THAILAND: After Violence, Truth Seekers Called ‘Unpatriotic’

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 7 2004 (IPS) - Among the files that lie on Jaran Ditapichai’s desk is one that contains messages of rage directed at the 56-year-old member of this country’s national human rights commission.

The notes range from those that rebuke him for challenging the use of excessive force by Thailand’s security forces to quell violence in the south last week, to those that ask if he is a ‘patriotic’ citizen because he has called for an inquiry into the matter.

Messages with rude and violent language in Thai also dot these diatribes towards Jaran, one of the 11 members of the premier human rights body in this South-east Asian nation.

”Some writers have threatened to have me kidnapped or to kill me,” Jaran said, while leafing through some of the messages. In just a week since the Apr. 28 violence in the south, he has received over 600 hostile notes, all as e-mails.

The anger and threats have come in telephone calls to his home as well. ”They said, ‘Be careful. Someone will kidnap you and take you to where Somchai is’,” Jaran added in an interview one recent afternoon in his office, full of books and framed pictures of his accomplishments as a rights advocate.

The Somchai alluded to is a lawyer from Thailand’s Muslim minority, Somchai Neelaphaijit, who disappeared on Mar. 12 in Bangkok. He disappeared shortly after he had exposed the Thai police for allegedly torturing five of his clients while in custody.

Running into such wrath from Thais is a first for Jaran since he began working in Bangkok as a rights commissioner in 2001.

The hostility toward him and his speaking up for rights was sparked by statements he made to a local newspaper following the unprecedented bloodbath in Thailand’s predominantly Muslim provinces in the south last week.

”I told the journalists that this was a tragedy and that a neutral committee should be created to find the facts,” said Jaran of the violence that resulted in over 110 deaths.

Of this, 108 of the dead were young Muslim men who attacked police posts armed with mostly knives and machetes.

During the early morning attack, some of the militants took cover in an ancient mosque rich with symbolism for the Muslims of the area. After a standoff, heavily armed troops stormed the Krue Se mosque, killing 32 militants.

But Jaran’s call for the truth to be exposed was not easily digested or understood among the public. ”The e-mail messages by the public revealed the mentality of these people – that we are supposed to be all Thai and that we should be concerned about the nation and the country first and that facts should come second,” he said.

That flavour of ultra-nationalism was on display in the Senate, too. There, the person whose loyalty to the Thai state was questioned was Kraisak Choonhavan, chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee.

Like Jaran, he called for an investigation into the southern violence – including a charge that some of those who died at the hands of the security forces had been ”tied and executed”. This call was criticised vehemently and someone even threatened to take a punch at Kraisak.

”Your speech shows you do not love our country and want to damage our country. Please shut up. It tortures me to listen to you,” Sen Boonlert Pairin had said while Kraisak was still speaking, according to the English-language daily ‘Bangkok Post.’

”In times of crisis, this ultra-nationalist streak in Thais come out,” Kraisak told IPS. ”We have had it in the past, in the 1970s and 1992, where this fascist notion has been used by conservatives to justify violence by the state.”

For political scientists like Giles Ungpakorn, the roots of such thinking can be traced to the ”Thai state’s history of repression” and the way the state has succeeded in defining what being Thai is. The outbursts against Thais who challenge the view of the state are a symptom of something pervasive in the country’s national psyche, Giles Ungpakorn of the Bangkok-based Chulalongkorn University, explained to IPS.

”It is a product of Thai nationalism directed against minorities in all forms by the state,” he said. ”We are seeing the result of this now.”

In that list of minorities he includes the estimated 2.3 million Muslims of Malay ethnicity in the south, the nearly one million indigenous hilltribe communities in the north and the over one million migrant workers largely from neighbouring Burma spread across the country.

Thailand has 63 million people, majority of whom are Buddhists.

Sanitsuda Ekachai of the ‘Bangkok Post’ also drew attention to the ease with which the Thai public, in the main, is quick to accept the state’s version of events when minorities are involved.

”While the violence at Krue Se is worrying, of more concern is the public endorsement of the violence,” she commented in her weekly column Thursday on the bloodshed in the south. ”We accept the army’s justification for the violence because, thanks to state indoctrination, we believe that those who threaten the Thai nation deserve no better.”

Central to this indoctrination are the elements that make up the Thai identity, says Giles. ”To be Thai one has to speak the Thai spoken in the central region of the country, be a Buddhist and be loyal to the three pillars of the state – the nation, the religion and the king.”

That has been the case since this was imposed on the country by a military dictator who ruled the Thailand twice, Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkram. Among those who felt the pinch of the military ruler’s policies about being patriotic were the Chinese Thais in the economic sector and the Muslims in the south.

In 1938, under a slogan of ‘A Thai Economy for the Thai People’, the Phibun regime ”attempted to take the urban economy under state management,” write Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker in the book ‘Thailand: Economy and Politics’.

”Phibun argued that government control was necessary to achieve the economic progress required for national strength (because) alien Chinese exploited the ‘Thai’ people and exported the profits,” state Pasuk and Baker.

The Muslims, however, have resisted attempts by Bangkok to bring them completely under its wing through policies that challenged the Malay-Muslim identity. They revolted against the Thai state in 1948, and this resulted in over 400 deaths.

This was followed by the rise of Muslim separatist movements in the south in the 1970s, which were subsequently quelled by the 1980s. Beginning Jan. 4 this year, attacks against symbols of the state recommenced in the south and kept escalating till the Apr. 28 carnage.

Such challenges to Bangkok’s authority stems from the fact that over a century ago, the southern provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, Satun, Songkhla and Yala belonged to the Muslim kingdom of Pattani, but it was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.

The spectre of who is a patriotic Thai or an enemy of the state has surfaced elsewhere, too, such as when university students and members of the country’s Communist Party in the 1970s challenged the largely military-dominated state.

”Protesting students and demonstrators in 1976 were called non-Thais by sections of the public and conservatives,” said Kraisak, the senator.

A popular uprising against the ruling dictatorship in 1973 left 72 dead. In 1976, 41 students were killed at Thammasat University in Bangkok after they were accused of being communists.

”Those who tried to investigate those incidents were accused of being unpatriotic,” said Jaran. ”And now it is happening again. The same thing.”