NU leader meets Thai PM Thaksin on southern unrest
NU leader meets Thai PM Thaksin on southern unrest
Boonradom Chitradon, Agence France-Presse/Bangkok
The head of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world's largest Islamic group, began a mission here on Monday that Thailand hopes will help ease tensions in the Muslim-majority south where an insurgency is raging.
The Indonesia-based NU chairman Hasyim Muzadi, leading a five- member team here, met Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra early Monday to discuss the conflict that has claimed more than 630 lives since January 2004.
Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon said the two men agreed the militants were using religion to fuel the violence, and that improved education in the Muslim-dominated south was key to boosting living standards and ending economic problems in the region.
Hasyim was granted a royal audience with King Bhumibol Adulyadej on Monday evening, and was due to meet Buddhist and Muslim religious leaders and to travel with his team through the southern provinces along the Malaysian border, Kantathi said.
"He said misunderstandings could be solved if we speak frankly and exchange information," Kantathi added.
Thailand hopes the visit by the NU team will help improve the situation in the violence-wracked south, where one man was shot dead at the weekend and 15 were injured after militants bombed and ambushed a maintenance car carrying police and soldiers on a railway.
Another five people, including one policeman and one former policeman, were injured in a shooting on late Sunday when two men on motorcycle opened fire on people sitting outside a house in Pattani's Sai Buri district.
"We hope the visit will help, as their mission represents the Muslim world coming here to find the truth," Kantathi said.
Hasyim warned that "a military approach only makes the fundamentalists more and more strong."
"Problem solving is not only with a military approach, but also a justice approach, an economic approach, and also an educational approach," he said.
On Wednesday, Hasyim is due to travel to Thailand's south to meet with chairmen of provincial Islamic committees in the Muslim majority provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.
He is also set to visit a royal project and an Islamic school in Pattani province, and also to meet the chairman of the southern military command.
Hasyim, who was invited by Thailand to visit, also plans to meet with the Indonesian community in Bangkok on Thursday before returning Friday to Indonesia.
The visit comes amid a flurry of efforts aimed at stemming the violence that has proven one of the most intractable problems facing Thaksin's government.
Thaksin on late Monday announced the 48 members of a National Reconciliation Commission comprising activists, senior politicians and government officials.
The commissioners included a Buddhist monk and 11 Muslims. Its mission is to propose ways to foster peace and reconciliation in the mostly Muslim and ethnic Malay southern provinces.
Parliament was also preparing for its first joint session in more than a decade to debate the insurgency, beginning Wednesday.
The last joint session of the 500-seat lower House of Representatives and the 200-member Senate was in May 1992, in the midst of bloody pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Thailand to its foundations.