Really Awesome Bbc-world Item On The Deep South

[chanchao]

If you're near a TV today, BBC World (Asia Today program) has an excellent item about the situation in the deep South. Unlike so many TV news channels with items lasting shorter than your average video clip, this item I think ran a cool 10 minutes if not more, giving really all angles to the situation, and about the Tak Bai disaster (with video from that I hadn't seen before) and explaining it all the way back to 1911 or thereabouts when the Pattani Kingdom was divided up between British Colonial Malaysia and Thailand. And the recent governent 'effort' about the paper origami crane bird folding by school kids.. Showing Thai school kids folding them and showing Thai Muslim kids in the South making nets by hand 'to catch' them.. (they're going to be dropped from airplanes.. talk about littering..) Anyway, even this is shown without an expressed snare or sarcasm at Taksin and the government, but the surreality of it all isn't lost in the images which really speak for themselves. Then there's interviews with the former foreign minister and an army general, who obviously didn't expect the very direct, yet simple and obvious first question "did the army make mistakes?"

And it includes really impressive video of monks making their morning rounds for alms, filmed really beautifully... but the 3-4 monks are protected by one heavily armed soldier in front and one at the rear. Surreal. Go see it. It's really not that often I see a news item on Thailand by a foreign news-source that makes sense from start to finish. Report was by BBC reporter Kylie Morris.