ABSTRACT
On 16 July 2004, there was a closed-door roundtable on ‘A Proposal from the Civil Society Sector on Southern Violence’, organized by the Peace Information Center and Fa Diew Kan magazine, at the Faculty of Political Science of Thammasat University, Bangkok. Some thirty participants, including academics, members of the media, religious leaders, NGO activists from Southern Thailand and others from Bangkok, attended the seminar. A professor from a state university in Pattani said that after the killing of Buddhist monks, which began on 22 January 2004, her daughter returned from school and complained that her friends refused to speak to her. When pressed for the reason behind their attitude, some said that their mothers had forbidden them from speaking or playing with the young Muslim girl because ‘the Muslims killed the monks’. The professor then said that on 28 April, at the height of the violence, she and her children travelled from Pattani to nearby Narathiwat. Her daughter cried all the way as she was afraid of falling victim to militant violence. Similarly, her daughter cried every night whenever the professor’s husband, a noted public intellectual in the south and presently an opposition Member of Parliament, went out on his frequent speaking engagements because she was afraid that he might not return home. Presumably, he could have been taken away by state authorities, as has been the fate of more than a hundred people in the area. In desperate bewilderment, the professor asked a religious leader from the south who was sitting next to her, ‘How could democracy turn out to be so barbaric?’ (Fa Diew Kan 2004: 159).
