PANARE, Thailand, 6 December 2004 — Around 50 Thai Air Force planes “bombed” the largely Muslim south with paper birds yesterday as a symbol of peace for the restive region where nearly 500 people have been killed since January.
However, the peace gesture was marred by new killings in the region.
Villagers stared into the sky awaiting the deluge of an estimated 100 million paper birds, one of which was signed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and carried the promise of a scholarship or a job for the finder.
Children ran around in excitement in one village as a plane appeared several thousand feet overhead at the time promised, and although the unloading of the birds was invisible to the naked eye, the paper birds descended.
Unfortunately the wind blew them beyond the village, one of hundreds in the three southern provinces near the Malaysian border which were the target of one of the biggest operations in the history of the Thai Air Force.
“I’m really disappointed,” said 11-year-old Fatima Sulhong before the operation ended with planes blowing red, white and blue smoke, the colors of the Thai flag.
“All I saw was the plane flying over.”
Thaksin’s bird campaign, just weeks ahead of a general election, caught the imagination of the predominantly Buddhist country, even in Bangkok where sympathy for Malay-speaking south is limited.
Everywhere people huddled in groups to fold birds — they were meant to be doves, a symbol of peace, but most turned out to look more like cranes — after Thaksin called on all 63 million Thais to make one.
In the end, estimates of up to 120 million accompanied five Hercules C-130 military transport planes crammed with bags of paper birds, made out of everything from bank notes to plastic, to southern airports for reloading onto smaller planes.
The gesture, done this weekend to mark the birthday of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, has done little to mollify the Muslim leadership of the region, once an independent sultanate that still chafes under the rule of remote Bangkok.
However, the violence continued with retired prosecutor, Nat Wipaseth, 62, from Pattani, gunned down by two men at his shrimp farm yesterday, according to television and online news reports.
Policeman Sutharak Oup-la, 24, was killed on Saturday evening while on patrol with five colleagues in neighboring Narathiwat, where security forces also found and defused a bomb near the border with Malaysia just before the airdrop started, police said.
A website for an outlawed Thai separatist group, which has previously offered bounties for killing governors and senior government officials in the region, dismissed the bird drop.
