The recent proposal which was endorsed by Education Minister Chinnaworn Boonyakiat, to send violent students to the troubled South to do community work, continues a long tradition in the thinking of the Thai mainstream.

For years, the regular punishment for delinquent bureaucrats was not demotion, or a fine, or (heaven forefend) dismissal from government service, but a ‘transfer to the Southern provinces’. And that was in the days before the serious violence of the past 6 years or so.

The South was the place where things were uncomfortably different. Most of the population not only followed a different religion and spoke a different language, but they dressed differently, ate different food and just went about life in a different way. And, in the opinion of some non-Southern Thais (and I quote from what I have heard with my own ears), they were ‘dirty’, ‘smelly’ and ‘ignorant’.

Though for some of these ethnically superior Thais, ignorance was the real cause of their dirtiness and smelliness. Too bad they were so ignorant that they insisted on shunning the perfectly good secular schools provided by the state and insisted on sending their children to religious schools that were, frankly, dirty and smelly. And possibly ignorant.

So for years, government officials who had been caught in corruption, or abusing their authority, or just doing such a lousy job that even other government officials noticed, were punished by being sent to a place where they couldn’t understand what people said, weren’t familiar with the ways things were done, and simply wouldn’t like the people.

Where, of course, they continued in their corrupt ways, abusing their authority and providing a lousy service for the local population, whose opinion was never canvassed but who are unlikely to have appreciated being treated as a garbage dump for the dregs of the Thai bureaucracy. But it was the South. Who cared?

The Secretary-General of the Office of the Basic Education Commission says that the current idea originated with the general public. Or at least that part of it who are given to reacting to television programmes with indignant mobile phone text messages.

Now I can understand the frustration of concerned citizens. I am also resigned to Thai TV programmes’ tawdry attempts to boost their ratings by sensationalizing the issue of the day. What I find more difficult to accept is the ready willingness of politicians, especially from a government ostensibly pursuing a policy of ‘reconciliation’, to go along with this understandable, albeit misguided, popular revulsion and gain a fleeting moment of popularity. This is simply following the politician’s syllogism: we must do something; this is something; therefore we must do it.

A meeting of ‘education officials, city administrators and the heads of 40 schools’ are reported to have soundly supported the Minister’s plans. One suspects this was a self-selected group nurturing traditional prejudices, which will include a distaste for youth who won’t do as they are told, and a lack of sympathy for, and understanding of, The Other, i.e. anyone who doesn’t behave like proper Thais should. Like the people of the South, for example.

The Minister says that he will seek the cooperation of the military. Another group not known for its sympathetic treatment of wayward youth and the inhabitants of the 3 southernmost provinces.

The Cabinet are reported to have knocked this idea back. At least that is how ‘we have no such plan’ is being interpreted. But as ‘critics came out in droves to oppose the idea and warn of the possible repercussions on the teenagers’ as one newspaper put it, the reasons given by those against the plan tend to be one-sided.

It is, they argue, not the correct way of dealing with young people with ‘a lot of energy but … no place to express themselves in a creative way’ according to one. They don’t believe in the effectiveness of community work in ‘rough areas such as the lower South’, in the Minister’s unfortunate choice of phrase. (There goes any hope of the Democrats winning seats there).

And that is precisely the problem. The Democrats are said to have a lock on the South (Chinnaworn himself represents Nakhon Si Thammarat) but not the ‘deep’ South (the ‘smelly-dirty-ignorant’ bits). He would never dream of dumping Bangkok’s bovver boys in his own bailiwick, but it’s OK to drop them farther down the coast.

Because nobody, proponents and critics alike, seems to bother that the people of the South might not want their communities turned into pseudo juvenile correction centres. After all, they’ve been complaining about the way Bangkok has been treating them for years and years.

Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Why should they start now?

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).