Word: south
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...learn from the monarch's 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...
...will lessons in crop yields 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...
...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 completely covered but for their eyes. (The area of Malaysia bordering Thailand's Yala province is among the most conservative in that Southeast Asian...