Autonomy and Armed Separatism in South and Southeast Asia

1. The Problem of Armed Separatism: Is Autonomy the Answer?

  tHe problem oF armeD separatism: is autonomy tHe answer? Michelle Ann Miller Over recent decades a number of states in South and Southeast Asia have been troubled by armed separatist movements that have sought to create their own independent polity via physical separation from the parent state. Various forms of autonomy have been promoted by policy-makers and donors as the most democratic way of accommodating separatist insurgents in ethnically, religiously, politically and socially divided states. Despite this, remarkably few states in Asia have succeeded in winning over their aggrieved separatist minorities to the dominant nationalist cause. This situation has created a real dilemma for many states of how much freedom to grant nationalist minority groups without ceding control over their sovereign territories to separatists. This central dilemma of conferring democratic freedoms to sub-state nationalists without compromising state sovereignty has been reflected in the policy choices of governments in South and Southeast Asia. On the one hand, some governments in the region have sought to divert secessionist demands through offers of autonomy and other forms of self-rule. On the other hand, policies of forced assimilation have frequently been employed in a bid to crush armed separatist movements militarily as a precursor to peace. In South and Southeast Asia, many national governments have pursued a dual-track persuasive-repressive policy approach aimed at compelling armed separatists  Michelle Ann Miller to comply with unilateral offers of autonomy through state coercion and military conquest. Resolving this dilemma of reconciling minority independence demands with state claims to sovereignty is by no means a simple or straightforward process. Even when parent states respond to secessionist challenges by deemphasizing a military approach and adopting ameliorative policies aimed at winning would-be separatists back into the broader national fold, separatist insurgents can, and sometimes do, attempt to garner political leverage for their nationalist cause through violent means. Autonomy can strengthen armed separatist movements if they use their increased access to state power and resources to mobilize in opposition to state authority (Cornell 2002, p. 252). For this reason, as John-Mary Kauzya points out, “the difference between decentralization and disintegration is very thin” (2005, p. 4). Striking the right balance between competing nationalistic agendas depends upon a basic level of consensus among the key political actors about the sort of autonomy formula to apply in the realignment of centre-periphery power relations (Horowitz 1981, pp. 166–67). Achieving such a delicate equilibrium between these oppositional interests is contingent upon the suitability of any autonomy design to the conditions and circumstances for which it was created. It also depends on the extent to which promises made by the key political players are kept. In armed separatist conflicts, which are always bloody, often protracted, and usually driven by forces with intransigent and irreconcilable claims to territorial sovereignty, promises about autonomy are frequently broken, perpetuating deep mutual mistrust. Under such circumstances, the capacity and willingness of parent states to negotiate shared rule outcomes with their aggrieved minorities is especially uncertain (Varennes 2007, p. 50; Weller 2009, p. 114). The contributors to this volume came together at the “International Workshop on Autonomy and Armed Separatism in South and Southeast Asia”, held in 2008 at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. They considered the core question of whether autonomy can offer a viable substitute for self-determination for armed separatist minorities in Asian national contexts. The authors explored the nexus between government offers of autonomy and the rise or fall of armed separatism in seven South and Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, India and Indonesia’s former province of East Timor. In terms of political geography, the region is awash with states that inherited national borders from former colonial masters in the post-Second World War period of decolonization (or, in the case of East Timor, experienced secondary colonialism under Indonesian rule, 1976–99). Even in Thailand, where no The Problem of Armed Separatism: Is Autonomy the Answer?  formal colonization took place, the borders of Siam (as Thailand was called until 1939, and from 1945 to 1949) were to some extent determined by independence settlements between British and French colonial powers and the newly independent nation-states of neighbouring Malaysia, Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Into these reconfigured independent states the incorporation of dispersed ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic minority groups was neither a process of comfortable assimilation nor...