Word: pichet
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...handing thousands of firearms to briefly trained and skittish citizens the best strategy? Lieutenant General Pichet Wisaijorn, the Fourth Army commander in charge of security in a region fortified by miles of razor wire and tons of sandbag bunkers, contends that there's no alternative to a weapons buildup. "If everyone threw away their guns, that would be wonderful," he says. "But if the insurgents have guns and no one else does, that's not fair. We have to help people feel secure, and guns give them protection...
...even as some 60,000 soldiers, police, paramilitaries and other government-backed militias patrol Thailand's three insurgency-wracked southern provinces, Lieut. General Pichet is focusing much of his personal effort on winning hearts and minds through the King's Sufficiency Economy project. The south is one of Thailand's poorest regions, and the Thai military says that thousands of villagers have willingly come to the center, mostly for one-day trainings on the merits of organic agriculture using a bio-fertilizer promoted by King Bhumibol. "Even within the military, some people believe I am wasting my time because they...
...patch of garden in troubled Yala is the brainchild of the Fourth Army Region Commander Lieut. General Pichet Wisaijorn, who is the military officer in charge of Thailand's far south. The 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...
...Unlike some of his more iron-fisted colleagues, Pichet has won grudging respect from some locals for attempting to promote sectarian harmony through military overtures. As he gave a rambling slide-show lecture on Sufficiency Economy to members of a local chamber of commerce (some of whom snoozed in the tropical heat), there was no doubting the commander's sincere belief that the project would promote the Thai nation's cause in the south. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the complex, young Buddhist army officers earnestly gave lessons on proper fertilizer use to groups of veiled Muslim women, some of whom were...
...Pichet dismisses allegations that his men might be part of the problem in Thailand's south. When asked about the Amnesty International report released earlier this year documenting systematic military abuse of local civilians, the Fourth Army commander first says he has never heard of the report, then switches tactics and claims that the group's researchers didn't spend much time in the south collecting their information. Pichet acknowledges that the hearts and minds of suspicious Muslim villagers can't be won overnight. But the country still faces a tough battle in its bloody south, no matter how impressively...