Word: year
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...easy to believe that it had been blown away by the gale of optimism and self-confidence that India's leaders now routinely display. Though India's boom has been tempered by the global economic crisis, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the summit that he expected growth in fiscal year 2009-10 to reach 6.5% - hardly shabby - before recovering in the medium term to the 8% to 9% that was seen in the years before...
Jiranan Phedsri confesses that she has "one true friend." The 51-year-old Thai housewife strokes the object of her affection, caressing its cool curves. The recipient of the devout Buddhist's ardor? A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol Jiranan carries wherever she goes in Thailand's troubled deep south, where a Muslim insurgency has resulted in roughly 4,000 deaths since it gained momentum in 2004. The handgun, though, isn't Jiranan's only trusted companion. As a volunteer in the Iron Ladies, an all-female civilian militia designed to protect Buddhists from Islamic extremists, she received military training...
...which, unlike the rest of the Buddhist-majority country, are 80% Muslim. The region was a Malay sultanate until the early 20th century when Thailand annexed it. While members of both faiths have been killed by Muslim militants, as a proportion of the population more Buddhists have perished. This year looks set to eclipse 2008 in terms of bloodshed. Victims of the extremists, who generally decline to publicly articulate the reason for their terror campaign, range from rubber tappers and teachers to Buddhist monks and Muslim imams, as well as soldiers and police. Just a few years ago, neighbors...
...Trigger-Happy? There's no question that Thailand's southern tip is increasingly awash in guns. The number of legally registered weapons in the three provinces has jumped 10% each year since 2004, and many more are owned illegally. The state readily distributes firearms to everyone from teachers to government officials. In Narathiwat's Tak Bai district, for instance, none of the 56 village chiefs owned a gun before 2004. Now all do. "Guns can't totally protect us against insurgents," says Yoon Yerntorn, chief of Tak Bai's Buddhist Sai Khao village, where five locals have been killed over...
...then that's O.K. because they're just protecting themselves." (Some ethnic Malays concede they are scared of joining state-sponsored militias because insurgents might see them as collaborators and target them.) Racial discrimination continues to fester in Thailand's deep south. An Amnesty International report released earlier this year documented systematic torture of Muslim detainees by Thai security forces. Business and civil-service activity in the south is dominated by Buddhists; the governors of all three provinces, for example, are from that faith...