Thailand's endless woe

[Guest wowpow]

 

Thursday, Jul. 19, 2007

Thailand's Endless Woe

By Andrew Marshall

The teachers are late for school again. It happens almost every morning at Ban Bukoh village in Thailand's troubled Pattani province, but the kids are getting used to it. The girls busy themselves by sweeping the corridor outside the government school's single row of tiny classrooms. The boys crib last-minute homework from each other. Then the men with guns arrive—six of them in a pickup truck, two more on a motorbike, all toting M-16 assault rifles. It is the job of these government militiamen to protect two cars and five motorbikes carrying a dozen teachers. Their convoy speeds into this sleepy village with the well-rehearsed urgency of a presidential motorcade.

The teachers coax the children into ragged lines in the schoolyard for a solemn morning assembly. A week before, an arson attack by Muslim insurgents had razed the old school building; some pupils wept when they saw the charred remains of their classrooms. "I don't have to ask how you feel," announces Mayakoh Cheyara, 47, the school principal. "I can see just by looking at your faces. But we all have to be strong." An older boy leads a short prayer in Arabic—all Ban Bukoh's 200 pupils are Muslims—and the national anthem is played. "Thais love peace, but aren't afraid to fight," the children sing as the Thai flag is raised between fire-scorched trees. The words can't mean much—some of the children are fresh out of kindergarten. But even the youngest among them must be dimly aware that a conflict is raging in Thailand's three southernmost provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, and that its battle lines run right through their schoolyard.

The torching at Ban Bukoh was one of more than 100 arson attacks on the region's state schools this year, against 37 in 2006, with nearly 80 teachers and school officials killed. Many were murdered with calculated savagery. In December, a school director and a teacher, aged 59 and 52, were gunned down a few hundred meters from their school in Yala; the four assailants then doused the bodies with gasoline and set them alight. In January, a kindergarten teacher died after eight months in a coma; she had been dragged from her class in Narathiwat by a Muslim mob and beaten until her skull shattered. And more than 300 government schools in Narathiwat were temporarily closed after insurgents killed three teachers last month. Two were women, shot dead in the school library by two gunmen while a hundred horrified children looked on.

 

An in depth article on the horror at • http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1644900,00.html

If only one had the answer.

[Guest BKKvisitor]

Unfortunately, there may be no "answer" to these woes anymore than there may be one to insurgent attacks in Iraq where citizens continue to kill fellow citizens. They cannot be mollified and they do not respond to the extended olive branch. Terrorism ends only when young men tire of dying for an old men's war.