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While politicians are busy pushing the lucrative NGV bus deal and rice-pledging scheme, and contemplating and posturing their next winning move to capture the seat of political power, the long and multi-faceted unrest in the South, which has claimed more than 3,500 lives since 2004, needs to receive the nation's immediate and careful attention.

Two years ago, I was told by a good friend to read Sir Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962" as a way to understand the tactical and strategic errors the Thai central government had made over the years in dealing with our separatist insurgent movement in the South. "But DO NOT explicitly equate in any conversation you have with anyone French Algeria with southern Thailand, or you could get yourself in a major hitch and you may not be forgiven," said the friend. So equating the two I am not. But it does not mean that one cannot draw some aspects of similarity of the situation on the ground of the two places in order to learn.

Last night, I spoke with a friend who is an "authority" on the issue and asked about the similarity between the Tamil Tigers' separatist movement in Sri Lanka and the separatist struggle in the South. Again, I was warned harshly to drop such an attempt to draw a comparison. "It is a dangerous and counter-productive exercise," he said bluntly.

The former British prime minister, Harold Macmillan (1854-1986), said that he had never found "in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance". And here I profess my lack of first-hand, in-depth knowledge of the problems of the South, call it my ignorance, but I want to make it clear that what follows is not intended as a criticism, but food for thought that can be taken with a grain of salt.

In reading Horne's description of the Algerian lives under the French rule, it is not difficult to find enough resemblance between the dismal, dreadful and decrepit living and economic conditions of the Algerians vis-a-vis those of the French colonists in the times leading up to the outbreak of the war in 1954, and those of the people in the three provinces on our border with Malaysia. "When I was growing up, there were two public phone booths in my village. Today there are still two. The difference is the two phones worked then," said a weary friend, originally from one of the three provinces.

The French Algerian War that brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned Charles de Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil, was an amorphous and complex struggle in which questions of religion, nationalism, external occupation, and terrorism took on a lethal intensity. When it first started, the French vowed the Algerian liberation movement would be entirely squashed and there was absolutely no possibility it would succeed. Like in any armed conflicts, abuse of power, torture, intimidation, and atrocities were committed by all sides at the expense of innocent lives. Five years before the end of the war that brought about Algerian independence, the French won a pyrrhic victory by use of force, which may have been a tactical success, but proved a strategic failure. In the end, the war left some 30,000 French men and women dead, together with as many as one million Algerians. Over 800,000 European settlers were driven from Algeria into exile. There was no denying the high cost and human toll regardless of which side one was on.

Last month, the long-drawn battle between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), considered a terrorist organisation by 32 countries, and the Sri Lankan government came to an end, at least for now, when Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tigers, was killed in the final mayhem with the Sinhalese army. From 1976, the LTTE, which became the strongest faction to represent the minority Hindu Tamils (15 per cent) in the overwhelming majority Buddhist Sinhalese (75 per cent) country, waged a bloody and ferocious secessionist campaign to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of the country. The conflict claimed the life of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was blown up by a female Tamil suicide bomber who bent to touch his feet. The conflict saw a brief cease-fire in 2001 when the LTTE dropped its demand for a separate state, but opted for a form of regional autonomy. In 2003, the LTTE proposed an interim Self Governing Authority, a move welcomed by the international community but rejected by the Sri Lankan government. After that all parties went for broke.

Today, the government in Colombo has claimed a total victory over the Tamil rebels. They did so by defying every rule in the book of how to deal with guerrilla warfare, by deploying brute force, ignoring negotiations and collateral damage, and sacrificing high democratic values.

The LTTE may not have a chance to regroup after this most recent defeat, but the discontent and ethnic resentment of the 2.5 million Tamil minorities that underpinned the insurgency for decades does not go away. Unless and until the government in Colombo achieves a political consensus with the minorities, peace is unlikely to be lasting. People with lost hope and patience are capable of committing unspeakable hideous acts.

In Thailand's South, the lack of consistent, unified, well thought-out, and fair policies based on accountability, as well as sincere effort by the central government over the years has provided for a rather fertile breeding ground for more unrest.

Many proposals have been put on the table, including the latest attempt to enact a legislation that focuses on social development of the local ethnic Muslim communities in the three provinces, in an attempt to win their "hearts and minds" and bring about political reconciliation and eradicate disenchantment, indignation, and alienation.

But unless and until such policies and legislation have some teeth, and most importantly there is serious attention and genuine political will to tackle the cause and not the symptoms of the problem by creating trust, justice, and opportunities amongst the 5 per cent ethnic minorities in the South, we have no winning way to stop the cubs from turning into deadly bloodthirsty tigers that could wreak havoc for the lives of the rest.