July 5,
2008: There continue to be several
religious murders a week in the south. The violence has been declining, but
slowly. Since early 2004, over 3,300 have died, and most of the Buddhists
living in the Moslem south have left the area. This is what the Islamic
radicals want, but the government is determined to defeat this latest
insurrection to threaten more than a century of Buddhist Thai rule in the Moslem
Malay south. The ethnic and religious differences have been a constant source
of tension, and the current popularity of al Qaeda and drug smugglers has led
to an increase in ethnic violence. But several years of work by the police and
army intelligence in the south have revealed who the primary terrorists are,
and led to increasingly successful search operations in the bush. The capture
of terrorist camps, plus the occasional firefights with camp occupants, hurt
terrorist recruiting, morale, and capabilities. The Thais are determined to
repeat past campaigns against rebellious Moslems and grind them down and stamp
out the violence. That's what appears to be happening, although this time the
government is also offering more economic assistance in the south. Unlike the
rest of Thailand, which has undergone enormous economic growth in the past few
decades, the south has lagged behind. This is largely due to less education and
more hostility to outsiders. Attempts to improve education, and the importation
of many Buddhist teachers (as there were no Moslem ones available), is one justification
for the current Islamic terror campaign. The economic programs are turning some of the
southerners away from the gangsters and Islamic terrorists who are behind most
of the current unrest.
June 28,
2008: Train service has resumed in the
south, less than a week after Islamic terrorists shot up a passenger train.
June 26,
2008: Over the last three years, about
20 percent of the 150,000 Burmese refugees living in camps along the Burmese
border, have been resettled in Western countries (most in the United States). Meanwhile,
the military dictatorship in Burma (Myanmar) survived the damage (both domestic
and diplomatic) from the recent typhoon. However, the lack of government support
for the typhoon victims allowed the Buddhist monks to further enhance their
reputation. Many of the half million monks for involved in disaster relief, and
the government did not use force to stop them. The monks are the only organized
force in the nation that have opposed the dictatorship and survived. That's
mainly because most of the 400,000 troops in the armed forces are Buddhist, and
reluctant to attack the monks.