By Scott Rosenberg Mar 30, 2007, 8:14 GMT
When the Public Relations Department (PRD) in the Office of the Prime Minister invites journalists on a Press Tour, they generally jump at the opportunity to attend.
Bringing Your Hearts Together for Knowledge Sharing clssroom photo © AMW International Co. Ltd.
Not only are these the folks that certify status as foreign correspondents in Thailand but they oft offer opportunities for access to information that foreign journalists may find hard to get.
So when the faxed invite to attend a Foreign Press Tour of Hat Yai to Observe the Southern Situation arrived, my assistant and I were both curious and dubious about attending.
After all, it was just the week before when Muslim insurgents attacked a van (like the ones PRD use to ferry us around) as it made its way from Yala to Hat Yai with passengers going to school and work. Nine people were killed.
While Hat Yai city remains relatively safe (there has been a bombing or two in the past), neighboring Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces are hot spots for insurgent attacks.
Jokes about “losing my head” were passed back and forth as I asked friends and work colleagues to opine on the safety of the trip. They all advised “bring a flak jacket.” Ha, ha…they were not helping in my decision making process.
However the deciding factor - the “carrot” to attend the press junket was the opportunity to meet with General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the Army Commander-in-Chief and chairman of the Council for National Security – the architect of the September 19, 2006 military coup that overthrew prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s government.
Heck, if journalists were imbedded with troops in Iraq, I could spend a day in Hat Yai (and with the General there, who would be foolish enough to attack).
Sign me up!
Flight down from the newly opened Don Mueang Airport was uneventful, (Muang was spelled differently when it closed last September upon the opening of the new international airport, Suvarnabumi. Don Mueang re-opened for domestic flights when massive problems were uncovered at the new airport and one of the changes upon re-opening was the addition of an “e” to the name, purportedly to make it easier to pronounce – according to the new government who seem to have same grasp of English as the previous government).
Accommodations at JB Hotel were fine – seemed like the sleepy town of Hat Yai was unfazed by the almost 2,000 killings (including beheadings of innocent Buddhist citizens) in the region since the Muslim insurgency flared up again in 2004.
Next day began with briefing of ‘Bringing Your Hearts Together for Knowledge Sharing project. A key undertaking by the General Prem Tinsulanonda Foundation (Prem is former Prime Minister and now president of HM the King of Thailand’s Privy Council and respected as one of Thailand’s leading statesmen). The peer teaching project brought together forty students from sixteen universities across Thailand to interact – teach two hundred secondary students from the three southern border provinces.
The project was presented to us both on paper and in press briefing in a very emotional way (as opposed to “logical” presentation to foreign press to justify such a project and ways to measure outcome) by president of the project, Ms. Pimnart Wongsaroj, a student from Thammasat University in Bangkok.
Questions by this journalist regarding cost of project, use of professional counselors to deal with the secondary students who, we were told, many of which “were traumatized by the violence in their villages”, and ways to measure sustainable goals and objectives of the project, went unanswered by Ms. Wongsaroj, who preferred to say the peer teachers were unprepared to deal with the student's problems and by just being together to “share being Thai” was going to help.
With answers like that, sometimes it becomes quite clear why Thailand remains a developing country. It is sad to see good programs like this peer to peer program, have no measurable outcome because of lack of structure and no built in way of obtaining results.
As I brought up to Ms Wondsaroj, (with laughter and measured applause from the press and PRD) even the PRD gives journalists a questionnaire at the end of the press tours to obtain some feedback upon which they can measure success of the outing.
And to have young college students teach (without professional support) and interact with “traumatized” students who have to deal with one of Thailand’s (and the world’s) most delicate problems Muslim insurgency – again without trained professionals to “deal with” the sociological and psychological needs of these students, is in this journalists opinion, unacceptable.
One last note, while the teaching facilities were borrowed, classrooms decorated by previous junior high students, the classroom we held our briefing in had a list of the months of the year in English.
One class the peer students had was English language (they were playing hangman when we were there). Lets hope they were not taught English in the room we were in. What’s wrong with this picture?
General Sonthi made a spectacular arrival landing a helicopter in the school yard. Addressing the students upon their “graduation” from the one week program, he too gave an emotional appeal on Thai unity, for King and country, so to say.
The General, a soft spoken man, truly believes in the Thai Kingdom and loves very much, as do all Thai’s and many others, HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
I had the opportunity to ask him later on in our press briefing, after all was said and done after September 19th when he was finally able to go home and think about what he had just accomplished -what did he think and how did he feel about the coup?
He replied that he had consulted many people leading up to the events of September 19th and they had all agreed that what happened was necessary and in fact, should have happened earlier than they did. “But in the end what was done was necessary for the Kingdom.”
I asked him another question which you can read about here.
As for the insurgency he admitted that since the coup, the frequency of the attacks had declined, however the attacks had intensified.
``We have been successful in getting 99 percent of the local population on our side,'' Sonthi said of the three provinces, which are home to about 1.8 million people. ``Winning the hearts and minds of youth is difficult'' as some young Muslims have sworn an oath of allegiance to support the insurgency, he said. Rebels try to integrate themselves within local communities to ``brainwash people,'' he added.
With that, the General ended his brief press conference and we all trudged off to lunch. The PRD folks are great hosts and know the way to win the hearts and minds of journalists is by plying us with good food, which they always do.
Next off to the PRD headquarters in the South for a briefing by Panu Woramit from the Tourism Authority of Thailand. With all deference to Mr. Woramit and the Tourism Authority of Thailand, we foreign journalists are not stupid.
The rosy picture of both foreign and Thai tourism in the South and especially figures he gave out for Hat Yai tourism, the least affected area with foreign tourists coming mostly from neighboring Malaysia, differed greatly form the reality of the situation.
Two weeks earlier, a group of six Hat Yai tourism associations issued a list of 10 demands to the government to save the city's tourism industry, that has been devastated by three years of escalating violence in the deep south. They claim among other things that hotel bookings in Hat Yai alone have dropped 20 -30 percent.
A far cry from the +13.5 percent increase in tourism between 2005 and 2006, Woramit claimed
But I think the impact of the one and half day press tour did not strike me until we were at the airport set to return to Bangkok.
On a group tour not much attention is paid to seating and upon being handed a boarding pass for a middle seat, I immediately went up to the Thai Airways counter to try an change to my preferred “aisle” seat (I am a “big boy” and sitting in the middle of two people does not bode well with me).
The Thai attendant politely told me the only aisle seat available was in the last row of the plane – but I turned it down, don’t like sitting in the rear of a plane. We stood talking for a minute or so and then she said, “You’re with the group that saw the General this morning?”
I looked at her not understanding the question at first. I finally said “Yes” to which she leaned forward towards me, looked at me intently and asked “Is there any hope for us?”
Tears welled up in my eyes, she was looking for a ray of hope, thinking that I knew something that she did not. I thought a moment before replying and finally said, “It is a complicated situation.” What more could I say? We stood talking a few minutes more before I walked away to relax with an ice coffee since the plane was 30 minutes delayed.
I returned to Bangkok, head intact with fond memories of this press trip. But that question still haunts me…”Is there any hope?”
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