(Human Rights Watch) – First doused with gasoline, then set alight, six schools were engulfed in flames in Thailand’s southern province of Pattani on Sunday. Flames consumed textbooks, furniture, classrooms, and dreams. It’s highly unlikely these schools will be repaired in time for the new school term in early November. Attacks on schools and teachers have become a regular part of the separatist insurgency in Thailand’s predominantly ethnic Malay-Muslim provinces. More than 300 government schools have been attacked in the past decade, and at least 175 teachers, predominately but not exclusively ethnic Thais, have been shot in their classrooms, in their lodgings, or on their way to or from school.
