12/7/2004 8:18:00 AM GMT
Source: AP
In a new approach to peacemaking, Thai warplanes dropped millions of folded paper cranes over the country's southern provinces on Sunday, as an express of hope to end the separatist violence that has claimed the lives of hundreds in the Muslim-dominated region.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that the mission was successful, saying they had an ''enormous positive psychological effect,'' making southerners feel that they are an important part of Thai society and that their countrymen care for them.
However, the campaign couldn’t stop the violence. A 22-pound bomb was found -- and safely defused – on Sunday on a road crowded with people trying to collect the paper cranes.
120 million folded
Over the past two weeks, Thais across the country -- Cabinet ministers, office workers, schoolchildren and even convicts -- have been busy making the paper birds, a peace symbol borrowed from Japan and familiar to most Asians.
According to the government, at least 120 million cranes were folded for the occasion.
About 50 warplanes dropped the folded paper cranes all over the southernmost provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, the only Muslim-majority region in the Buddhist-dominated country.
More than 540 people have lost their lives this year in the separatist violence in southern provinces.
Thai government came under heavy criticism after 85 Muslim demonstrators died during arrest on Oct. 25.