that really, the governments' or the terrorists? I blame the terrorists who are destroying the economy and the social fabric. The government is caught in a tough position because the violence makes it extremely difficult to improve the socio-economic status of most of the residents.

Finally, with incomes rising and the number of poor/poverty levels decreasing in the lead up to the massive upsurge in the insurgency in 2004, I think socio-economic factors are just a convenient excuse. I have no doubt some other excuse would be brought up and played on.

Here is a strange idea, what about fundamentalist Islam as a root cause?

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