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| Southeast Asia |
| Thailand may need 10 years to bring peace to the south |
| 2004-07-23 |
| Thailand may need at least 10 years to bring full peace to the mainly Muslim south, where nearly 300 people have been killed in a burst of violence since January, Defence Minister Chetta Thanajaro said on Friday. The government plans to sink $300 million over the next three years into social and economic development in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, where 80 percent of the people are ethnic Malay Muslims. But Chetta said the problems, which date back centuries, were so deeply rooted they would take a decade or longer to resolve. "If we really want to see a sustainable solution and a very stable region, I would say it would take at least 10 years," Chetta told Reuters in the provincial town of Pattani. "Even that may be too quick," he added. Chetta and other government ministers said they are at a loss to pinpoint the precise roots or motives of the violence, citing a complex mix of history, corruption, crime, drugs, religion and separatism that racked the region in the 1970s and 1980s. They say, however, the instigators appear to have used a network of unregulated Islamic schools funded by Saudi and other Middle Eastern money as recruiting grounds for embittered Muslim youths. Chetta put their number at several hundred. He said the little intelligence available suggested secret initiation ceremonies involving oaths of blind allegiance sworn on the Koran used to brainwash recruits, although there was no evidence of links to al Qaeda or its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiah. "We want to know what's in their minds," he said. In an attempt to win hearts and minds, Chetta toured the area this week with Thailand's Islamic spiritual leader, 90-year-old Sawas Sumalyasak. One influential Muslim scholar they met, Ismail Lutfi, welcomed the government's approach and said trouble had been brewing for years. "All these problems have piled up into a great big rubbish heap and some ill-willed people have come along and lit a fire under it which is getting more severe," he said. Lutfi, a Saudi-educated traditionalist, is rector of the Yala Islamic College, which was built with funds from the Islamic Development Bank and has 1,300 students. The government had no right to criticise foreign funding of Islamic institutions given that it had neglected its own Muslim population until now, he said. "Foreign funding eased tension and resentment among the locals. The government should have been grateful to the Islamic countries that support us," he said. He dismissed a suggestion from Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakual that rock music, soap operas and movies would win over Muslim youths by replacing fanaticism with fun. "Such entertainment is not in accordance with Islamic culture here and I don't think the Islamic leadership here would agree to that," Lutfi said. "The government would do better to give them an education and job training." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |