Word: buddhists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...area was once a Malay Muslim sultanate, but Thailand, then known as Siam, annexed the region in the early 20th century. Since then some Muslim residents, who make up roughly 80% of the local population, have complained of feeling like second-class citizens in what elsewhere is a predominantly Buddhist land. Sporadic violence in the deep south bloomed into a full-scale insurgency in 2004. Overtly Buddhist targets like monks and teachers have been murdered by shadowy perpetrators, while Muslims thought to be collaborators with the government have been killed as well. In recent months, the Thai government has unleashed...
...Sufficiency Economy philosophy, which bundles together concepts of sustainable development, rural self-reliance and equitable income distribution. But there's a difference to this vast botanical project: unlike others in the rest of Thailand, this one is located in the country's Muslim-majority south, where suspicion of the Buddhist-dominated state has spawned a bloody insurgency that has claimed more than 3,700 lives, both Muslim and Buddhist, since...
...truly ease tensions in Thailand's south? In the year since the gardening project was unveiled, the number of violent incidents in Thailand's deep south has only increased, despite army protests that this is a last-ditch, desperate campaign of terrorism from the insurgents. And while any overtly Buddhist undertones of the King's Sufficiency Economy theory have been stripped away in the south, there's no question that the royal economic philosophy draws succor from the Buddhist concept of the Middle Path. (Indeed, one fish-breeding program at the center was recently suspended because a Buddhist monk...
...Three decades later, Chinese society has fully blossomed. Chinese today experience a wide variety of personal freedoms in daily life that they and their ancestors had never known. Chinese state and society have also reconnected with the past, emphasizing Confucian and Buddhist values. More than 200 million people have been lifted out of poverty and the members of a growing middle class with disposable income travel abroad, invest in the stock market, dine out and decorate their stylish apartments with furniture purchased from stores like Ikea. Access to education has become far more widespread. Some 21 million students attend university...
...worst brutality for ethnic groups. International human-rights organizations have documented a wide array of abuses against minorities, ranging from forced labor and army conscription to mass rape and village relocations that have displaced 500,000 people in eastern Burma alone. Complicating matters, some ethnic groups are not Buddhist in a country where the junta celebrates that faith and often persecutes those who do not. (The Kachin, Chin and many Karen, for example, are Christian.) Career trajectories for many ethnic minorities are stunted. Despite their proud martial tradition, Kachin know it's nearly impossible to rise in the Burmese army...