Bangkok - Thailand's separatist conflict in the south has killed at least 115 public school teachers since January 2004, when the insurgency escalated, media reports said Sunday. Lekha Issara, a Thai-Muslim in Raman district of Yala province, was killed on June 16, the latest teacher killed in Thailand's three southernmost provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, the Bangkok Post reported.
"Security for teachers in the area is getting worse, but teachers have to soldier on. It is our duty," Boonsom Thongsriprai, chairman of the Confederation of Teachers in the Southern Border Provinces, told the newspaper.
Several public schools have been closed in the majority Muslim region, where religious schools offer an alternative form of education but entrench the area's sense of deep alienation from mainstream, predominantly Buddhist Thailand.
Public school teachers and Buddhist monks have both been targeted by insurgents bent on forming a separate Islamic state or at least winning some form of autonomy from the Bangkok-based government.
"Insurgents no longer target only Buddhist teachers. Muslim teachers also live in fear," Muranee Kalayakarn, a Muslim teacher in Naratiwat, said.
An estimated 3,500 people have died in clashes, bombings, revenge killings and beheadings in the troubled region over the past five and a half years.
About 80 per cent of the region's 2 million people profess to be Muslim.
Of the 300,000 Thai Buddhists who lived in the region, about 70,000 have left since separatists raided an army depot in January 2004, killing four soldiers and making off with 300 weapons, leading to an escalation of the region's long-simmering separatist struggle.
The incident sparked a series of brutal government crackdowns, which turned much of the civilian population against the central government.
Although the region, which centuries ago was the independent Islamic sultanate of Pattani, was conquered by Bangkok about 200 years ago, it has never wholly submitted to Thai rule.
Analysts said the region's Muslim population, the majority of whom speak a Malay dialect and follow Malay customs, feels alienated from the predominantly Buddhist Thai state.
