 The violence in Buddhist Thailand's Muslim-majority south, in which more than 700 people have been killed since January 2004, is not a religious conflict, the head of an international Muslim delegation said yesterday.
| "It's... ummm... something else." |
"The roots of the problem could be anything but religion," Sayed El-Masri, a former assistant secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, said after a tour of the troubled provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
| "It's probably the heat. It gets pretty hot here..." |
"Compared with many other countries, we find here permissiveness and tolerance. Nobody interferes with the Muslim community," he told a news conference in Bangkok.
| Maybe that's the problem... |
The government has imposed martial law on parts of the far south, a relatively undeveloped region along the Malaysian border, where 80 percent of the population is Muslim.
| It wasn't long ago that all of Thailand was "relatively undeveloped." It's pure coincidence, no doubt, that the Mooselimbs are lagging... |
El-Masri said he hoped the government would take steps to ensure tragedies such as October's Tak Bai incident, in which 78 Muslim protesters died in army custody, were not repeated.
| Ummm... Were they protesters or rioters? I forget... |
However, he said that, overall, southern Thai Muslims did not appear to get a raw deal — even though they have described themselves regularly as second-class citizens in the past. "They are carrying out their culture and religion freely. We have seen schools supported by the government imparting Islamic teaching. We have seen universities in the south also supported by the government for Islamic studies," El-Masri said. "We have observed so many elements that point out that tolerance is practiced in this part of the world." |