Word: conflict
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bangkok military seminar in February concluded that the conflict in southern Thailand, now entering its sixth year, "will get worse before it gets any better." In the same week, insurgents gunned down a village chief, blew up two people and shot two soldiers, mutilating and burning the corpses. Some 3,300 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since 2004. Exactly how much worse does it need...
...British academic Duncan McCargo counters such heartless defeatism with Tearing Apart the Land, an introduction to a scandalously underreported conflict. Most of the 1.8 million people in Thailand's three southernmost provinces are Malay-speaking Muslims, but they make up only 2% of a largely Thai-speaking Buddhist country. For a century, attempts at assimilation have been met with resentment and rebellion. The current hostilities erupted under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose hard-line response to what he dismissed as banditry turned sporadic militant attacks into a full-blown insurgency...
...Despite its Islamic overtones - insurgents rail against "Siamese infidels" - this is not a holy war but a rebellion driven by homegrown historical and political grievances. McCargo rightly scorns the legions of post-9/11 armchair analysts who try to shoehorn every conflict into well-Googled theories of global jihad. No armchairs for this author: he researched the book by crisscrossing southern Thailand in a temperamental 1989 Mercedes, hastening back to the town of Pattani by nightfall to avoid militant booby traps. McCargo is the real McCoy...
...Abhisit Vejjajiva, Thailand's new Prime Minister, hasn't helped much. He has extended an emergency decree that makes it hard for rights-abusing soldiers and police to be prosecuted, and his vow to boost the halal-food industry and other local projects does not address the conflict's complex roots. By blankly rejecting Amnesty International's recent claims that the Thai military was systematically torturing Malay Muslims, Abhisit also struck a yoga position familiar in Thai politics: saving face by burying your head in the sand...
...people over the next 10 years - combined with climate change will likely mean that far more Asians will be tapping shrinking sources of water. Water wouldn't be a sole trigger for war but rather a "threat multiplier" - a factor that worsens the social instability that can lead to conflict. That can happen even inside a country - one of the most violent protests in recent Chinese history occurred in April 2005, when over 30,000 villagers in Zhejiang province clashed with police over water pollution from a local chemical plant...