Posted on 01/28/2004 5:42:25 AM PST by JimSEA
The government orders the move amid fears of fresh violence in the restive provinces bordering Malaysia
BANGKOK - Thailand ordered massive school closures across its Muslim-majority south yesterday as the region grappled with an eruption of violence against government targets and Buddhist monks.
Bird flu and southern violence: Thaksin's toughest challenges
The Thai PM feels that he is being tested to the limit.
All 248 schools in Narathiwat province were closed and at least 40 per cent of schools in two other provinces were shut down after emergency meetings on the crisis.
'We have decided to close all schools in Narathiwat for three days until Friday as there is concern about rumours of possible attacks and abduction' of students and teachers, the province's teachers' council said in a statement.
The decision affected all public and private primary and secondary schools, said Narathiwat teacher Adisak Apiraksakul, who attended yesterday's crisis meeting in the province.
'We had heard that there were plans to abduct a teacher in Bacho district,' Adisak said, referring to a district in Narathiwat.
Earlier yesterday, Deputy Education Minister Sirikorn Maneerin said she had authorised school administrators in Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala - which all border Malaysia - to shut down schools if they felt threatened.
'As of now, some 40 per cent of schools in those three provinces have closed,' she told reporters.
The provinces this month have witnessed a wave of attacks on soldiers, police officers and Buddhist monks who reportedly are now seeking to leave the deep south following the brutal murders of three monks as they walked in public receiving alms.
The Bangkok Post said monks were requesting reassignment from their temples in Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, and the temples had asked for police protection.
The spate of attacks in the region, home to a long-running but now considerably weakened separatist movement, began on Jan 4 with a raid on an army depot in Narathiwat in which four soldiers were killed, and simultaneous arson attacks on 18 schools and two police checkpoints.
Two police officers were killed the next day in a bombing in Pattani.
One monk was murdered last Thursday in Narathiwat, followed by the killings of two more on Saturday in Yala, where a policeman was also shot dead.
The government has fumbled in its attempts to say who it believes is to blame for the ongoing violence, variously saying bandits, separatists and 'mujahideen' were responsible.
For several years, school teachers in the south, seen as representatives of the national government, have been the target of violent attacks, but violence against Buddhist monks was previously unknown.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra warned on Monday that the first curfew in two decades could be clamped on the region if the violence was not halted. -- AFP
BANGKOK - Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday that the deadly bird flu epidemic combined with violence in the Muslim-majority south marked his worst political crisis.
Mr Thaksin, who is under fire for the way his government has handled the outbreak of the disease which has killed at least two people in Thailand, told his ministers that he was being tested to the limit.
A billionaire businessman before sweeping to power in January 2001, the Premier is also struggling to cope with a mounting death toll in the deep south where a Muslim separatist rebellion has rumbled on for decades.
The father of a six-year-old boy who was the first of two victims of bird flu has joined accusations that the government mounted a cover-up of the outbreak.
Mr Thaksin, who has looked haggard and stressed during public appearances in the past week, bristled at the charge but expressed condolences to the families of the victims and repeated his assurances that no cover-up had occurred.
'We don't know exactly what we are fighting with here, and the government wants to reiterate that we are not playing games with Thai people's lives by covering up any information,' he said. -- AFP
Allowing the rebellion to "rumble on" for decades is a mistake. He should take decisive action to crush it completely.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Thai government has warned against a Muslim-Buddhist "religious conflict" after assassins killed two Buddhist monks and a novice in southern Thailand, while the army canceled sending Israeli-trained Thai troops to Iraq because they might anger Iraqis.
"Don't take what happened as a religious conflict, otherwise we could become a tool of the [Muslim] separatists," warned Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after three members of the Buddhist clergy were killed in Thailand's Muslim-majority south.
Muslims fighting for a separate Islamic nation are suspected of countless bombings, arson attacks, shootings and other assaults during the past several years in southern Thailand, to destabilize Bangkok's grip and allow Islamic Sharia law to dominate there instead.
"I will never let anyone take away even a square inch of Thai soil," the prime minister vowed in his weekly radio broadcast on Saturday.
Hours earlier, assassins killed a 65-year-old Buddhist monk and his 13-year-old novice - the latest victims in a new strategy of assaults against saffron-robed clergy. Previously, Buddhist religious figures were not a main target in the violence-racked south.
Four men on two motorcycles ambushed their victims while the monk and novice strolled barefoot, silently collecting alms on Saturday in Yala, about 1,000 kilometers south of Bangkok, according to police reports.
On Thursday, a sword-wielding man on the back of a motorcycle driven by his partner sliced a 64-year-old monk to death while the shaven-headed Buddhist walked to a temple in nearby Narathiwat province, police said.
Islam and Buddhism are at different ends of the spiritual spectrum because, unlike Islam, there is no "god" in Buddhist belief. Muslims also denounce the "worshipping of idols", while statues of Buddha appear throughout Thailand and are revered by bowing Buddhists who comprise more than 90 percent of this Southeast Asian nation's population.
Some Buddhist scholars say the statues are not to be "worshipped" but instead used as a symbolic portal, similar to a spiritual keyhole, enabling seekers to transcend earthly existence and the illusions of human thought. Afghanistan's former Muslim Taliban regime, however, judged the huge, ancient Bamiyan statues of Buddha in central Afghanistan as a "idols" and unleashed multi-barreled rocket launchers and tanks to obliterate the pair in 2001 while cheering and praising Allah.
Some of Southeast Asia's Muslims trained in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the US-backed mujahideen received massive funding from Washington and successfully ended the "godless communist" Soviet Union's decade-long occupation. Others trained there in the 1990s when Osama bin Laden and the strict, Saudi-inspired Wahhabi sect of Islam increased their influence in Afghanistan.
Thai officials suspect that returnees from Afghanistan, plus Wahhabi-financed religious schools, have influenced some Thai Muslims at more than 100 small, private Islamic campuses in the south. Relentless arson attacks on government schools in the south during the past decade have been blamed on Muslims who want to cripple the official education system so more Muslim children end up in local Islamic schools or fundamentalist institutions in the Middle East.
In a separate development, Thailand's army canceled plans to fly about a dozen Israeli-trained Thai soldiers to Iraq, "to end concerns about possibly upsetting the Iraqis", the English-language Bangkok Post reported on Sunday. Israel trained the soldiers in desert farming techniques in the Jewish state, but Bangkok's Defense Ministry "worried about negative consequences for the mission due to conflicts between Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East", the paper said.
According to the Defense Ministry's deputy spokesman, Palangkoon Klaharn, a substitute team will go from Bangkok to Karbala instead, and use their experience gained at farm projects in Thailand. No Israeli-trained Thai forces have been sent to Iraq, where more than 420 Thai troops are stationed, he stressed.
Two Thai soldiers, both sergeant-majors, died in Iraq last month when assailants attacked their military camp in Karbala.
A Thai Muslim, Colonel Montri Umaree, has reportedly been selected to become the new commander of Thai forces in Iraq, beginning in March.
Isn't this the most amazing and stupid thing a head of state has said recently.
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