Armed with just a guitar, activist preaches peace in Thailand's south

Tanyonglimo, Thailand: He is kind of a Pied Piper of peace, carrying a guitar instead of a flute to areas of Thailand's Muslim south plagued by sectarian violence.

In a T-shirt, with a Mao cap shielding his bearded face, he looks like a refugee from the '60s.

Quirky though his looks may be, the self-appointed emissary who calls himself Souriya D. Sunshine has convinced at least some embittered Thai Muslims that they should give peace a chance.

"Instead of gunfire, I use songs and a sincere approach to win their hearts and minds," Souriya said.

His gifts, he said, have convinced more than 200 suspected insurgents to turn themselves in a sharp contrast to the government's almost total failure to ease the area's bloody conflict.

There is little middle ground in Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani, Thailand's southernmost provinces and the only ones with Muslim majorities in the Buddhist-dominated country. More than 1,300 people have died in a separatist insurgency that flared up in January 2004.

Southern Muslims have always felt alienated from other Thais, believing they are treated as second-class citizens.

Government soldiers, who have mostly been brought in from other parts of the country to deal with the violence, treat the Muslims with suspicion or worse.

Souriya is a Buddhist, too. But he carries a guitar for his encounters with Muslims, although the instrument does have the banana clip of an AK-47 assault rifle welded to its neck, and a bandolier for a strap.

"I made the guitar from an AK rifle as a symbol that we will no longer kill them," Souriya said.