Thailand: Killings in the South
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When I first came to Georgia Tech I
knew very few international people so all of the news that I heard from CNN or
Fox always seemed quite distant. I
always felt detached from the topic and could never whole heartedly grasp the
sentiments that others had about common issues in foreign places. But the day I stepped foot on campus I met
people from all corners of the globe and my perspective of what goes on in the
world changed. For example, I met
someone from Australia who lived in Bangkok, Thailand for his entire high
school career. Just the other day as he
explained to me his somewhat eccentric experiences there I found out that other
parts of the world can be very different.
So as I skimmed through these Human Rights sites this article about
southern Thailand caught my attention.
This articles details how over a short span of time six individuals who
all belong to the Malay Muslim religious group have been murdered. Each of these murders has sparked little to
no police investigation into the matter and this is due to the religious
beliefs of the individuals. These
attacks on Muslims have sparked a counter offensive against the Buddhists due
to their involvement with the murders.
As I read further I began to think about my friend who lived in Bangkok. This power struggle in a totally different
part of the world slowly began to become real to me. What if this happened in America? How would I
feel about it? As these questions popped up in my mind I realized that these
very questions were not just fabricated ideas for my friend, but instead his
reality. Many times we see articles
about atrocities and become detached because the United States is a safe haven
for religious and cultural ideologies (for the most part). This article and my recent experiences have
helped me to see what the rest of the world is like. I learned that sometimes looking at something
like this article from a different lens can make a world of difference in
helping the privileged to understand that killings over religion still happen
and that not everyone reads about it in a magazine because they have to live it
every day.
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