By Supalak Ganjanakhundee
A multi-faith and multicultural society is something that really exists in Thailand but Thais are unaware of it because, since the era of democracy, the Thai elite has implanted and imposed a monoculture to make all citizens of the kingdom Thai, rather than allowing them to be as they are.
The idea of a monoculture began in the late 1950s during the regime of Field Marshal Plaek Pibulsongkram, to assimilate Muslim Malays within Thai society or, in other words, to force people in the southernmost provinces to become Thai. The policy enforcement consequently created frustration for the Muslim Malay population and has resulted in a number of resistance groups that persist up to the present day.
Violence in the South erupted at the beginning of 2004 and has left more than 3,500 people dead so far. Some in the Thai bureaucracy mull over the concept of a multi-faith and multicultural society being a solution to allow people in the deep South to live in harmony with the vast majority of Buddhist Thais in the rest of the country.
The Foreign Ministry`s American and South Pacific Affairs Department took 20 community leaders, both Buddhist and Muslim, from the deep South to visit Australia in July, to show them how a multicultural system works.
They learnt from a series of lectures by government officials, community leaders, religious leaders, academics, non-governmental organisations and workers that Australia is home to many races, faiths, cultures and languages.
Of Australia`s 21 million people, 42 per cent are either born, or have parents born, in another country. In fact, Australia is a country of migration. Beside indigenous people, its citizens come from 200 countries around the world, speak hundreds of languages, and follow nearly 100 religions and sects.
Stepan Kerkyasharian, chairperson and chief executive officer of New South Wales`s Community Relations Commission. told the delegation from Thailand that Australia had three options when dealing with its new multicultural society. First, ignore it and do nothing - which may have risked conflicts and clashes. Second, decide what should be the sole identity or national characteristic and how people should behave - but again, there would have been difficult consequences if some refused to comply. Third, create and foster a multicultural society in which all groups live in harmony.
Australia chose the third option, allowing people of different races, religions, languages and ethnicity to live together in peace and harmony. Australian citizenship is based on shared “values” that are common for everyone in the country, Kerkyasharian said.
The term “value” is very subjective, so the acceptable common values are defined by laws and regulations. For instance, the English language is the common language in Australia, but no law says it is the “official” language of the country, he said.
If people don`t know English, the government is obligated to help them by hiring interpreters for them if they have problems with the police or at hospital, he said.
A Muslim leader from the deep South whispered while listening to the presentation that it would be good if Thailand enforced the same policy. Thai is the official language here. A proposal to have Malay as a “working” language in the southernmost provinces, where the majority of people are Malay, was immediately shot down by the elite in Bangkok.
In Australia, discrimination is against the law. The state governments have issued anti-discrimination laws to guarantee people will be treated equally. Nobody should get privileges because of their race, ethnicity, religion or language, Kerkyasharian said.
Communities themselves play significant roles in promoting the multicultural and multi-faith society by forming interfaith dialogue networks to give a better understanding among people of different backgrounds. The federal and state governments help with financial and moral support to promote the dialogue.
People are encouraged to take a leading role in their community without discrimination. Pinar Yesil, for example, was elected this year as the new mayor of greater Dandenong city. She is the first Muslim woman elected to the position in Victoria. Yesil is a Turk who was born in Australia in 1980. She went back to Turkey with her parents when she was six years old and returned to Australia again when she was 18 to continue her education. She settled and was elected leader of her community, where people from Bosnia-Herzegovina make up a significant proportion of the population.
The young mayor told the Thai delegation that good will, harmony and tolerance are key components in enabling people to live together peacefully.
In order to make a commitment on better understanding between communities and law-enforcement officers, Victoria`s police set up a multicultural commission and a multi-faith council. The police commissioned officials to work with emerging multicultural communities, hoping to provide better police service and prevent crime. The commission is a helpful mechanism in enabling police to deal with people of different cultures and faiths, notably those who are newly arrived in Australia. The Victorian police have even dispatched officials to Sudan and the Thai-Burma border to prepare refugees for settlement in Australia.
Tuanbukharee Tokkubaha, an imam from Pattani`s Puyud Mosque, praised Australia`s multicultural society, saying people in the deep South understand the nature of a multicultural system and indeed lived under such conditions for a long time before the 2004 violence erupted.
“But somebody wanted to emphasise the difference and deepen the divide among people in the region,” he said.
“The Thai government must trust the people and make people trust it,” he said. To gain trust, the authorities must tell the truth, he added, referring a recent massacre at a Narathiwat mosque in which 10 men were killed while praying. “If the truth can be told about who was behind the massacre, people would trust the authorities,” he said.
Tasneem Jehtu, a village head from Narathiwat, said the majority of Muslim Malays in the deep South do not want to separate but to live in harmony with the rest of the people in Thailand although they are culturally different.
“The violence that takes place is because of the government`s ignorance. The majority of people in the deep South are poor and want education, while a small group wants the return of the Sultanate of Patani,” she said.
The government should realise the differences among people and find proper ways to deal with this, she said. “Providing the same treatment to different people will never solve the problem,” she said.
Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com
