Response paper to Peace and Violence in Religion #1

Religion could be one of the conflict causes, but it does not enough to judge that every conflict which happened is a religious conflict because there are many things can cause conflict, not only religion but also many social aspects such as ethnicity, wealth or political policy from the government.

The conflict in Southern Thailand gave us good example about this. Based on the research, actually the origin of conflict there is about the policy from Thai government to the Malay ethnic who mostly concentrated on Southern Thailand at King Chulalangkorn era (SP. Harish p.50). That policy wanted to assimilate Malay ethnic as fast as possible to be more Thai. The background of this policy was the government’s fear that southern Thailand’s people want to separate and integrate with Malaysia, which has same ethnic and religion, Malay and Islam. After that, the conflict escalated and appeared to be such as religious conflict, between muslim representated by Malay ethnic and Buddhist representated by Thai government.

The problem we face now is there is much misleading of religion. Religion is used to be legitimacy of people do. People often named their acts as a religious acts, although there is no simple understanding about it. That misleading is important to be understood because religion has the powerful influence within its follower. Religion can provide the legitimacy that we need to guarantee it is true or wrong. Although it is still debatable whether it is religion says or just our interpretation of some part of religion values, we can see how massive the power of religion can be used to mobilize people. This phenomenon is called political entrepreneur (Hasenclever and Rittbeger, p.650).

The understanding of the basic problem is very important because it will determine our success to finish the problem. The settlement of the conflict in Southern Thai should be started from the efforts of dialogue between the Thai government and the Malay ethnic, not with a settlement between religions, between Islam and Buddhist. Although many people assume that the happening conflict in Thailand is a religious conflict, people who keen in researching must understand and conclude that the conflict turned out to be ethnic conflict, between the Thai government with Malay ethnic.