A Journey of peace in southern Thailand

PM Surayud Chulanont attending celebration at Pondok Bantan of Surin Pitsuwan

In the beginning when I received an invitation for the 66th year celebrations of the founding of Pondok Bantan, Thailand, it conjured in my mind that it is an Islamic religious school named after a town somewhere in West Java of similar name.

I later found out that Bantan is Ban Tan a village near an intersection of the road to the hills just west of the town of Nakhorn Sri Thammarat and it's similarity in name to the town in West Java is accidental. It is just my Malay brain that computes names by default to those found in the Malay speaking world.

Dr Surin Pitsuwan, a former Foreign Minister of Thailand, a Democrat Party leader is the patron of the Misbahuddeen Islamic School also known as Pondok Bantan. His entire family is involved in its sustenance, operations and indeed direction for the future.

Accompanied by two of my boys and two nephews, I started driving from Kuala Lumpur at about eight in the morning in a 1985 Mercedes Benz T230 Station Wagon towards Sadao along the North-South motorway reaching Sadao immigration crossing at four in the afternoon, after two stoppages for breakfast and lunch at Rawang and Butterworth rest areas.

As usual, no hassle and soon we were at Hatyai and checked into the Centara Sukhonthai Novotel where we spent the night. Life goes on as usual in Hatyai even though the 20th of June wasn't a weekend, a lot of Malaysian cars bearing Penang and Kedah states number plates were parked in the town hotels and restaurants.

We hardly noticed the border crossing and the divide between two neighbouring countries, there is so much cultural and demographic superimposition and spill over between the Northern Malaysian States and South Thailand.

Malaysian civil servants some still in their uniforms are seen patronising restaurants in Sadao and likewise many Malaysian citizens, especially Malay ladies in their ubiquitous head scarves are seen milling and shopping around Sadao.

To them Sadao is an extension of their neighbourhood, a rude interruption to their rubber small holdings and mangosteen orchards and the immigration checkpoint a mere inconvenience, often ignored with the tacit approval and turning a blind eye by the Thai immigration officers.

You can never beat Thai hospitality and charm, even strict immigration laws are bendable for the sake of community convenience and fraternity. We know and it is public secret in North Kedah, Perlis, Satun and Narathiwat districts that local Kamnans (called Datuk Kamnan on the Malaysian side) who move and slither across the divide like moving from living room to the kitchen of their residences and bear deep respect from both communities, they  'uphold' local security and stability, good relations and diplomacy, help in tourism and commercial deals, all for no official salary nor compensation, augmenting and tacitly aiding the official system which can sometimes be cumbersome and tardy.

Talk about globalisation and ASEAN Free Trade Zone to them? That is kindergarten stuff! They are probably fourth generation of globalists!

We were joined by two more friends from Kuala Lumpur on the morning of 21st June at Hat Yai, a Siamese Malaysian and two other Malays. The Siamese gentleman, steadfastly Buddhist, holds a degree in Islamic Studies from the Northern University of Malaysia and is in the logistics business.

Like his fellow Thai citizens in South Thailand he finds the border a historical error that should only stay on for the sake of land title demarcation and administrative convenience.We had to really speed to follow the Ford Escape 3litre SUV our Malaysian Siamese fellow was driving along the motorway via Pattalung to Nakhorn.

What a beautiful sight to behold along the motorway, the policy makers of The Land of Smiles, la Pays des Sourirs. Contrary to popular belief, Thai administrators have undersold their country abroad and even to their own fellow Thais up north.

The motorway was  densely lined on both sides and the middle divider by tall robust and beautifully matured tamarind and jacaranda trees (called Bongor Siam in Malay), unlike the pathetic pencil like trunk and sickly varieties you find in hot blistering Singaporean motorways and parks and stunted types in the Emirates.

The boys remarked that the jacaranda trees were nearly all flowering, not just purple but yellow ,white and various shades of pinks. Trust the Thais, they can even make the jacaranda trees smile.

My goodness, flowers on tall trees, that is Suvarnabhumi! or Suwarna Bumi  in malay, just fancy that ,these Siamese, when we don't flatten their language their words are similar to Malay. Nakhorn was a welcome sight when we went past the the beautiful trees into the town to the Twin Lotus Hotel.

Nakhorn, what a beautiful town to behold, rolling former padifields with ribbons of trees and small forests and orchards going on till the foothills of the beautiful mountain range in the background.

Nature and the well maintained environment aside, my boys went to check the modern Malay livability indices. They soon returned to the hotel after discovering that Nakhorn has a Carrefour, a Tesco, a good hospital, a bevy of halal restaurant  eateries and  mosques.

Thus Nakhorn scored a CGPA of perfect 4 and our Blackberries were soon busy sending emails back home with poems of the beauty of Nakhorn Sri Thammarat ( Negara Sri Dharma Raja in malay, with prejudice, Malay being the better version with non-tonal and un-flattened smart clear pronunciation) and its visibility approval.

It caters for the faithful with food and prayer place and good hospital if sickness is inevitable and the hypermarkets to cater for the daily needs, even the French bread is so frenchy crunchy at Carrefour and all the cheeses in the world for the modern Malay like his modern Thai cousin takes cheese and French bread.

Like the modern Thai the modern Malay must always go to Carrefour to buy his toiletries, especially liquid soap in a dispenser bottle, extra towels, large tissue rolls, fruit cutlery and stock of tropical fruits which Thailand has the best in the world, without any nearest challenger! When a modern Malay or Thai travels he still brings his Ban Nai Fun with him.

Come early evening of the 22nd June and we were all prepared to go go to the Misbahuddeen Islamic School 66th Anniversary celebration and the official opening of the new modern blocks of the library, lecture building, mosque, canteen/bistro, etc.

Such beautiful architecture is the town of Nakhorn, shophouses that has Sino-Malay and Portuguese architecture with a hint of Siamese ( I cannot use the word Thai which to me, a malay refers to the nation not the people, the culture and the ethnicity.

Thailand like the word Malaysia does not mean any depth to me more than the nation where a passport is needed to enter and leave ),government buildings and the town hall and its sprawling lawn that can be anywhere in the northern Malaya states.

We passed by a huge Wat complex where a Jathukarm festival was going on, Nok Air has been very busy ferrying people from Bangkok over here to seek the medallion amulets, some fetching really mind boggling high prices ,even a Royal Thai Air Force plane we later saw at Nakhron Airport, purportedly carrying Air Force officers coming for consultation ,prescription and purchase of the medaillons.

Now that the Air Force isn't deployed in actual fighting any more, we wonder what the medaillons are for, but that is another story. We drove past the main town mosque, in the same locality as the Buddhist huge Wat complex, called Masjid Salahuddin and got on to a main highway.

We prayed at the Mosque earlier at noon time and indeed Muslims came to pray from all over the town and soon melted into the town again, ordinary citizens of Nakhorn coming and ordinary citizens of Nakhorn leaving, meet the muslim males in the Nakhorn streets and they are like any other Thai, except that some wear the ubiquitous white skull caps.

The village of Ban Tan starts from a junction off the main highway to Sichon and onwards to Surat Thani and the Islamic School is situated just off  the highway from that same junction towards the hills the waterfalls and onwards to Krabi and Phuket ( in Malay , Gharbi and Bukit, in Malay the Gh and the Bs are pronounced with precision!).

Pondok Ban Tan is not nestled in the middle of a continuous belt nor enclave of Muslim community but in a cosmopolitan semi-rural Thailand. From the junction before reaching the small road to the Pondok is a Siamese Buddhist Wat and the small cluster of bazaar at the junction  has only one Muslim eatery.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont was coming to officiate  the celebration and opening of the new buildings , so understandably security was tight but not suffocating nor obfuscating just pleasant management of public order by local young men recruited as guards for the day and in uniform too!

The small road into the Pondok precincts is rural Thailand at its cleanest and greenest, with mangosteen and lonkong orchards surrounding it. Now we entered an enclave that suddenly detaches itself from the hustle bustle of semi-rural Thailand. Semi-rural Thailand like Semirural Malaysia and Indonesia is a connotation with a geographical makeup of its own, perhaps a very feature that makes one know that one is in inner Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia and Java Island.

One American friend sums it rather well, a countryside of pleasant roads lined with fruit trees, rubber trees small holdings and continuous and seamless homesteads of all shapes and sizes punctuated by bazaars and junctions and the schools and village community centres, mosques, wats and even churches and last but not least, the football grounds.

People go around in motorbikes and pick up trucks ( called Carryboys in Malaysia) to nowhere and everywhere. There are mobile telephone towers , roadside eateries called warung in the Malay speaking world, where in Malaysia mainly Thai nationals run them.

Tomyum and somtam and paprek dishes have conquered the Malaysian ruralside and suburb cuisine, arguably now the national dish nationwide, definitely is the national dish in the northern states, putting the older Mamak (South Indian Muslim eatery) establishment out or forced the Mamak eatery to go partial tomyum/somtam theme.

Tomyum and somtam has penetrated rural Java with a vengeance as well, as Javanese Indonesian workers in Malaysian restaurants and warungs prepare Thai dishes under supervision of Thai nationals and they then return home as restaurateurs themselves in Java.

So that is free market ASEAN trade for you ,ask for rijstaffel (nasi hidang) in the Malay speaking world and you will inevitably get tomyum, somtam,paprik beef and the ubiquitous Thai fluffy brown thick ommelettes with waves and ripples towards their round edges.

My apologies for this long pasage on the warung subject, but it is this roadside institution that provides the soul and life into semi-rural South East Asia and so recognisably so.

We had to go past a cluster of old tin roofed shacks but in well swept and groomed and excellently drained area, these tin shacks are the original pondoks that made up the cluster of ashrams around the Islamic school of the yesteryears.

Pondok is derived from the arabic word foundouk which means hostelries and in the modern days it also refers to the FourSeasons and JW Marriott. Immediately adjacent to the old quarters are the new school blocks, the Kuwaiti Library, the Qatari block, the Mosque, the IDB ( Islamic Development Bank) building , Sasakawa Peace Foundation(SPF) House, etc making the whole place looking like a full fledge matriculation college anywhere in South East Asia.

The Pitsuwan family has worked hard to raise funds for these new structures and has managed to get donors from the Middle Eastern countries, the Bank and the SPF. While the rest are drawn from the heartland and birthplace of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, The Sasakawa Peace Foundation stands out. Here is the other side of Japan apart from aggressive commercialism and technology drive, a manifestation of a war devastated Nation that wants to be a leader in world peace and certainly is now.

The donors and their representatives came, so did the ambassadors form selected countries notably from the donors countries and from Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Present as VIP guests were also monks from Buddhist wats, in their resplendent yellow robes.

His Excellency PM Surayud Chulanont came and he made an impact on us who came from ASEAN democracies of sorts of which Thailand is one.

We have seen Prime Ministers put in by Juntas but His Excellency Surayud isn't like one of those. He put aside protocol, brush aside security, stood to the full view of sharpshooters, had there been any and on a platform ,unguarded, that can take a truckload of bombs underneath it.

He was exposed to people around him  that can allow for suicide bombers to mingle around, had there been any and we saw no military men armed to the teeth with the juthakarme medallion pendants around their necks, to shelter him from the people.

He was so savvy in popular politics, playing to the gallery like a polished diplomat, completely at ease in such a ceremony where about 10,000 people were gathered, nearly all of the Muslim faith.

He stood on the platform surrounded by Muslim religious figures attired recognisably so and after the recital of the Quran he stood to deliver his speech, so seamlessly that one could easily say, Islam is the state religion!  The psalm melody of the Quran recital sounds like it was natural to his ears and he went to speak like he was mindful of the recitals. In the depth of 10,000 Thai Muslims, a Buddhist Thai Prime Minister stood tall , admonishing them as their leader and safe in their hands  and their magnanimity.

In democratic parlance, His Excellency is not even elected by free elections! His is supposed to be under threat and siege! However as a fellow ASEAN citizen , I too am an adherent of democracy and would call myself a total democrat but I find the Thai version very interesting and challenging and indeed amusing in a positive sense. Please accept my heartfelt apologies if the readers of this newspaper find my support of Junta leadership abhorrent.

The Malay leadership of Malaysia and more so the Malay royal houses are very Siamophile, formerly in their customs and protocol practice but now to the way the Thais carry on the art of Government.  While our system normally works on the basis of regular national elections we also made constitutional dispensations from time to time.

Constitutional Monarchy enshrined in our Constitution makes our Malay Sultans of the states, we know, pine for what the Thai Monarch enjoys. Normally our rotating Kings would act under advice from our Prime Minister, His Majesty reigns but doesn't rule. We in Malaysia thinks that while the Thai Constitutional Monarchy is almost similar, the Thai version is special because it has an interventionist clause by the Monarchy.

We are of the impression that in Thailand should the head of government, the prime minister in this case, makes a particular decision that injures national integrity and fibre, HM The King will hint to him directly or via the Privy Council and give him a period of notice to act accordingly.

If the hint is ignored or rendered ineffective, the King will seek the advice of the Privy Council who will recommend to HM , say, a military intervention to dissolve the government, remove the prime minister, dissolve the cabinet, keep the parliament and the houses of elected representatives and establish an interim junta.

We have done this too in Kuala Lumpur, once in my memory, in 1969. However it was still our PM ,the head of government advising the HM ( the rotating Yang di Pertuan Agung) what to do and act, like  dissolving the elected representatives, the parliament and the cabinet.

We find this royal prerogative in Thailand like the one recently exercised by HM against PM Thaksin Shinawatra and putting PM Surayud Chulanont on instead as very interesting and effective and should be employed in Malaysia as well.

As we see it , life, business, industry, diplomacy, statehood are going on so well under a Junta that Thailand is probably the only country we know in the world where elected governments can take a vacation for a long time and the administration and civil order continues as normal if not better! 

Unfortunately for the closing ceremony on the 24th of June, General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin was not able to attend and he spoke to the milling crowd at the Pondok concourse via telephone with his profile projected on a large screen. Inspite of that,it was to no lost, for the 9,000 crowd stayed on and listened to him like he was there in person.

That evening, the Pondok put on a real gala stage show of  Thai popular culture at its best. The students at the Pondok put on a choreography of the popular song and dance to the sound of the flute and the percussions.In the northern states of Malaysia it is called Dikir Barat and Dikir Ulu.

While the tunes sounded familiar, the choreography was an innovation to us, who are already familiar with this popular song and dance.I am sure very soon it will filter down past the immigration checkpoint south to Malaysia and will be very popular too.

The CD night markets in Kota Bharu and Alor Setar are always abuzz playing Thai Dikir Barat and Dikir Ulu tunes. A Malaysian song group, Raihan  was also invited to perform , popular and very good though they are, we felt the choreography put by the Pondok students was very much more charming.

In Malaysia a lot of folk arts and songs have been supressed by the current wave of music and performing arts talibanism exhorted by the Islamic religious elders. The liberalism in Thailand is so wonderful, the muslim religious elders so untalibanic and it was indeed refreshing to watch the prospering of these performing arts.

Thanks Thailand for ever more!

I was given a brief history of Islam and Muslims in Nakhorn by a member of the Pitsuwan family. As an amateur historian and journalist in spare time I was corrected of my perception. Nakhorn Sri Thammarat , or Negara Sri Dharma Raja in our unflattened malay lingo , was formerly also known as Ligor and was a Hindu Kingdom like the rest of the Malay Peninsula.

It was part of the Empire of Srivijaya which spans across the ports cities of Palembang in Sumatra, Kota Bharu Kelantan (my home own), Pattani, Ligor, present day Cambodia and South Vietnam.

Then the Buddhist era came and Islam came awell. Sumatra, Kelantan and Pattani became Muslim while Ligor remained Buddhist, indeed common roots but different confessions for us today.Well,unfortunately we had to fight from time to time.

So during the Pattani wars, The King of Ayuthiya had to make his vessels, like the sultanate of Pattani stay within the framework and HM the King suffered a few reversals, as wars waged by super powers sometime happened.

He was then  assisted effectively by a supply of mercenary troops from the keeping of the Raja of Ligor and in one decisive battle Pattani came to be metropolitan Siam forever. With that went my home state of Kelantan as well, it being a province of Pattani. Hence my ancestors became Siamese subjects for a long time until the British intervention which delineated the boundaries once again. As peace followed and people return to normalcy ,there was free movement of people, even though corvee labour was still practised, much at its tail end.

Here Muslim prisoners of skirmishes (not wars really) from Kedah and Perak were taken to Ayuthayya and the Bangkok of today to dig canals. They were later freed, settled down , worked the lands, owning them and today some became  dollar multimillionaires when Bangkok grew and had to eat up their lands.

The free movement brought muslim planters, farmers and workers to Ligor and the surroundings from Kedah. However, from Kelantan came a different flock, the religious teachers and traders. Nearer from Pattani also came Muslims of various backgrounds but again mostly as traders and planters and teachers.

Today they are settled communities in the towns of semi-rural Thailand as far up( for me, or way down for Bangkokians) as Chumphon (Jambu in our unflattended Malay language) near the Isthmus of Kra ( Kera in our beautifully dictioned language).

The Kedah Malays were the fastest to drop their Malay language and their accent and adopted  the siamese language while remaining Muslims, very few remain speaking Kedah Malay as their mother tongue and lingua franca, they can be found deep in the isolated malay villages off the main roadways of the Southern Semirural Thailand.

The Pattani Kelantan Malays  somehow have got this strong attachment to their malay language and accent, called Yawi ( misnomer fo jawi, the arabo-Malay writing script).Among them today ,they are still bilingual, Yawi Malay and thai .I am not unlike them, being one of them, speaking five languages but still clung on to Yawi and when I speak in Yawi ,I am like any villager from Bannang Sata or Chana, even though I have never been to those places until in my late thirties.

Muslims of Indian, Persian, Turkish and Arabic origins came as traders and are town dwellers.In Nakhorn you find those of Indian and Persian origins near the railway station and surrounding the Mosque Salahuddin.Many intermarried the Malays and passed off as Pattani Malays.

Like anywhere else in the world, a minority with a critical mass always want to keep their mother tongue and community lingua franca especially if that mother tongue is equally dynamic and living as the language of the majority or the state language.

This happens in Canada and in Malaysia. In Canada and Malaysia the minorities, as they have critical mass are very much inclined to keep and made their mother tongues alive and dynamic, as indeed the French and Chinese languages are widely spoken, living and dynamic world languages.

Likewise the malays of Thailand, the Malay language too is alive and dynamic and a world language widely spoken in Greater South East Asia. Like the French in Quebec and Chinese in Kuala Lumpur, the Malay language will be there to stay in Pattani and parts of Nakhorn Si Thammart.

Nothing wrong with that, indeed everything right with that , for such is the nature of cosmopolitanism and Thailand is part and parcel of a global cosmopolitanism and there is no recourse to self denial and deception for it does not benefit anyone.

In the Library of the Pondok I took a good look at the classics kept there from the archives of  the Pitsuwan family. Many of them were tomes kept from the times of Tuan Hajji Yaakub Abder Ra'uf Pitsuwan, Dr Surin's grandfather and are key texts and lexicographies in the Islamic studies and the arabic language. They are a collection of Rouh Al Qazafaani, Zaad el Ma'an, Bahr el Maazi and Mu'ajam as Sibaweih.

These are master pieces, chef d'oeuvres which must be in the collection of any respectable scholar of Islamic studies and the Pitsuwan family is one of them. I found it a little quaint that such tomes which are supposedly more at home in Qom,Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus are found in Pondok Ban Tan Nakhorn Sri Thammarat. Bravo! Thailand.

The Bibliotheque of the Pondok is only a rooster's cock- a -dooddle -do away from the nearest Buddhist  Wat where the tomes containing the words of the Gautama is kept! In that Library I found Buddhist monks, ordinary Thais of different confessions walking around and looking at the texts, speaking a babel of languages, Thai, Malay, English and Arabic.

I even caught up with MR Dr Sukhumbhand Paribhatra, a scholar ,politician and a royal himself. Dr Sukhumbhand's family is much linked with the Malay world, his grandfather stayed in Java and his family has many royal Malay members in marriage. In a corner of the Library were wall pictures in black and white of press cuttings of HM King Chulalangkorn dressed in Boys Scout uniform of the de riguer shirt and pantaloon but with a black tall fez as headgear and another of HM dressed in malay sarong with same headgear on.

Apparently according to the Pitsuwan informant, HM was so impressed with the Ottoman Boys Scouts that he insisted on similar headgear be used by Muslim Thais and he wore one himself. He saw the Ottoman scouts on a visit to Istanbul. In the other photo he was acting in a play as a Muslim leader of Ottoman extraction. Such was HM King Chulalangkorn, he was proud of his own 'Ottomans" and saw that Thailand too has a province like the Ottoman sanjaq ( province under the Ottoman administration).

Coming back to MR Sukhumbhand Paribhatra, it is interesting to mention that not only Prince Paribhatra, his grandfather, was invited and given political refuge in the malay world but also in the not so distant past in 1934, after a failed rebellion HM King Pachathipok himself took refuge in Belawan , North Sumatra before departing for Europe.

He was received with such warmth and brotherhood by his malay speaking friends. His Malay speaking friends also sheltered his dear relatives, his uncles Prince Damrong and Prince Sawat, his brothers Prince Boriphat and Burachat and a former Prime Minister Phraya Manopakon.

The Malays of Peninsula Malaya and Indonesia have not forgotten that the Colonial powers, the Portuguese, the Dutch and later the British only managed to get footholds in the Malay world after the weakening of the Ayuthya Kingdom and when Siamese protection and military alliances were weakened completely.

President Soekarno of Indonesia and his team of Mohammad Hatta  et al have never forgotten that it was the intriguing Thai passage and access given to the Japanese that caused the collapse of the colonial powers in the Malay world. It triggered the independence of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).

During the War (WW2) the Japanese took away the administration of the states of Kelantan, Kedah, Perak and Trengganu and put them under Thai control that lasted for 4 years when the returning British wriggled back the 4 states from the Thais.

With that my father and my entire family became Malayans again. Sorry, my Thai brothers, otherwise PTTEP will be owning all those lucrative offshore oil and gas fields!The mother of our first Prime Minister Prince Abdul Rahman was a Thai Princess from Nakhorn and he himself grew up in Bangkok.

Nakhorn itself is not an academic backwater, far from it. We had time to visit two Universities in the locality, Rajabhat and Walailak Universities. Walailak was really astonishing for us while Rajabhat looks like a typical provincial university anywhere in the world.

Walailak is well planned, a huge park and garden campus dotted with faculty buildings and residential hall. As a frequent visitor to Bangkok and an employer of Thai nationals and with many Thai colleagues over the last nearly twenty five years of professional life as a director of companies in the oil and gas sector I am very familiar with the main Universities in Bangkok, I have a younger brother who did graduate medical studies at Mahidol, a niece who was recently at AIT (Asian Institute of technology at Ayuthya), friends and staff from Chulalangkorn, Thammasat (Dharma Sastra in Malay) and  a few from Kasetsart and KMIT.

Walailak is new to me and I was so delighted to see such a vibrant campus with a concept. We stopped for dinner at one of the halal eateries just outside the campus where the Walailak students go on motorbikes to chill out. Malaysians are familiar only with one University in the South, the PSU (Prince of Songkhla University) in Hat Yai and Pattani as many of graduates from the PSU go for graduate studies in Malaysia.

While we were at Nakhorn, the Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar and his entourage were  on a visit to the PSU and delivered a lecture there. The tired and fatigued Dr Surin Pitsuwan though just left Nakhorn for Bangkok flew back to Hatyai to be with the Grand Sheikh at PSU.

It was appropriate for him,not only as a scholar himself but also on invitation from  the Rector of the PSU , Dr Hon Chuan Leekphai ,being his former chief in the government. The Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar appeared live on channel 11, his lecture at PSU covered in full.

Channel 11 is widely followed in the northern states of Malaysia and it must have delighted the Malays there to watch the much revered Grand Sheikh. He flew on a Royal Thai Airforce special aircraft, state Mercedes-Benz and was given full military salutes everywhere, whereas his earlier visit to Malaysia warranted only a ride in a Government Proton Perdana (the Colt Galant in Thailand) and his lecture not covered on TV .

It was one of the most brilliant lectures given by the Grand Sheikh anywhere that I have personally heard. His rendition was from the heart, he had no text and with such eloquence and lucidity too, while I must say I was not too happy with the translation, being an Arabic speaker myself.

The Sheikh spoke on peace, hamorny, interfaith respect and coexistence, anti-violence and terrorism and on education, touching on the role of Pondoks like Ban Tan in augmenting formal state education for Muslims in Thailand in the era of globalisation.

He made an offer of easing for a significant increase in the intake of Thai students into the Al Azhar university, not only in Islamic theology and Arabic studies but also in the sciences ,engineering and medicine. 

Finally on 27th June it was time to go home and this time we chose to drive on the coastal highway via Songkhla back to Hatyai.The following day on the 28th of June, we crossed the immigration check point at Sadao and stopped for refueling as gasoline is cheaper on our side of the divide.

Fuel is now the top three commodities of alternative (smuggling in less respectable parlance) trade across the border, the other two being birdnests and cattle. The logic is simple, even at the pump stations prime gasoline is only 140 bahts per litre on our side and 260 bahts on the Thai side, so the Datuk Kamnans are merely rendering a delinearising exercise in price arrangement.

Like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, they are bringing petroleum to the people at mass affordability. At the pump station we met up with an entourage of Thai Porsche Carrera owners , nine Porsches and one Mercedes SL500 and one MPV carying the mechanics ,tools and spare parts, who drove all the way down from Bangkok via Nakhorn as well, after stopping at a rest point to take boats to Ko Samui (Ko Semut in our beautifully diction language).

They were destined for Kuala Lumpur to join their Malaysian counterpart Porsche owners for a race around not to win at the Sepang Formula 1 circuit. When we asked them whether they fear the insecurity and troubles in the South, they looked sharply at us like saying, et tu Brutus? What an embarrassment!

Thus ended our journey of Peace to South Thailand and for those who fear, need we say more? 

NADZRU AZHARI

Selangor, MALAYSIA