Word: thailander
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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...
...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...
...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 nation, and the local Kelantan state government draws inspiration from Islamic Shari'a law.) In another area, under the shade of some trees, a group of young Muslim drug addicts underwent a Koranic-inspired rehabilitation program while Thai soldiers...
...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...