Thai PM to visit restive South after recent violence

Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra will travel to restive southern province of Pattani on Thursday for meetings with teachers after recent continuing violence against teachers, Bangkok Post online reported. Yingluck announced the trip on Wednesday after attending a meeting of the committee for implementing policies and strategies for solving problems in the restive deep South. Yingluck said she would travel to Pattani on Thursday to meet teachers and other people and get first-hand information about their problems. In the past several weeks, schools were attacked and some teachers were killed by suspected separatist militants, forcing the schools to be temporarily closed due to security concern. She said the meeting stressed the need for all agencies to integrate their work to make sure they go in the same direction. The meeting will also discuss allocation of budgets to troubled areas to better meet the requirements of the local people. The prime minister said the government was of the opinion the ongoing problems were mainly the result of insufficient manpower, adding that the government had taken for consideration a proposal by teachers from the southern border provinces for the setting up of a task force to specifically provide security for teachers. More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 9,000 hurt in over 11,000 incidents, about 3.5 incidents a day, in Thailand's three southern border provinces -- Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat -- and four districts of Songkhla since violence erupted in January 2004, according to Deep South Watch, which monitors the regional violence.