THAILAND IS ON TO A winning formula. In order to improve relations with its neighbours. The country has decided to rewrite history, literally.
The Thai education ministry is producing a new school textbook that tones down accounts of conflicts with neighbouring countries. This way, Bangkok hopes, the country's bilateral relations will improve and regional unity will be strengthened.
The project is the result of an initiative aimed at building regional unity proposed by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation, an intergovernmental body created in 1965 to promote co-operation in education, science and culture in the region. Its members are the 10 countries that make up Asean.
The project supervisor, Vuthichai Moonsilpa, reportedly said that current history textbooks had been the cause of many conflicts with neighbouring countries and should be considered 'obsolete'.
He said some Thai textbooks had been written with a deliberate emphasis on nationalism in a bid to counter communist insurgencies during the Cold War. Thailand was a member of the staunchly anti-communist alliance, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation, which was dissolved in 1977.
Although Thailand managed to stay out of both World War I and World War II, it was embroiled in a large number of conflicts in the region, including wars with Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos.
