THAILAND: War Against the Night

Winding through narrow jungle roads, a platoon of Thailand’s crack 1st Cavalry Battalion was caught last month in the bloodiest ambush yet staged by the country’s Communist insurgents. Twenty-two of the unit’s 26 men were quickly cut down in a fusillade of rocket grenades and heavy machine-gun fire. Seizing the platoon’s weapons and ammunition, the Communists set the dead bodies afire with gasoline, then slipped back into their jungle cover.

The war in Indochina is not over. It has merely moved to a new battleground —Thailand. Prime Minister Tanin Kraivixien now calls the long-smoldering (at least eleven years) insurgency by Communist guerrillas the gravest threat to Thailand’s internal security. Long ignored by Bangkok, the increasingly bold Communist attacks have become a focus of concern in the 3½ months since the military’s National Administrative Reform Council swept aside Thailand’s wobbly democracy (TIME, Oct. 18). In their armed struggle against Tanin’s military-backed government, Communist guerrillas have killed more than 90 soldiers and police since October; unofficial estimates go much higher, though the government does say that an average of one local official is assassinated every four days.

The coup provided the Communists with their biggest influx of recruits in a decade: an estimated 600 to 1,000 student leftists who fled Bangkok and began training in “liberated” zones and in neighboring Laos. It also polarized Thai politics. “Before the coup,” says one Thai counterinsurgency expert, “there were four channels open to anyone with a complaint: Parliament, the newspapers, government officials and the Communists. Now there are only two: the government or the guerrillas.”

Interservice Rivalries. To assess the course of the sputtering war, TIME Correspondent William McWhirter traveled 1,400 miles through Thailand’s most troubled provinces. So far, he reports, the 9,000 to 12,000 guerrillas of the Maoist-leaning Communist Party of Thailand have been confined to border regions. According to government estimates, the Communists control only 100 villages with a total population of 75,000. But nearly 10% of Thailand’s 45 million people live in “contested” regions, many of them ruled by the government during the day and by the guerrillas at night. Twenty-eight of the country’s 71 provinces are governed by martial law.

Although Tanin’s government has committed 40% of this year’s $3.4 billion budget to the military and police, Thai efforts to push back the rule of the night are sometimes snarled and chaotic. There are bitter interservice rivalries, and undercover agents from different branches seldom pool their information. As a result, intelligence is spotty. Despite all this, Thai troops are performing well, and field officers continue to fight the “other war”—that is, gaining village support. Along the Mekong River, army helicopters rain propaganda leaflets on disaffected villages. The government has devised civic ac- tion programs to rebuild damaged hamlets, and anti-guerrilla patrols are often accompanied by doctors who bring free medical care to the hill people. But there remain deep misunderstandings. One deputy chief of a village still labeled “pro-Communist,” after having been burned out by Thai police and rebuilt with government aid, told McWhirter: “There was enough left over from the compensation to build the big Buddha image at the temple. Officials seem more polite. This village is ready to be progovernment.” Heavily guarded government teams are also hacking out roads through the forested valleys of the northeast to bring goods from remote villages to market—and allow troops easy access for anti-guerrilla raids. In one of the heaviest such engagements, a Thai-Malaysian force of 4,000 troops—the first cooperative effort of this kind—is waging a joint campaign backed by heavy air and artillery strikes against the guerrillas’ mountain strongholds in the south.

Government Reform. It is clear that the government needs all the grassroots support it can get. To engineer this, Bangkok is relying in part on the activities of the nation’s fastest-growing volunteer movement, the almost 1.5 million-member Village Scouts. Sponsored by the royal family, the scouts preach loyalty to King, country and Buddhism. Besides seeking local allies like the scouts, field commanders claim to have learned from the failures of the U.S. and the Thieu regime in Viet Nam. “If the Thai soldier is corrupt,” says an army major, “then the Thais will lose the same way Laos and Viet Nam lost.”

To avoid that, General Saiyud Kherdpol, director of the anti-guerrilla Internal Security Operations Command, has sketched a strategy for winning popular support. In a strikingly frank book, Thailand’s Future, published last month, Saiyud concedes that military planners “always look at those who suffer and struggle for justice as Communists.” He argues that the government must side with demands for reform in political, economic and administrative structures. Only by doing that, Saiyud feels, can the military undercut the insurgents’ appeals and “keep the people from the influence of the enemy.”