Peace Festival

Success against an insurgency

Each August the residents of the hamlet of Baan Nabua, 30 miles south of the Mekong River center of Nakhon Phanom, stop all work and open their stilted houses to visitors for a celebration. Government officials gather for a feast and an all-night spectacle that features classical Thai dancing and Kung Fu movies. The holiday is called the Stop the Gunfire Festival: it commemorates the government's success in quelling a Communist insurgency that once infested most of Thailand's 16 northeastern provinces. This year the eight-man band that played popular tunes at Baan Nabua was composed entirely of Communist defectors.

Government officials credit their achievement to aggressive rural-development programs, innovative military tactics and a healthy dose of Communist squabbling. To win the peasants to its side, Bangkok provided new varieties of rice, and imported silkworms to stimulate silk production. Instead of staging massive military operations against guerrilla enclaves, the army intensified its psychological-war effort. "Before, when we captured a Communist, we just pushed him out of a helicopter," Major General Sudsai Hasdin told TIME Bangkok Bureau Chief David DeVoss. "But this use of force just gave the Communists a propaganda advantage."

Most important, Bangkok was helped by a falling-out in 1979 between Viet Nam and the Maoist Thai Communist Party. Hanoi expelled Thai guerrillas from their sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos and confiscated their weapons and ammunition. The Thai Communists lost a second ally soon after when China sought support for Cambodia's Pol Pot regime from the five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which Thailand belongs. ASEAN in turn demanded that Peking minimize its relations with Southeast Asian Communist parties. As a result, it has sharply reduced its support of Thai insurgents.

To speed the process of decay in guerrilla ranks, the Thai government offers a generous amnesty program. So far this year more than 1,000 guerrillas in the northeast have defected. Those who defect are not asked to apologize or recant. They are generally given work on government construction projects or assisted with funds gathered by local merchants. Says Lieut. General Lak Salikupt, regional commander of the Second Army: "Persuasion is always more efficient than gunfire."

Bangkok has been far less successful in containing Communist insurgents in the deep south. In recent weeks, guerrillas there have blown up a railroad bridge, disrupted rail traffic to Malaysia and ambushed a police station. Unlike the northeast, where poor farmers were drawn to the Communists by promises of a better life, the south spawned guerrillas who concentrated their propaganda on government corruption. "The people in the south become Communists for revenge, not ideology," explains Uthai Hiruntoa, the Interior Ministry's director for rural development in the five southernmost provinces. "Fighting is intense today because the hatred is very strong."

Although development programs and political-education classes are being promoted in the south, Bangkok has found it difficult to focus its efforts. Work is plentiful on the rubber plantations and in the tin mines of the region. Because the average income is relatively high--second only to that of people living in Bangkok--few southerners need the limited financial help the government offers. Still, Thai officials are convinced that in time their approach will work in the south as well. Says Lieut. Colonel Suwan Chinda, an army specialist in psychological war: "It is better to have one defector than to kill ten insurgents. We don't want to kill our countrymen."

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