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POLITICS-THAILAND: Government’s Use of Emergency Law Under Fire

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 11 2010 (IPS) - A powerful bomb that ripped through an apartment building on the Thai capital’s outskirts last week – one that killed the suspected bomb maker and three people – has provided the latest twist to an ongoing debate about the Thai government’s continuing use of a harsh emergency law.

The explosion, which shattered the calm of the Samarn Metta Mansion apartment, came a few hours after the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva extended the emergency decree for another three months in Bangkok and three neighbouring provinces.

The Abhisit administration is also using this explosion, the latest in a series of smaller bomb blasts that have gone off across this sprawling megapolis, to buttress its claims that the decree needs to be extended due to the unsettled political climate.

In the administration’s crosshairs are operatives within the anti-government protest movement, known as the red shirts for their signature crimson clothing, who are allegedly behind the string of explosions.

“This emerged for the first time with last week’s bomb – to establish the link,” Panitan Wattanayagorn, a government spokesman, said Monday during a seminar discussing the emergency laws at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. “These people are connected to the red shirts, and they are capable of exploding bombs.”

“It is clear, the threat is clear,” added Panitan, echoing the words of his prime minister, who on Friday warned that there would be more explosions.

“Bangkok is likely to stay under threat of bomb attacks at least until the next month,” Abhisit was quoted as having told the ‘Bangkok Post’, an English- language daily. “There is more than one group of instigators on the move at the moment.”

Yet going after the alleged perpetrators of the bomb blasts does not need the backing of the harsh emergency law, say analysts and human rights activists who are worried that the continued dependency on a law aimed to target and silence the red shirts would become counterproductive.

“The emergency decree is not needed in the red shirt areas,” said Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, Thailand analyst of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “The government could use regular laws to deal with the disturbances.”

The danger is that the law could harden red shirt attitudes and further widen and deepen this South-east Asian kingdom’s bitter political divide, she explained to IPS. “It has already created a wide sense of resentment against the state, because the law has been used to detain people, (and) many of them are not bomb makers.”

Legal experts say the political climate in the Thai capital is steadily inching toward one where laws meant for abnormal circumstances are becoming the norm. “The exception is becoming the rule on many fronts,” said Vitit Muntarbhorn, professor of law at Chulalongkorn University. “National security laws are becoming permanent – “the permanence of the temporary.”

These alarm bells are being triggered by the sweeping powers under the emergency decree, which allow officials to detain anti-government protesters without charge, deny the suspects information about the charges against them, keep them in “unofficial” detention centres and even impose censorship on red shirt media.

The current emergency decree to target the supporters of the United Front for Dictatorship Against Democracy (UDD), as the red shirts call their movement, was imposed on Apr. 7 to curb violence on the streets of Bangkok. By then, the UDD’s numbers had swelled to tens of thousands of largely working-class protesters from the north and north-east provinces.

The UDD’s protests to force the Abhisit government to dissolve parliament and call an early general election came to a bloody end on May 19, following clashes between heavily armed Thai troops and a shadowy group of armed men in black shooting from behind red shirt lines.

Two bloody clashes between the soldiers and the protesters – the first in April – left 91 people dead, a majority of them civilians, and close to 1,900 people injured.

By late August, the jails in Bangkok and in cities across the north and north-east held close to 470 political prisoners, some of them arrested for their alleged role in acts of violence – including torching government buildings – during the end of the clashes.

“The government is systematically using the Emergency Decree to hold persons without charge for up to 30 days in unofficial places of detention,” Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based global rights lobby, charged days before the Abhisit administration extended the period of emergency.

“The category of people subjected to questioning, arrest and detention by the government’s Centre for the Resolution of Emergency Situations (CRES) has apparently been expanded beyond leaders and members of the UDD who directly took part in the protests, and now includes those accused of sympathising with or supporting the UDD,” HRW added. “Hundreds of politicians, former government officials, businessmen, activists, academics and community radio operators have been summoned to report to the CRES.”

But the government denies that red shirt detainees have been trapped in a legal black hole under the emergency law. “There are no secret jails. No one is held in secret jails,” said Panitan. “We have 184 people being detained in normal prisons.”