Malaysia vows to help to solve Thai unrest
Malaysia vows to help to solve Thai unrest
Nopporn Wong-Anan, Reuters, Bangkok
Thailand and Malaysia agreed on Thursday to work together to improve conditions in their border region, long a source of tension, to help curb a new wave of violence in Thailand's largely Muslim south.
"We've got a policy that we should prosper our neighbors," Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said after he and his Thai counterpart Surakiart Sathirathai signed a Joint Development Strategy (JDS) for the border region.
"What is most important is we want to avoid poverty or sense of deprivation or sense of marginalisation being used as an excuse to create problems," Syed Hamid told a news conference.
The violence in Thailand's deep south has caused more tension between the two countries with more than 300 people killed since it erupted in January with an attack on an army base in which nearly 400 M-16 assault rifles were stolen.
Thailand insisted the organizers took refuge in Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur said it could not find anyone belonging to the names it was given, leading to some testy exchanges.
No one expected the joint development pact -- covering road links, trade, tourism, agriculture, energy, education, human resources and disaster relief -- to cure all the problems.
"It will be a bit over ambitious to say that JDS will be the answer to it all. There are many things that we are doing on both sides," Syed Hamid said.
"Malaysia and Thailand collaborate and cooperate with each other very well because we know that if anything happens in southern Thailand, it may have a spill over effect on Malaysia. So it is good if both sides are able to contain this effect."
Bangkok says it cannot pinpoint precisely what sparked the latest violence in a region where a low-key separatist insurgency was fought in the 1970s and 1980s, but it admits that the largely-Malay speaking area needs a long-term development scheme.
The Thai government has pledged to spend US$300 million over the next three years on roads, better schools and new jobs and many such projects would be undertaken in parallel with the JDS, officials said.
Thailand has earmarked another 500 million baht ($12 million) for the next fiscal year starting October for priority JDS projects, Surakiart said, but Syed Hamid declined to say how much Kuala Lumpur had set aside.
The scheme covers Malaysia's four northern states of Perlis, Kelantan, Kedah and Perak, and predominantly Buddhist Thailand's five largely Muslim southern provinces.
Pattani, now the name of one of those Thai provinces, was one of the first Muslim kingdoms in Southeast Asia from where Islam spread through what are now Malaysia and Indonesia. But some analysts doubted the scheme would work. "This joint development is a real treachery," said political analyst P. Ramasamy of Malaysia's Universiti Kebangsaan.
Southern Thai Muslims had been a "long-term embarrassment" issue to Malaysia, which professes a moderate and progressive brand of Islam.
"You cannot simply assume poverty is the real issue without addressing the question of autonomy, independence and living a life that is meaningful," he said.