Pulo's open letter to Gen Sonthi

'Shame' On You, Gen. Sonthi;

At the conference at Rangsit University in Bangkok, yesterday July 5, Gen Sonthi wrongly and naïvely lectured the audience of about 1600 Muslim people from Bangkok and the surrounding areas who are the children of great grand fathers who were once the prisoners of wars brought here by the Siamese from the former Malay Kingdom of Patani.

The first and foremost he said he felt ashamed that the Muslims of Patani provinces ignored efforts by all sides, be they Their Majesties, the CNS, the matured-ginger government, or even by the recently honourable visiting guests like the OIC's Sec. Gen., the Muslim World League chairman and Sheikh Azhar al-Sharif, the friendly neighbouring countries, etc. to persuade the uprising Patani people, especially their leaderships, to follow the true path or simply wanting the Patanis to surrender to a worldly cruel ruler instead of a true submission to almighty God and His commandments and being the supposed-to-be Muslims of His representatives on the globe, living peacefully among other nations side by side on conditions that others doing the same.

Secondly, Gen. Sonthi who is a Muslim of either descendant of our former Patani prisoners or of the Persian Muslim community during the Ayutthayan era, claimed to be a Muslim and a patriot in defending Thai nation. He claimed to be a patriot for his ancestors' host nation and he failed in expecting the people in the Thai occupied territories to behave the same. He felt ashamed, this is absurd.

Further, he naïvely wondered as why the Patanis are having a slow growth in pursuing their education and exploiting the economy. This is an all-time pretext of the Thais by unjustifiably claiming that the Patanis have been refusing progress through forcibly assimilating Thai education policies imposed on other people of other language, culture and religion. The worse thing was, during the initial period of the introduction of the compulsory education, the Thai schools in rural areas were mostly embedded with Thai Buddhist temples. This was seen by the Patanis as an expressive and direct confrontation with the already available Patani educational system. But if the Thais were wise enough to allow the Patani children to have their secular education for example, mathematics and science subjects also in Malay language, the attitudes of the Patanis towards their occupying forces would have been more lenient than what is happening at the present time.

Above all, after the 'democratic' coup in 1932 and the changing of 'Siam' to Thai which was then totally unknown to the Patanis, with their success in Thaification of the Buddhists of Mon, Lanna, Isaan and khmer ethnics, the newly-established nationalistic regime of Thailand expected to cleanse the Malay ethnic group in the Patani provinces as well to supplant it with the dominant but the minority Thai. 

Therefore, what the Thais should really be ashamed of is what they are inhumanly doing to the uprising Patani people and the Thais should in fact reconsider pretending to have good intentions as that is the wrong way by nature and will never bring any satisfaction towards the Patanis. This is the real shame that is supposed to be felt.