THAILAND: Thaksin Outlaws VCD Challenging State Over Muslim Deaths

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 12 2004 (IPS) - While the world marked human rights day, the Thai government chose the occasion to step on the citizen’s right to information by declaring illegal a video compact disc (VCD) containing footage of Thai troops suppressing Muslim demonstrators.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, himself, is leading the way to censor the disc. He told reporters on Dec. 10, world human rights day, that the government would crackdown on the circulation of the VCD.

”Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra yesterday threatened to use the full force of the law against those behind a proliferation of the video CDs showing the violent suppression of Muslim protesters by police and the military in Tak Bai,” reported ‘The Nation’ newspaper on Saturday.

”It is not right to play the VCD and attack the government as if the government had killed the Muslims,” Thaksin was quoted as having told the English language daily.

The footage in the compact disc, which IPS has also viewed, challenges the official storyline spread by Bangkok over the clash between hundreds of demonstrators from the Malay-Muslim minority and Thai troops in late October in Tak Bai, a small town in the southern province of Narathiwat.

The Tak Bai violence on Oct. 26 has come to haunt Bangkok due to the deaths of the Muslims – six of them were killed when heavily armed troops confronted the demonstrators and 78 died due to ”suffocation” after they were arrested and placed in military custody.

”It is quite clear that the government is trying to suppress the right to information,” Sunai Phasuk, the Thai researcher for the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS. ”It is also ironic, because the government wants an independent assessment of what happened in Tak Bai but is refusing to acknowledge alternative views about the brutality.”

The editor of an alternative news magazine is as worried about the crackdown on the Tak Bai VCD, since he plans distributing copies of the outlawed disc with his Thai language quarterly publication.

”We will have to stress our rights,” Thanaphol Eiwsakul, editor of the ‘Fah Diew Kan’ magazine, was quoted as having told ‘The Nation’ newspaper. Thanaphol added that the stores making the copies of the disc said that ”the police had been calling all such shops and instructing them not to make any copies of the Tak Bai crackdown.”

The VCD began circulating few days after the deaths in Tak Bai. And the route it has taken – being distributed for viewing outside the normal broadcasting channels – reflects the limited space available for images critical of the state to appear on television.

Currently, five of the major television stations are owned by the Thai military and government departments. The only independent television station is owned by the telecommunications empire belonging to Thaksin and his family.

Hence none of the main stations have shown the graphic footage of Tak Bai, Pipope Panichpakdee, senior producer at an independent cable channel run by ‘The Nation’, told IPS. ”On the day of the clashes, all stations were told by the military not to broadcast the violence in Tak Bai.”

Pipope’s cable channel, however, broadcast some of the footage that they had got from southern Thailand for half a day, ”and then we had to tone it down.” Images they broadcast included ”the army using their boots to force people on the ground.”

At the time, Thailand’s independent newspapers led the way with images that conveyed the harsh measures used by government troops on the Muslim demonstrators. The photographs included Thai soldiers firing live ammunition at a target on the ground and ramming rifle-buts into heads of the protesters.

The government has still not explained what law it plans to use to enforce the VCD crackdown. Currently, Thailand’s national security laws have only provisions to close publications if they carry material that the state deems subversive.

Government officials who are calling for the VCD ban have gone on record saying that the disc may inflame passions in the Muslim south, triggering off more violence.

Bangkok has been unable to contain the violence that has shaken southern Thailand since early January. Over 500 people have died, including civilians and Buddhist monks, most of them victims of attacks from assailants who the government identifies as Malay- Muslims.

The death toll also includes Muslim youth and men who have been killed by Thai security forces during clashes with them and while in military and police custody.

The country’s southern provinces, home to the Malay-Muslim minority in Buddhist Thailand, have witnessed violence before, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Muslim separatist rebels fought Thai troops to carve out an independent homeland.

The three southern provinces that have witnessed the recent outburst of violence – Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani – were once part of the independent kingdom of Pattani that was annexed by Siam, as Thailand was then called, in 1902.