POLITICS-THAILAND: Premier’s Trip to Burma Zeroes in on Drugs

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 6 2003 (IPS) - Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s scheduled visit to Burma Sunday will be pivotal for his just-launched crusade against drugs here at home, since that neighbouring country is the font from where the narcotics flow.

In the days ahead of his departure, Thaksin is not fighting shy of this connection, given his plans to make the trafficking of drugs along the Thai-Burma border a central feature of his talks with Rangoon’s military junta.

”I will discuss the drugs issues with the Burmese to work out joint measures against drug trafficking along the order,” the premier was quoted in Thursday’s ‘Bangkok Post,’ an English-language daily.

It is a position that is being warmly received here for two reasons: no prime minister till Thaksin has made the drug problem a key focus in talks with the Burmese regime and in doing so, he is being perceived as one determined to triumph in the war on drugs.

”This is the first time that a Thai prime minister has made the drug issue a main theme for the talks with the Burmese government,” says Chayachoke Chulasiriwongs, head of the international relations department at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ”It will go well with the domestic campaign that has been launched (this February).”

Yet Thaksin faces a daunting challenge on this international front, given the amount of narcotics, largely amphetamine pills, which are produced in Burma and sold in Thailand. According to official figures, the supply ranges from 500 million to 700 million amphetamine pills a year.

What is more, Rangoon’s military rulers have a ”very convenient relationship” with the drug lords in the country, says a Burmese exile in Thailand who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”The drug traffickers have invested their profits in hotels, transport services and in construction.”

The most well-known group in the drug trade is the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which belongs to a Burmese ethnic community and operates out of the Shan state, along the Burmese-Thai border.

The UWSA’s uninterrupted flow of drugs has resulted in the amphetamine addiction attaining unprecedented heights in Thailand over the recent years. This South-east Asian country currently has the highest percentage of the population in the world that abuses amphetamines, states the United Nations Office on Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCP).

In Thailand, which has 62 million people, as many as one in 17, or 5.9 percent of Thais aged 15 and above are reported to be abusers of amphetamines, adds the UNDCP.

According to newspaper reports here, there are over 600,000 students across the country, from primary schools to universities, who are drug addicts. The number of people treated for metamphetamine or ‘ya baa’, a type of amphetamine, has also been rising sharply in Thailand. The proportion of methamphetamine cases rose from 0.2 percent of all treatment demand in 1990 to 46 percent in 2000, according to the Thailand Narcotics Annual Report 2001.

It is this reality that triggered Thaksin’s anti-drugs crusade, under which he gave the police three months, from February to April, to mount an intense crackdown to rid the country of drugs.

”This is a good strategy, because it is being enforced across the country, so there is no getting away from one province to another,” says Chart Chai, deputy secretary general of the narcotics control board. ”Earlier, it was only done in a few provinces in the north.”

”The prime minister has also warned that bad officials, those who let the drug traffickers get away will be punished,” he adds. ”A monitoring system has been set up by the government to evaluate performances.”

In the first week of this anti-drug crusade, the Thai public has witnessed dramatic results: Over 1,000 dealers and producers were arrested and more than 3,000 people in the drug trade turned themselves in.

Over the weekend, according to some reports, the police had seized over 700,000 metamphetamine pills.

But there has been a darker side to this act of social cleansing – charges by human rights defenders and some journalists of police abuse, resulting in what they call a steadily spreading reign of terror.

”The government policy is calling for the suppression and elimination of people suspected to be in the drug trade by any means,” says Jaran Ditapichai, a member of the national human rights commission. ”Some suspects have been killed through extra-judicial methods.”

On the first day of the Thai government’s war on drugs, four drug suspects were shot dead.

In Sakhon Nakhon, a province in north-eastern Thailand, one police station had a macabre message for drug traffickers, wrote Thepchai Yong in a column in Tuesday’s English-language ‘The Nation’ newspaper.

They had ”piled up a dozen donated coffins in front of their office as a warning to drug traffickers: Stop or end up in one of them,” he said. ”It’s rather obvious that the police in many areas, under pressure from their superiors to ‘perform,’ have resorted to extra-judicial killings to show results.”

But these voices of concern are no match in volume to the groundswell of public support Thaksin’s anti-drug crusade has received so far. According to a poll conducted this week in the Thai capital by the Bangkok-based Assumption University, 84.2 percent of the 1,412 people questioned backed the government’s campaign.