Sowing peace in southern
Thailand By Marwaan
Macan-Markaar
LUBO SAMA, Thailand - In the
shimmering paddy fields and leafy rubber
plantations that stretch across a 400 square
kilometer area, a new crop is struggling to take
root - peace.
In this corner of southern
Thailand close to the Malaysian border, an
enthusiastic army colonel is leading his troops in
a task to build a bridge of trust with the local
residents - the country's ethnic Malay-Muslim
minority.
Some 700 Thai soldiers are
engaged in this "hearts-and-minds" operation,
trading their uniforms and weapons for farming
implements and helping
out the Malay-Muslim villagers as they sow their
rice fields and tap rubber trees.
"I tell
my troops they have to reach out to the
community," said Colonel Songwit Noonpackdee, who
was assigned to southern Narathiwat province last
November to address the deep distrust with which
the Muslims view the Thai military, the police and
the government.
The reality that
confronted the 40-year-old colonel when he started
out was bitter. Only days before, 78 Muslim boys
and men from the small town of Tak Bai died of
suffocation while in military custody.
Since January 2004 more than 1,000 people
have been killed on either side of this emerging
conflict spread over the three southern provinces
of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, all of which have
predominantly Malay-Muslim populations. The
killings seem almost a daily occurrence. Two Thai
policemen were killed and three civilians wounded
in a bomb explosion Monday morning on a railway in
the southern province of Songkhla. In a separate
incident, two Chinese vendors were killed Friday
in a drive-by shooting in Narathiwat.
In
the face of this killing, some are trying to make
a difference. The only way to overcome the
prevailing mistrust is to "build a sustainable
peace" through "strong civic action", said
Songwit, who belongs to Thailand's majority
Buddhist community. "The troops have to be trained
for this."
Bonds are already visible in
Muslim villages such as Lubo Sama, a community of
some 200 families who live off farming, rubber
tapping and fish breeding.
After dark on a
Friday, for instance, the colonel feels secure
walking about the narrow streets and closely
clustered homes accepting, with an air of
familiarity, the greetings of Muslim men and
women.
Some of the villagers even admit
that hardly any of their youth have left to join
the suspected Malay-Muslim separatists the Thai
government accuses of being behind the
20-month-old conflict.
"No one has gone
from our village to fight," community leader
Rusuewa Maseng said. "It is safe in our village
but I cannot say what happens outside."
But this village appears to be less of a
challenge for the Thai government than the more
than 350 villages Bangkok identified in February
as "red zones" for "separatist activity" in the
south. That is, if the torching of Lubo Sama's
school by suspected insurgents on January 4 last
year is not counted.
The army's
initiatives are winning praise from sections of
Thai society committed to resolving the conflict
through cooperation rather than might. "It is good
that there are efforts to work with the people as
part of the hearts and minds campaign," said Jaran
Ditapichai, a commissioner on Thailand's national
human rights body.
Ditapichai, however,
concedes that it will take some time before the
initiatives bear fruit. "At the moment, the Thai
government and the Thai people do not see a light
at the end of the tunnel," he said in an IPS
interview.
To strengthen the hearts and
minds program, the country's recently appointed
National Reconciliation Committee (NRC) is urging
the government of Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra to establish community peace
initiatives in the troubled south.
"In the
past, one of the main obstacles to peace has been
the refusal of local people to cooperate with the
government because they did not trust them," NRC
member Paisarn Promyong was quoted in Thai Day
newspaper.
Yet, even those Malay-Muslims
who are willing to openly cooperate with Bangkok
harbor reservations about the extent to which the
troops and the government can be trusted because
of a long record of discrimination.
One
senior educator revealed this while talking with
Thai officials about the escalating violence here
while whispering asides to journalists he can
confide in. "It is not just about separatism now.
It is something more," he said.
This
long-time resident of the Malay-Muslim south knows
only too well the effects of Bangkok's policies of
discrimination that start with a four-decade-old
ban on the use of the Yawi language in all
state-run schools.
Apart from religion,
Yawi, the Malay dialect that the Malay-Muslims
here speak, marks them as a distinct ethnic
community among Thailand's 64 million people - 95%
of whom are Buddhist and speak Thai.
Combined with economic neglect and a
non-sympathetic bureaucracy, linguistic and
cultural discrimination that stretch back decades
have been at the root of separatist movements by
the Malay-Muslims.
The goal of these
failed rebellions is the restoration of the
defunct Muslim kingdom of Pattani, which included
the three southern provinces annexed in 1902 by
Siam, as Thailand was formerly known.
It
is to prevent a new and more violent phase of
separatism developing that Songwit has commanded
his troops to follow strict principles of
non-retaliation. "We do not take revenge when
soldiers are attacked."
Equally important
is the civic action "to win over at the village
level" the local communities by lending a hand
with the paddy farming and rubber tapping - in an
innovative labor of peace.
