NFE-Mae Hong Son officer Kriengkrai Eiamkrasin told
The Irrawaddy today that the new courses, which should be up and running by the end of March, will target students who have difficulty accessing
Thailand’s formal education system and will combine elements of traditional hilltribe culture with standard school subjects. He admitted, however, that the new courses face problems from the outset due to understaffing: “We have only 116 teachers for 116 centers, and the total numbers of students in this province is 7,600.”
Mae Hong Son, a province along the northern Thailand-Burma border, is home to people from many ethnic groups including Shan, Karen and Karenni from Burma. Illiteracy has proved a major problem when dealing with Thai authorities and has led to difficulties in accessing public services, especially healthcare. The courses will be open to students under the age of 60, including migrant workers and those without official residency papers, particularly those who live in remote areas and are unable to reach existing schools.
The literacy rate in Mae Hong Son is much lower than the Thai average, which according to National Statistic Office figures from 2000, stands at just over 90 percent. Sanan Supreena, the headman of Baan Sobpong, one of the Mae Hong Son villages due to benefit from the program said: “Only about 50 percent of people in this village are literate, and many of them do not yet have Thai citizenship.” Mae Hong Son is the first province to run the new courses.
Al-Qaeda Funds Suicide Bombings, Indonesia Police Says
Osama bin-Laden’s terror network helped fund all of the suicide bombings in Indonesia in the past four years, a senior police official said Tuesday, highlighting links between al-Qaeda and the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah. Money for the attacks, which have occurred annually in the world’s most populous Muslim country since 2002, was delivered by courier to leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah, said Col Petrus Reinhard Golose, of Indonesia’s counterterrorism task force.
Indonesia is the only Southeast Asian nation known to have been hit by suicide bombers. Jemaah Islamiyah is blamed for the 2002 nightclub attacks on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, attacks in the capital Jakarta in 2003 and 2004 that together killed 21, and triple suicide bombings on Bali last October that killed 20.
Indonesian authorities have claimed since 2003 that al-Qaeda helped finance the terror campaign in Indonesia. But they never before provided the level of detail given by Golose, who said that September 11, 2001 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad personally arranged for a courier to deliver money for the bombings. It was not immediately clear from which country the funds originated, but he said the money passed through Thailand and Malaysia before reaching Indonesia.
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