The first was aimed at Muslims and Buddhists in the villages directly affected by the unrest, to hear their grievances and report them with sensitivity.

The second was directed at non-Muslim and non-Buddhists all over the country, to urge them to listen and help shore up what was left of southern tolerance.

 Gathered under the umbrella of the Issara News Centre in the hope of getting the stories absent from the mainstream media - stories about people, not bombs - the team of 10 set out to transcend barriers.

The barriers were those imposed by their own news organisations, by personal bias and by religion.

The reports they offer here aren't necessarily accounts of victims of the violence.

The subjects are food vendors, fishermen, restaurant operators, postmen, doctors and nurses, teachers and a few village chiefs.

But they seem to have visited every spot where the important clashes took place over the past two years, in every place talking to the people skipped over by the mainstream media and the authors of official reports.

Each of these two volumes has about 30 short articles written in a feature style, with touches of "new journalism" - emotion and subjectivity are allowed.

Altogether they put a much more human face to the ongoing drama of Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and Songkhla.

Readers are given not only the hard facts of the April 28, 2004, uprising that ended with the massacre of 32 people at Krue Se mosque, but also the symbolism behind it, beginning with meaning of the mosque's name: "sand as white and pure as a pearl".

In the Pattani district of Barahom there is a road with a Muslim community on one side and a Buddhist community on the other. The peace that bonded them for centuries was only disrupted two years ago.

Across the Malaysian border in Kalantan, where 131 Malay-Thais fled after the murder of their village chief in Narathiwat last August, there is a community of no fewer than 12,000 Thai-Malays and 20 Thai Buddhist temples.

The abbot of Wat Pikul, which dates back to the Ayutthaya period, says both Muslims and Buddhists have long lived in harmony there, and Muslims show their support at Buddhist weddings and funerals.

Each article is a complete snapshot on its own, but some display impressive research while others are rather sketchy. Given such a complex issue, the compilation amounts to a primer, enabling the average reader to grasp the elements of living in the South.

By following the separate but related accounts, one can form a larger picture, though a well-considered and chronological table of contents would have been helpful. 

The first volume opens with Tuelamae Teemaza, a village chief in the Tak Bai sub-district of Je He, who lost one son and has another seriously crippled.

He comments on the first anniversary of the Tak Bai incident - in which six people were killed directly and 79 detainees suffocated aboard military trucks.

Volume 2 begins with a series of detailed accounts on the mysterious murder of two captured marines last September in Narathiwat's Rangae district.

These are a must-read, giving a clear picture of the complete disarray that accompanied the tragedy, with women and children becoming human shields.

The villagers set up their blockade against outsiders, the reporters found, not in defiance of the authorities but in desperate self-defence.

In the end, the compilation offers no conclusion, nor any guide to who is responsible for the now-daily violence.

It confirms, however, that if facts have the power to heal, then so does the long-promised compensation - the jobs and the justice.

Due process of law has yet to be levelled at the authorities responsible for so many deaths at Krue Se mosque and Tak Bai.

This too, it is suggested, would also be an indispensable part of the healing process in the South.