IN PRINT : Teachers must be protected

IN PRINT : Teachers must be protected.

Would it be asking too much to implement safety measures such as assigning soldiers to provide security for the teachers 24 hours a day?

KAMOL HENGKIETISAK

Juling Pongkunmul, a teacher of Ban Kuchingluepa School, Ra-ngae district, Narathiwat province, was pronounced dead on January 8, 2007. She had been unconscious since she suffered serious head and bodily injuries inflicted from savage beatings by separatist sympathisers on May 20, 2006. Her body was flown by a military helicopter to Chiang Rai, her birth place, for the royally-sponsored funeral rites, noted a Matichon editorial.

Juling was a model teacher. She knew full well that the three southernmost provinces were dangerous. She could have chosen a safer school to teach at, as she came first in the teacher selection examination. But she chose a school in Narathiwat, reasoning that she had only good intentions toward the local children and would teach them to her utmost ability. This should be enough to protect her from harm. However, fate was not kind to her. She and a fellow female teacher were abducted from the school and both were later beaten, in the case of Juling very severely, before the authorities could rescue them.

Throughout the 7 months and 19 days that Juling lay in a coma at Songkhla Nakharin Hospital, Hat Yai, her parents and people throughout the country prayed for her recovery, hoping that a miracle would happen. But the severe and horrific beatings were too much for her slender and small body to sustain, and eventually her internal organs failed. She left this world to the grief of her parents, friends, colleagues and all Thai people.

During those 7 months and 19 days there were other teachers in the three southernmost provinces killed by terrorists. The assaults on innocent teachers created terror throughout the region among the teachers, school children and parents alike. It seemed that the security personnel from the police and the military were slow to act to safeguard the teachers as they performed their duties.

The Matichon editorial asked: Would it be asking too much to implement safety measures such as assigning soldiers to accompany groups of teachers travelling to schools, and regularly patrolling the various travelling routes?

Would it be too much to ask the Ministry of Education to build secure teachers' accommodations in all schools?

Would it be too much to ask the military to provide security around the schools 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

If the military personnel are insufficient, village chiefs, tambon chiefs and their deputies should be asked to help, said the editorialist, who conceded that in some villages the kamnan and village chiefs are not strong enough to provide protection for teachers and schools.

Now that the interim government has resurrected the Southern Border Province Administrative Centre, the police and military should be able to obtain information and coordinate the activities of various security agencies and come up with measures to protect schools and teachers, said Matichon.

It's no longer enough to look at the big picture, said the editorialist. It's time to have concrete measures in place to fight against the terrorists and their sympathisers, who always look for any weak point to inflict damage on innocent people and their property.

He admitted that the task of the authorities is not an easy one. There is no choice but to try to plug all the holes and strengthen all the weak points.

One can only hope that there will be no more teachers to die in the tragic southern unrest, concluded Matichon.

Whose zero-sum game? On 24 August 2006, the police arrested a suspect driving a Daewoo automobile loaded with bombs near former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's residence. The driver was Lt Tawatchai Klinchana, a military officer attached to the Internal Security Operations Command (Isoc). Later it was revealed that he was also a member of the Thai Rak Thai party, and his relatives insisted that he was a Thaksin's admirer, noted a Matichon writer.

The incident raised suspicion in some corners that it was Thaksin himself who orchestrated the event, to bury the news of the day that the government employed thugs to attack demonstrators against Thaksin at CentralWorld on 21 August 2006, and also to court public sympathy for Thaksin.

This was, of course, denied by the TRT camp and Thaksin himself, who maintained that some groups really wanted to get rid of him because they feared he was sure to win any new general election.

Thaksin characterised the bombing incident as a zero-sum game, meaning that if one side gained from the incident, another side must lose.

The car-bomb case, with 4 suspects, is now under deliberation in the Criminal Court. It is expected that a verdict will be issued in the first quarter of this year.

The Matichon writer then turned to the 8 bombings in Bangkok on New Year's Eve. Some TRT politicians have conjectured out loud that these may have been the work of the interim government and the Council for National Security, designed to bury the issue of Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont's holiday retreat on Khao Yai Thiang hill, which is supposed to have been built on land that was allocated to landless farmers. Former prime minister Gen Chavalit Yongchaiyudh also advanced this theory, saying that a foreign intelligence source believed that the CNS was behind the bombings.

Thaksin faxed a letter from China denying the government's assertion that those who had lost political power in the coup were behind the bombings, and speculated that the southern terrorists may have extended their attacks into Bangkok.

A poll of Bangkokians revealed that 58% believed that the old powers were behind the bombings.

While these old powers tried to discredit the government and the CNS, either alleging that they were behind the incident or that they could not prevent the violence in the South from spreading to Bangkok, Kasturi Mahkota, the foreign affairs chief of the separatist organisation Pulo, denied the organisation's involvement in the bombings. He said in a statement that Thaksin, "with no sense of guilt and from afar, is baselessly blaming us, as he always did at the cost of others..."

The Matichon writer was of the opinion that while Thaksin may not be directly involved in the bombings, it was undeniable that people who had lost power through the coup were behind them.

He noted that some of these people are now under intense scrutiny in several corruption investigations. By planting the bombs, said the editorialist, they hoped to create a political climate that would pressure the interim government to quickly return power to the people via the ballot box, in the hopes that the general election would be held before all the corruption investigations were finished, and the process interrupted before the cases could be filed in a court of law.

The old powers may also hope that they will be returned to power in a general election, either under a Thai Rak Thai banner or that of another, perhaps as yet unformed, party.

They could then use their political power to undo all the work of the various corruption-fighting agencies.

The old powers know full well, continued the editorialist, that if the new government is installed soon, bureaucrats and various government agencies would be fearful of retaliation if they carry out actions that would adversely affect their new political masters. The writer urged the interim government to be more firm in speedily employing its authority to rid the old powers' influence in the bureaucracy, as some career bureaucrats are still reluctant to carry out their duties, believing that the interim government's term is too short.

Matichon said this bureaucratic inertia could be seen in the police chief himself. Only after five days had passed did the police chief go to the bombing scenes to inspect them for himself. He did not even turn up at the Isoc meeting to discuss the incident.

If this is the typical reaction of career bureaucrats, the interim government and the CNS will have their work cut out for them, concluded Matichon.

Miscellany Panthongtae Shinawatra, son of deposed prime minister Thaksin, failed to answer many questions raised by the Assets Scrutiny Committee's tax investigators about the operations of Ample Rich Investments last Wednesday.

He presented a two-page written explanation of the Shin Corp share deal in January of last year between Ample Rich and Singapore's Temasek Holdings. He then told the investigators to get a detailed explanation from Karnchanapha Honghern, a secretary to his mother Khunying Potjaman, because she had handled the business for him.

Perspective
Bangkok Post
Monday January 15, 2007