During a recent visit to the South, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra vowed to bring an end to the violence which has rocked the restive region for almost two decades.
His confidence was buoyed by his close ties with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who recently appointed him as an informal adviser to the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).
This tight relationship seems to raise the prospects of meaningful and productive peace negotiations between the Thai government and Barisan Revolusi National, an Islamist organisation pushing for the creation of an independent state in southern Thailand and the handover of several insurgents who have fled to Malaysia to avoid prosecution.
However, the reality on the ground seems to indicate otherwise.
One day before his visit to the South, a bomb blast killed one person and injured seven others in Yala. Just hours before the plane carrying Thaksin and his entourage landed in Narathiwat, another bomb went off near the air traffic control tower at the airport.
The former PM put on a brave face, saying the bombs did not scare him at all. "I've survived four assassination attempts, so come what may," he told the media before returning to Bangkok on the same day.
The bombs show how far authorities are from their goal of ending the violence in the South. The question that needs to be answered now is whether the new peace plan prepared by the National Security Council (NSC) in sync with reality.
Earlier in the year, Deputy PM and Defence Minister Phumtham Wechayachai ordered the NSC to revise its plan to solve the crisis in the deep South, which was drawn up by the junta when it took over. Critics say the plan places too much focus on the deployment of security personnel to maintain peace in the restive region.
The NSC's new plan brings nothing new to the table. It is nothing but a reformulation of the four-decade-old amnesty policy known as "Order 66/23", which was issued by Prem Tinsulanonda's administration in 1980 to integrate left-leaning students and political activists back into society.
However, the leftist student protests in the 1970s aren't comparable to the insurgency across the deep South.
For one, the insurgents are fighting for greater autonomy from the government or outright succession. The students, meanwhile, were pushing for ideological changes within the government.
Past governments have rolled out similar amnesty policies with limited success -- the most recent being the "Bring People Home" programme that was initiated by the Royal Thai Army in 2018. Out of the 300 people who agreed to take part in the six-month re-education programme, only 39 turned out to have held important posts with the insurgent group -- the rest were rank-and-file members.
No insurgents will voluntarily join the peace negotiations if all the government has to offer are promises of amnesty and job training. The government must also remember that no peace plan will succeed without the participation of the public.
Authorities need to stop looking at the peace talks as quid pro quo negotiations. What the government needs to do is win the hearts of locals in the South. Without a plan to foster trust, the government's plan to resolve the continuing unrest in the southern region will go nowhere.
