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EDUCATION-THAILAND: Full Marks for Ethnic Tolerance Class

Marwaan Macan-Markar

HAT YAI, Mar 29 2007 (IPS) - School holidays, which begins here in March and ends in May, have taken on a different ring this year for over 150 teenagers from Thailand’s southern provinces, where an increasingly bloody insurgency is raging.

During a seven-day stretch, Malay-Muslim high school students like Nuttrisia Thirachote joined Thai-Buddhist high schooler Tiradet Yodkaew for an initiative aimed at building community bonds through education.

The presence of the two 16-year-old girls at the ‘Bringing Young Hearts Together for Knowledge Sharing’ camp, which ran from Mar. 21 to 28, could not have been more apt. They have both been touched by the pain of the violence that has intensified across the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani since January 2004.

Nuttrisia, who comes from Yala, lost an uncle two months ago to the conflict. He was killed when a bomb exploded in the government office he worked. Tiradet’s reminder of the brutality in her midst was a week before she drove from Yala to the city of Hat Yai, in Songkhla province, which is next to the troubled region, to attend the youth camp. The father of her school friend was killed in a now familiar style of attacks. He was shot while riding a motorcycle on the way to a school, where he was a teacher.

What is more, the classrooms where the male and female students followed lessons in chemistry, physics and biology to English, social studies and mathematics also opened another vista. It was the first time that some of the teenagers from the Malay-Muslim community were in school together with those who are Thai-Buddhists.

”Every day at this camp taught me how to live with others having a different religion and culture,” says Nuttrisa, who is currently enrolled at Thamma Withaya School, which is the largest private Islamic college in Yala. This school, which has over 5,000 pupils, has been in the headlines since the current cycle of violence began, with some of its staff being accused by Bangkok of fuelling the insurgency and its premises raided on occasions by heavily armed troops.

Tiradet, who attends a state school in Yala, welcomed this unique encounter during her school holidays for the new friendships that have developed across the two cultures. ”To learn about the Buddhist and Muslim cultures in the classroom and after is very good to change our minds,” she says.

For the 17 university students who played a part as teachers in this inter-cultural exchange, the occasion was as rewarding. ”I learnt about the fears these students have to live with daily because of the bombs and the shootings,” says Sarin Utamapimol, 19, a first-year medical student from Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ”It was better coming here and teaching than staying in Bangkok during the holidays and going shopping with my friends or doing nonsense things.”

And just how significant this experiment matters to the Thai military, which hosted this gathering of students in a school building located within the perimeter of the Senanarong military camp in Hat Yai, was revealed on the final day. The guest of honour for the closing ceremonies was the head of the country’s junta, Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin.

”Winning the hearts and minds of the (Malay-Muslim) youth is the biggest difficulty the government is facing in the south,” Gen. Sonthi told reporters afterwards. ”Because they have been brainwashed.”

”The youth selected by the insurgents have been chosen carefully,” he added. ”They are the ones who have good grades in education and are loyal to the religion.”

Thailand’s military leaders, who came to power after driving twice-elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra from office, are facing an insurgency that has spiked in its intensity and viciousness since the Sep. 19 putsch. A mid-March massacre brought the brutality into sharper relief. On that day, nine civilians, including three women and a girl, who were travelling in a van, were singled out and shot at close range.

Other daring attacks across the three southern provinces and Songkhla, near the Malaysian border, has seen the death toll reach 2,100 victims in the over three-year spiral of violence. And the bombings, beheadings and drive-by shootings has seen the relationships between the Malay-Muslim and Buddhist communities fray in some areas, while a gulf between the two have emerged in other areas.

The long-time Thai-Buddhist residents of the area accuse Bangkok of doing little to protect their lives and their interests from the Malay-Muslim insurgency. Of late, more Thai-Buddhists are turning to arming themselves to bolster their security.

The Malay-Muslims, who account for over half the death toll, admit to being cornered due to the pressure from the government to show loyalty to the state and from the militants who threaten them with death if they are perceived as ”collaborators.”

Malay-Muslims make up the majority in this South-east Asian country’s southern provinces and form the largest minority in a country where nearly 95 percent of the population is Buddhist, by faith. The two communities have different languages, the majority speaking Thai and the minority using Yawei, a Malay dialect. History, too, makes them distinct, since the southern provinces were once part of the Muslim kingdom of Pattani till they were annexed by Siam in 1902, as Thailand was known then.

Thailand’s south has seen separatist violence erupt in the late 1960s and continue through cycles of intensity. It followed decades of disaffection the Malay-Muslim minority felt towards Bangkok’s policies, including charges of cultural, political and economic discrimination.

Schools in the south have been on the frontline of this conflict, with militants attacking the state schools for undermining Malay-Muslim identity through forced assimilation programmes and the military storming Islamic schools on the grounds that they are breeding ground for insurgents.

But not everyone feels that the space created for reconciliation at the youth camp here in March will produce merit. ”These are unfortunately the shallow programmes that the government keeps doing with students. They don’t produce results,” says a Muslim doctor from Yala, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”The divide between the Muslims and the Buddhists is growing. The violence has succeeded in separating the people.”