Civil society intervention in peace building necessary
20 April 2006 6:00 pm

Peace promotion and building should come from the people at the ground and the role of civil society is very important in the entire process.

Speaking at the Human Rights Focus on Peace Promotion seminar in Penang, Malaysia, from 15-16 April 2006, FORUM-ASIA’s Chalida Tajaroensuk said the process must involve people from various groups – Muslims, Buddhist and Thai citizens in three different provinces, Yala, Naratiwat and Pattani.

Peace promotion and building should come from the people at the ground and the role of civil society is very important in the entire process.

Speaking at the Human Rights Focus on Peace Promotion seminar in Penang, Malaysia, from 15-16 April 2006, FORUM-ASIA’s Chalida Tajaroensuk said the process must involve people from various groups – Muslims, Buddhist and Thai citizens in three different provinces, Yala, Naratiwat and Pattani.

“It is very important that peaceful approach must come from the bottom because day to day condition is experience by the community.

“Heart to heart, people can build trust and mutual respect between human beings. We need our friends from the region to understand our problems and compare it with their own.

“Friends from Mindanao, Aceh, Maluku, please support Thai- Malay people to overcome this bad depressive situation,” stressed Chalida.

About 50 participants attended the seminar, organised by Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia ( ABIM), Jamaah Islah Malaysia ( JIM), Citizen International (CI) and Research & Education for Peace ( REPUSM) University Sains Malaysia.

The seminar mainly focused on ‘Finding the path to peace promotion in Southern Thailand’.

Chalida further explained that most state peace promotion failed because “state policies are popular policies to gain support from the public.”.

“Popular policies are talk shows which are not serious enough to implement or change the difficult situation on the ground.

“If you consider the Thai policies for Southern Thailand, you can see that it is merely a dream policy and not action policy.

“The people who wrote the policies don’t understand the real situation, they may have good will but to write a policy in the air-condition room can only be a good-will policy which could not be implemented .

“The state is a body which provides guidelines but real implementation is on the ground, in the hands of people and ground officers.

“The state must be open and support a space for the people and communities to implement their own decision,” she added..

Chalida reiterated that the ongoing violence affected everyone, as in case of Southern Thailand, it was perpetrated by the state, insurgency groups and the illegal mafia gang.

She added that to stop the violence from these three large and organised groups was not an easy task.

“As I mention earlier, it is only strong communities, love, trust and confidence among people to people can build up peace.

“In the case of Aceh, Mindanao and others, the role of civil society is very important to bring people together and challenge the states as any peace process directly affect to peoples’ lives,” said Chalida.

She concluded that respect for human rights is the most important for peace promotion.

She said peace promotion must come from community level, between people to people from inside peaceful minds.

She stressed that people peace promotion is a mechanism from the ground and the state’s role is to open space and support people to people relationship.