Peace advocate: Govt wants complete control

``The eye for an eye'' methods used by the government in dealing with southern unrest is a clear indicator Thailand's representative democracy is turning into an authoritarian one, peace advocate Chaiwat Satha-anant said yesterday.

Mr Chaiwat, a Thammasat University political scientist, said the government and the military had three times rejected Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng's proposed measures to return peace to the South, despite them being based on views gathered from thousands of locals.

Mr Chaiwat said calls for state recognition of ponoh schools, pardons for people involved in southern unrest, sincerity in solving dual Thai-Malaysian nationality problems and withdrawal of military forces based outside the South from the region could well have been too much for the government to accept.

``Those measures hit right at the heart of southern problems but affected the traditional ways of handling problems that have been in use for a very long time,'' Mr Chaiwat said

Relationships between southern Muslims and the police and military, government officials and even with Buddhists in their own communities deteriorated after the government stepped up its use of force in the deep South, he said.

People who understood and accepted cultural differences became divided after a Buddhist monk was killed on Jan 26.

``The knife that slit the monk's throat also cut cultural ties. Things that Buddhists and Muslims knew they must not do to each other became meaningless. I think that is very dangerous for southern society,'' Mr Chaiwat, a Muslim, said.

He said the military saw the killing of the monk as the state losing its authority so it felt it had to restore that power.

Mr Chaiwat said violent state methods of tackling southern unrest, the massive killings of suspected drug dealers in last year's war on drugs and the death of 16 activists fighting for human rights and environmental protection over the past four years should serve as a wake-up call for Thai society that the government favoured complete obedience to authority before personal freedom.