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Forget labels and seek out answers to the bloodshed

Re: US Government may be getting the message – Finally, Editorials, The Nation, Thailand April 30th.

Your editorial regarding the word games involved in the political mess that rages in the Middle East and, on a much smaller scale, in the deep South of Thailand calls for a new set of lexicon to more accurately depict the “plight of the Malays.”

One of your contributors to the editorial gave a broad description of jihad (holy war) as someone “walking his dog quickly through traffic to ensure said dog doesn’t get hit by a car” as an example of jihad. Another contributor said that using the term jihad may actually glamorise the holy war, thus being counterproductive when attempting to win the minds and hearts of the public and Muslims in particular.

Your editorial seems to call for more sensitive terms to describe the cold blooded murders of innocent men, women and children. You allude to the fact that harsh terms reflect the lack of sensitivity on Thai society’s part dealing with the “insurgents” in the deep South. You offer no suggestions as to how we all should refer to Muslim men and women who behead, hang, bomb or shoot the unlucky Thai farmer and his wife working in their fields. What shall we call the miscreant that places roadside bombs and detonates them when buses full of families happen to drive by? It is not only as you say, “the plight of the Malays”, in the deep South. Four years and 4,000 murders later no one has a handle on this insurgency or “small civil war” or whatever you choose to call it. It is actually “the plight of the Thai people”.

I would ask that we all concentrate less on semantics and more on the final solution to a very, very serious problem. If and when this “baby war” moves out of the deep South and onto the world stage we will have a whole new set of terminology to describe our various failures here in Thailand.

David Barkdull
Bangkok

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