Thai Muslim south starts new school year with fear
Mon 16 May 2005
By Surapan Boonthanom BAAN LUEMU, Thailand, May 16 (Reuters) -
Students and teachers in Thailand's restive Muslim south began a new school year on Monday guarded by heavily armed soldiers after two schools were set ablaze by suspected militants on the weekend.
Government schools have become the latest targets in the 17-month long violence in the Malay-speaking region where more than 600 people have been killed in attacks the largely Buddhist central government has blamed on Muslim separatists.
Teachers rode to school in pickup trucks guarded by soldiers armed with M-16 automatic rifles and on motorcycles or in Humvee military vehicles.
Many worried parents also escorted their kids to class.
"I am saddened to see this," Asae Masaleng, a father of a six-year-old boy, said as he looked at a fire-damaged Baan Luemu School in Yala province, hit twice by arson attacks in two years.
"The future of my children rests on education. I will never give up sending my children to this school," he said.
Baan Luemu was among two dozen schools attacked by arsonists when the violence began in January last year. At the time, one of its three classroom buildings was destroyed.
The school, which has 300 students, was attacked again last weekend and another two-storey building was badly damaged.
"Why did they have to burn my school," shouted Muhamad Hilae, 10, before he joined other children in singing the Thai national anthem on the school grounds.
In one damaged classroom, a group of girls wearing Muslim headscarfs searched through a pile of charred textbooks.
"Let's see if there are any we can still use," said one girl.
Most of Baan Luemu's younger students started the new term in makeshift tent classrooms, while older ones were assigned to nearby schools, said Attasit Ratanakaew, a senior education ministry official in Yala.
Security officials say schools are an easy target to be attacked in the region where Muslim separatists waged low key insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s, because they are a symbol of Buddhist central government and not well guarded.
Violence remains unabated despite the a variety of government tactics from sending thousands of troops to keep peace in the region to spending millions of dollars to develop the three southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.
Army officials reported 35 small arson attacks in Pattani province on Sunday, the same day that a powerful roadside bomb killed one soldier and wounded five others in nearby province of Narathiwat.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is considering lifting martial law in the region, said he would call a meeting of top security officials later this week to assess the situation in the deep south.
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