EDITORIAL
Police serving in the South
- Published: 31 Dec 2012 at 00.00
- Newspaper section: News
Events in Thailand's far South have effectively have come full circle. With a Royal Thai Police decision to hold a lottery and assign losers to the deep South, the situation in important ways returns to the 1970s. That was when police and other civil servants were sent to the South unwillingly. The result was incompetence and poor job performance, followed by resentment by southerners for becoming Bangkok's "dumping ground", followed by violence and terrorism _ a situation pretty much repeated today.
This pretty kettle of fish arose for understandable reasons. The Royal Thai Police headquarters has to come up with 150 investigators to begin service tours in the deep South in coming months.
There are 30 volunteers. National police chief Adul Saengsingkaew plans to choose the rest by lottery. He figures he will have 4,000 names of qualified detectives available for the "lucky" draw on Jan 7. In this case, the lottery "winners" will get the decidedly undesired assignments to Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani provinces.
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