THAILAND: Hundreds of Thai schoolchildren and air force recruits loaded an estimated 100 million origami birds on to military transport aircraft yesterday in preparation for a "peace bombing" of the Muslim south of the country.
The little pieces of folded paper are to be dropped from the air tomorrow to mark the birthday of Thailand's revered king, Bhumibol Adulyadej.
They are intended to sow peace, harmony and goodwill in the three southernmost provinces, where an 11-month insurgency has claimed nearly 500 lives.
The Prime Minister, Mr Thaksin Shinawatra, whose government has struggled to get to the root of the violence, has defended his paper-bird scheme against opponents who say the government is just dumping 48 planeloads of rubbish.
"Don't criticise against the wishes of the majority of Thais," Thaksin said at a sending off ceremony for the paper birds at Bangkok's military airport.
The birds, folded out of everything from bank notes to plastic sheets, covered the floor of an aircraft hangar to a depth of more than two metres.
The organiser of the ceremony, Group Capt Chakrapong Homkrailas, put the number of birds at 100 million. Ant-like columns of recruits and children carried thousands of plastic sacks across the airport tarmac and into the bellies of five Hercules C-130 military transports.
Some people in the mainly Muslim deep south, which has a century-long history of ethnic and religious hostility towards the largely Buddhist administration in Bangkok, question the symbolism behind the gesture.
In 1948, the Thai air force was called in to bomb parts of the south along the border with Malaysia to quell a rumbling Muslim separatist insurgency.
"The paper birds are not a traditional symbol for us," said Abdullaham Abdulsamad of the Narathiwat Islamic Council. "It's a different culture."
Thaksin's initial intention was to drop 62 million paper cranes, one for every person in the country. - (Reuters)