Memories of collective victimhood and conflict in southern Thailand Muhammad Arafat Bin Mohamad This article discusses the views and attitudes of the Malay-speaking Muslims of Thailand’s Far South (henceforth, simply the Malays) about their collective position in Thai politics. Since 2004, the Far South, comprising the provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala, has been engulfed in political violence that has claimed several thousand lives. Consequently, the conflict is often the subject of conversations among the Malays. More importantly, the Malays sometimes evoke their collective memory of episodes of past violence involving members of the Far South Malay society and the Thai state in their discussions about contemporary incidents. Why do the Malays hark back to the past when they discuss contemporary political violence? What connections do the Malays make between past and contemporary events? In this article, I discuss Malay collective memory about the Pattani Demonstration of 1975 and the Tomb of Martyrs at the Tok Ayoh Cemetery in Pattani province. I argue that, among the Malays, historic graves in Thailand’s Far South are commem- orative objects that aid the circulation of stories about collective victimhood pertaining to events such as the Pattani Demonstration. Such stories are central to the mainten- ance of a shared sense of community among the Malays vis-à-vis the rest of Thai society. ‘Their corpses were not washed. They were buried as martyrs,’ said Muhammad, a forty-something-year-old Malay resident of Pattani province, Thailand. His remark refers to the Muslim youths who were shot dead by Thailand’s security officers on 28 April 2004. 1 These young men had organised themselves into bands and attacked Muhammad Arafat Bin Mohamad is a Lecturer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Correspondence in connection with this article should be addressed to: sea- mam@nus.edu.sg. I would like to express my gratitude to various interlocutors who have contributed to the research and publication of this article. In the Far South, the assistance and friendships of various persons have been invaluable to the research. They are not individually named here for privacy reasons. Other scholars who have read and commented on several earlier versions of the manuscript include: Christopher Joll, Claudio Sopranzetti, Douglas Kammen, Federico Perez, George Radics, Goh Beng Lan, Irving Chan Johnson, Itty Abraham, Jan Mrazek, Michael Herzfeld, Vatthana Pholsena, and Yoshinori Nishizaki. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their astute comments and sug- gestions. Lastly, I am grateful for the guidance provided by the editor, Maitrii Aung-Thwin, in the final stages of the article’s preparation. All photographs are mine. 1 In Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, ethnicity is often associated with religious identity in everyday speech. A Malay person is often assumed to be Muslim and vice versa. In this article, however, I attempt Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 49(2), pp 204–226 June 2018. 204 © The National University of Singapore, 2018 doi:10.1017/S002246341800019X available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002246341800019X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. National University of Singapore (NUS), on 11 Jun 2018 at 17:13:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,