A dozen Muslim men were watching a television show at a teashop when the school next door went up in flames in Thailand's deep south.
They ignored it.
Soldiers arrived without fire-fighting equipment and tried to tackle the blaze with a bucket as their colonel pleaded to groups of people watching the 36-year-old school burn down.
"This is everyone's school," the colonel cried. "Please help the soldiers put it out."
They ignored him.
Lohtu Elementary School was one of five schools which went up in flames on Tuesday night, just hours after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the situation in the mainly Muslim south was improving.
The reluctance of local Muslims to help save the school, which they see as a symbol of the government in Bangkok, spoke volumes about the estrangement of Malay-speaking people in an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation.
Three of the five schools were in the Kapoh district of Pattani province where police shot dead two armed Muslim militants a day earlier.
"They probably set them on fire because two of their men were killed," the colonel told Reuters in between urging the Muslim villagers to help try save the building.
They were the latest of scores of schools torched in Thailand's three southermost provinces alongside the Malaysian border since January, when the violence erupted with a raid on an army camp in which more than 300 assault rifles were stolen.
Since then, almost 500 people -- government officials, suspected militants and civilians -- have been killed in the violence.
FUTILE ATTEMPTS
Nothing Prime Minister Thaksin has tried seems to have dented the alienation.
He believes lack of education and unemployment are the two main factors behind the violence in a region where Muslim separatists fought low key insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Thaksin pledged to spend 12 billion baht on education, job creation and infrastructure to accelerate regional development.
But appeals for people to come forward with information to help end the militancy appear to fall on deaf ears.
"Many Muslims are still reluctant to help the authorities with tip-offs because they don't trust officials," said a Muslim scholar who declined to be identified.
Thaksin's latest campaign -- to get each of Thailand's 63 million people to fold a paper dove to be dropped over the deep south on King Bhumibhol Adulyadej's birthday on December 5 as a gesture of peace and caring -- is shrugged off in the south.
Thaksin, who faces a general election in February he is expected to win handsomely despite the continuing violence in the south, is undeterred.