Published on November 30, 2004

People in the country’s southernmost provinces will purportedly be showered with love and sympathy this weekend. At the latest count, more than 20 million origami birds have been folded by their compatriots from around the country, and when they are dropped from the skies on December 5, it will send an unmistakable message of deep concern and caring.

But I’m just not sure whether love and caring are enough. At this crucial juncture, understanding and respect seem a lot more important. The deep South is a wild child at the moment, and every effort to rein this child in appears to have backfired. The carrot has been spurned, and the stick has only served to galvanise him.

The paper birds will rain down on a region feeling isolated, resentful and full of doubt, and the residents can be forgiven if they greet the falling messages of love with cynicism or confusion. After all, those who died in the infamous Tak Bai clampdown are still portrayed as insurgents or, at best, potential rioters who somehow deserved to be punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Few grieve for them except relatives, friends and fellow Muslims. Those who do are branded unpatriotic, and attempts to seek justice for the deaths have all but evaporated.

Young Thai Muslims are being stereotyped as troublemakers being brainwashed to be anti-state, while the suffering of Thai Buddhists has received the greatest attention. The local education system is suspected of breeding future terrorists. The line between being a separatist militant, a sympathiser and simply a southern Thai Muslim has become increasingly blurred.

If only the Thaksin administration could utilise its marketing and persuasive power that triggered the paper-bird frenzy in a more constructive manner. Instead, the indignant region has heard from the highest authorities such comments as “We won’t keep them [troublemakers] to be our fathers”. Generalisations and stereotypes are what the separatists want in order to fulfil their goal, and the on-going campaign of love does little to stem this.

After decades of relatively peaceful co-existence, we have taken a lot of things for granted. Some of our Muslim friends can join us at a lunch or dinner table where pork is served and we assume that all Muslims can handle the same situation. We can take part in Christian weddings and we think Muslims shouldn’t have any trouble participating in non-Islamic rituals. We have so many things other than Buddha statues and amulets to worship that we forget that to our Muslim friends, nothing stands between them and God.

Perhaps ignorance is not to blame. Perhaps the majority of Muslim residents of the deep South have been generally happy as Thai citizens. And perhaps those responsible for the daily killings, occasional bombings and acts of arson are just an unreasonably fanatical movement.

But why have things been deteriorating so fast since the beginning of the year? Why in a matter of months has the separatist issue gone from “they are just a small group of bandits” to something that requires 60 million paper birds to be dropped from the sky?

Is the separatist element really that good and shrewd? Is it so easy to cook up resentment and turn an entire ethnic minority against the state by killing two or three “majority” citizens everyday and by provoking the authorities into responding in kind? Is the state so naive as to fall into such a trap? If the answers are all “no”, then something else must have been seriously wrong long before the eruption of violence early this year.

Nobody knows how many of the Thais who made the paper birds approve the Tak Bai killings. But some messages seen on those folded papers are unsettling. Some were apparently addressed to Thai Buddhists or government troops asking them to “fight on”. Prime Minister Thaksin has made the objective of the campaign more ambiguous by vowing to reward anyone who finds the paper bird bearing his signature.

Ironically, the origami campaign is taking place at a time when the nation is on the verge of splitting into “us” and “them”. Government-controlled television stations have all but glorified the senior military officers responsible for the Tak Bai clampdown. Web boards have been bombarded with eye-for-an-eye messages. Hate letters have been sent to newspapers, senators and academics critical of the protesters’ dubious deaths.

In this kind of environment, the paper birds will have to brave more than winds, storms and rain to get the message of love across to the people of deep South.

Tulsathit Taptim

The Nation

Tulsathit Taptim is managing editor of The Nation.