RIGHTS-THAILAND: Prime Minister Goes for Drug-free Country

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 24 2003 (IPS) - The countdown has begun to get Thailand a unique place among the world’s nations – as the only country that has succeeded in stamping out the drug menace.

That is what Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is being called increasingly autocratic, hopes to accomplish by the first week of December, when the harsh "war on drugs" that he launched in February comes to an end.

But the premier’s addiction to success has been reproached by human rights groups disturbed by the trail of dead bodies – some due to extrajudicial killings – that accompanied this crackdown of alleged drug peddlers.

Last week, in an effort to ensure that his promise to the Thai populace is met, Thaksin ordered government agencies involved in the anti-drug campaign to accelerate the seizure of assets belonging to people linked to the narcotics trade.

Thaksin wants the anti-money laundering agency to take action against more than 60 drug traders if the target he set for a drug-free Thailand is to be met.

Such commands are being welcomed by officials of Thailand’s anti-narcotics board, given the impact achieved so far in the asset-seizure phase of this anti-drug drive. ”Lot of suppliers have stopped their activities and have been forced to leave the areas they operated after law enforcement officers began to attack their assets,” Chatchai Suthiklom, deputy secretary-general of the Narcotics Control Board, told IPS.

”The push now is to go after the suppliers operating in cities like Bangkok and those working with drug traffickers along the Thai-Burmese border (where much of the illegal drugs come from),” he added. ”If properly carried out, we feel that the target can be met by early December.”

Media reports say that the Anti-Money Laundering Office has seized 65 million baht (1.64 million U.S. dollars) worth of assets from 33 suspected drug traders between Oct. 1 to Nov.3.

The reality on the street also reflects the consequences of this campaign, which officials say involved close to 40 local and national government agencies. The current street price of the drug that is the target of this war – methamphetamines or ‘ya baa’ as the Thais call it – is 300 baht (7.6 dollars) per pill.

But prior to this crackdown, when the speed pill was easy to access in the country’s anything-goes environment, ‘ya baa’ was available at 100 baht (2.52 dollars) per pill. In June, when this drive marked its halfway point, the drastic cut in methamphetamine supply pushed the price up four times. This ”war on drugs” was launched in the wake of many Thais’ concern that ‘ya baa’ addiction had become a national menace.

At the start of this year, out of Thailand’s 62 million people as many as one in 17, or 5.9 percent of Thais aged 15 years and above were hooked on methamphetamines, reported the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCP).

Drug laboratories on the Burmese side of the Thai-Burma border have long been blamed for supplying Thailand 500 to 700 million amphetamine pills every year. The region’s most notorious drug traffickers, the United Wa State Army, are the kingpins of this trade.

”Thailand’s campaign against drugs has been a success in some ways,” Yngve Danling, law enforcement advisor at the UNDCP’s East Asia and Pacific office, told IPS. ”The suppliers have been forced to stockpile their drugs along the border. Some traffickers have been forced to bury their stocks because of the difficulty of getting it across the border.” However, the cheers that this campaign is receiving – even from the lead U.N. agency that works to control drugs – have failed to mute the mix of outrage and concern expressed by local and international rights groups about the deadly price of such an anticipated ‘victory’.

For a start, they point to the number of people killed for alleged links with the drug trade during the initial phase of this effort, from Feb. 1 to Apr. 30. During those three months, an estimated 2,245 people were killed across the country as a result of the anti-drug crusade, human rights groups pointed out.

The gravity of such a high death toll – an average of 25 murders a day – is striking when compared with the country’s average murder toll, which come close to 400 deaths per month, according to available records. In 2001, by contrast, close to 300 murders were recorded every month in Thailand.

But officials have gone on the record to state that only 42 drug suspects were shot by the police at that time – and even these were acts of self-defence. They attributed the rest to mafia-style killings involving the drug dealers themselves.

In early November, the London-based human rights lobby issued a scathing report saying that after nine months of the anti-drug drive ”no independent investigation is known to have been instituted into the deaths of 2,245 drug suspects who were killed during the (first) three-month campaign”.

”Some of the killings may have been extrajudicial executions by the police or other members of the security forces,” declared the Amnesty report, ‘Thailand: Grave Developments – Killings and Other Abuses’. ”We know for sure that the murders are continuing, but the government has made up its mind to suppress the death toll,” Sunai Phasuk of the regional human rights lobby Forum Asia said in an interview.

He estimates that the deaths due to the ”war on drugs” could ”be near 3,500 or more by now.” But this number ”cannot be verified” because of the orders given to ”conceal the reports of deaths,” he says.

Yet the activists’ cries have not been warmly received by the Thai public, who favour the government’s tough approach toward alleged drug peddlers.

”Almost 99 percent of the Thai public has been supporting the anti-drug campaign, even if it has meant gross human rights violations,” Jaran Ditapichai, a member of the National Human Rights Commission, told IPS. ”It means that Thai society has chosen to support such suppression even if they know the consequences.”

This has made ”our work more difficult,” he adds, because ”we have been condemned for drawing attention to what have clearly been many human rights violations in the name of the war on drugs.”

Says UNDCP’s Danling: ”We assume that the Thai government respects human rights and has followed the national laws. We assume that the campaign has been handled appropriately.”