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HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND Editors Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong Louisa Chan Boegli and Supat Hasuwannakit HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND 1 2 HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND Editors Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong Louisa Chan Boegli and Supat Hasuwannakit The Deep South Relief and Reconciliation Foundation This publication is made possible by a grant and the Rugiagli Initiative from the Swiss embassy in Thailand Vietnam Myanmar Lao PDR Songkhla Pattani Thailand Perlis Cambodia Yala Narathiwat Andaman Gulf of Kedah Sea Thailand Kelantan Penang Perak Malaysia Map of Thailand and the four southern provinces Healing Under Fire: The Case of Southern Thailand Editors Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong Louisa Chan Boegli and Supat Hasuwannakit © The Deep South Relief and Reconciliation (DSRR) Foundation and the Rugiagli Initiative (tRI) 2014 Any part of this document may be freely reproduced with appropriate acknowledgement. Suggested citation: The Deep South Relief and Reconciliation (DSRR) Foundation and the Rugiagli Initiative (tRI), Healing Under Fire The Case of Southern Thailand, Bangkok, 2014. ISBN: 978-616-92204-0-4 CONTENTS FOREWORD 4 Surin Pitsuwan PREFACE 6 Prawase Wasi I. BACKGROUND – CONTEXT OF SOUTHERN THAILAND 8 Chapter 1 Introduction 9 Louisa Chan Boegli, Supat Hasuwannakit, Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong Chapter 2 The Deep South of Thailand: Neither War Nor Peace? Trajectories for a peaceful settlement of the conflict 16 Norbert Ropers Chapter 3 The Southern Medical Community’s First Forays Into Peace Work 24 Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong, Metta Kuning, Vorasith Sornsrivichai, Wallapa Thakan Chapter 4 By the Numbers: Major Health Problems in the Deep South 31 Rohani Jeharsae, Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong Chapter 5 Epidemiology of the Violence in the Deep South 41 Metta Kuning, Mayuening Eso, Vorasith Sornsrivichai, Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong II. ADAPTING AND DELIVERING HEALTH CARE AND THE COLLABORATIVE INITIATIVE 49 Chapter 6 Coping with Challenges and Dilemmas Amid the Conflict 50 Supat Hasuwannakit, Withoo Phrueksanan Chapter 7 From Unprepared to Managing Severe Traumatic Mental Stress in the Deep South 61 Pechdau Tohmeena Chapter 8 Thai Islamic Medical Professionals’ Contribution to Peace 70 Ananchai Thaipratan Chapter 9 Capacity Building for Health and Peace Work: A Collaborative Effort in Southern Thailand 73 Gabriella Arcadu, Louisa Chan Boegli, Urs Boegli, Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong, Supat Hasuwannakit III. CURRICULUM, KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS FOR HEALTH AND PEACE WORK 85 Chapter 10 Peace-Health Education for Medical Professionals 86 Klaus Melf, Pantip Chayakul Chapter 11 Human Rights Law in the Context of Southern Thailand 94 Paisit Pusittrakul Chapter 12 When Medicine Is Not Enough: Negotiation Fundamentals for Physicians 103 Kimberlyn Leary Chapter 13 Managing Suspicions and Building Trust 109 Urs Boegli ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 118 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 120 FOREWORD Surin Pitsuwan The decades-long multidimensional conflict in southern Thailand is seldom reported and little understood in the international media. Increasingly, however, a body of knowledge has been accumulated by Thai and foreign scholars and is gaining more intensive scrutiny. The scale of the conflict is by no means small. It has taken a heavy toll in lives (more than 6,000) and thousands of mentally traumatized and physically handicapped individuals, with several thousands more internally displaced people. Having been insulated and locally contained with little or no involvement from external parties, a window of opportunity exists for people of goodwill in all segments of our society to make a collective effort to resolve the conflict by peaceful means, with active and conscientious engagement. A further delay would only invite deepening divisiveness and open doors for external parties to complicate the matter even more. It is extremely encouraging to see the medical professionals in southern Thailand taking the challenge to heart, responding to the call for compassion and understanding from both sides of the ethnic divide, the Malay Muslims and the Buddhist communities in the southern border areas. It is a most trusted group of professionals, Buddhist and Muslims, risking their lives in the frontline of conflict, knowing that theirs is a calling that seeks to live up to the credo of ‘do no harm’, winning the hearts and minds of the local people. This is indeed an asset, a ‘social capital’ that can be further harnessed for the larger purpose of our society. The goodwill of the people, the trust that they have placed in the medical personnel, the reverence that they have given to their doctors and nurses, whose very profession is the manifestation of ‘selfless sacrifices’ – all these can serve as a strong foundation of a sustained and peaceful resolution to the southern strife. As has been recognized by the global community, violent conflicts, no matter how complicated, no matter how long, no matter how deeply rooted, always have a space for the involvement of medical professionals in the search for their lasting solutions. 4 HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND It is heartening that the doctors and nurses from regional universities, provincial hospitals and local clinics have been engaging in national development and communal reconciliation for quite some time now. They have been catalysts of change, proponents of more equitable and inclusive development or even forming coalitions to forge better policies and building a more just and peaceful society for Thailand. Mindful of the benefits of learning from and exchanging with other like-minded professional colleagues from around the world, the medical corps of southern Thailand have reached out and engaged with foreign experts, learning from their successes and failures, their best practices and their models of efficiency in fulfilling their mission as ‘agents of change’ for the betterment of our society. Healing Under Fire – The Case of Southern Thailand is a valuable collection of stories and narratives of the noble engagement of the medical professionals in southern Thailand seeking to heal the wounds in the larger context of our society, and not just the physical healing that is of their immediate concern. In that sense, it is a set of heroic deeds that deserve our attention, not just for the sake of recognizing their selfless sacrifices but also for the larger and more noble purpose of sharing with others how a group of dedicated people, ‘with malice towards none, with charity towards all’, can indeed make a meaningful contribution to the search for a lasting resolution to the painful and costly conflict of southern Thailand. Surin Pitsuwan Former Secretary-General of ASEAN Nakorn Sri Thammarat, Southern Thailand HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND 5 PREFACE Prawase Wasi The current era is still full of overt and ‘silent’ violence. It is the violence that we learn to live with. Peace therefore should be loud. The three Deep South provinces of the Thai Kingdom, predominated by a Malay Muslim population, have been occupied by a long history of conflict, the most recent of which exploded into a new level of violence a decade ago and which over these past few years has killed several thousand and injured thousands more of innocent people. Several attempts have been made to resolve the conflict. This includes those who work for peace through the work they do, silently, in their everyday lives. In the Deep South, this includes the countless medical professionals who believe that health and peace are intertwined and that a healthy society is a peaceful society. This includes a group of local people who established the Deep South Relief and Reconciliation (DSRR) Foundation. It was first chaired by Prof. Dr Tada Yipintsoi and currently by Prof. Dr Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong. They and the others working with them share the belief that providing assistance to victims of violence without discrimination will lead to psychological and social healing. In Europe, the Rugiagli Initiative (tRI) was set up by another group of people who believe that medical people working in conflict areas have the potential to create peace. They believe that there can be no good health outcomes without peaceful outcomes. tRI was looking for an area where they could work, to demonstrate how medical healing can go beyond the patients and reach out to communities. They found the work already being done in Thailand’s Deep South inspiring and useful for documenting and open to being enhanced. The health professionals in the South provide non-discriminating health services with devotion, patience and courage. DSRR and tRI became partners in providing further skills and knowledge to complement what the Thai health professionals have been doing in their everyday work to promote peace. Dr Supat Hasuwannakit, the Director of Chana Hospital in Songkla province coordinated this mission. 6 HEALING UNDER FIRE THE CASE OF SOUTHERN THAILAND This book emerged from a workshop co-hosted by the DSRR Foundation and tRI in Krabi, Thailand in late 2013. The publication is financially supported by the Swiss Embassy in Thailand. The workshop brought international specialists to exchange with the Thai health personnel on their experiences. This workshop became an interactive learning through action, which is the most powerful tool to overcome any difficulty eventually. The contributions collected here reflect many of the presentations made during
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