RIGHTS: Justice Can End Thailand’s ‘Dirty War’ in Muslim Areas

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Jan 4 2006 (IPS) - Human rights activists are calling on the Thai government to place more faith in justice to end what is shaping out to be a ‘dirty war’ in the Buddhist country’s Muslim-dominated, southern provinces along the Malaysian border.

The plea, by the London-based rights lobby Amnesty International and local human rights advocates, comes as this South-east Asian nation marks two years since violence erupted in three predominantly Malay-Muslim provinces, resulting in over 1,100 deaths.

”The government has to take up the justice issue as one of its main goals,” Boonthan Verwongse, head of Amnesty’s Thailand office, told reporters Wednesday. ”If you want peace, you have to work for justice.”

Flaws in criminal justice system in the south are visible in the manner in which Malay-Muslim boys and men are ill-treated after being taken in by the police for possible links with suspected rebel groups.

Almost half of the nearly 200 people currently detained in jails in four southern provinces are chained and have to ”even where these shackles when playing football in the prison compound,” says Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, a Thai human rights advocate investigating violations in that troubled region. ”Many of these detainees do not have proper legal advice and lawyers.”

Amnesty shed light on the abuse in a 31-page report released Wednesday. ”Some detainees held in relation to the violence have been kept continuously for prolonged periods in heavy metal shackles weighing four-and-a-half kgs,” it states.

The only other time Thai authorities use shackles is on prisoners to death at the country’s Bangkwang Maximum Security Prison.

”Thai authorities’ response has included arbitrary detention, torture and excessive lethal force,” Amnesty added in the report that catalogues why Bangkok is failing to end the violence. ”(The government has) also failed to properly investigate attacks against both Buddhist and Muslim civilians.”

It also charged that ”an unknown number of people have ‘disappeared’ and human rights workers who try to gather information on such cases have faced anonymous death threats and other forms of intimidation.”

Amnesty echoes an appeal made this week by Anand Panyarachun, a respected former Thai prime minister who is head of the country’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC). ”The government must come up with decisive and consistent policies, open up to criticism and be ready to clarify all allegations if there is to be peace in the far south,” Anand was quoted saying in Tuesday’s ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper.

”The government should not worry too much about the incidence of violence. It must see through the problems and map out short- and long-term measures, including procedures to deliver justice,” he added.

But the government has contributed to this debate by painting an optimistic picture that the insurgency in the three provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat is on its last legs.

”The situation in the south would improve even more by April as officials have improved their tracking and arresting techniques,” Deputy Prime Minister Chidchai Vanasatidya was quoted as saying in Monday’s ‘The Nation’ newspaper. ”So far more than 190 suspected militants and bombers (have) been arrested, (and) only around 10 suspected militants remain at large and officials are working to capture them.”

Reality, however, flies in the face of such an assessment, since dozens of Malay-Muslims arrested in the south for alleged insurgent activities have either been acquitted by the courts or their cases not taken to trial for lack of evidence. This includes 31 men arrested in connection with an attack on an army camp in January 2004, which triggered the current cycle of violence, eight Islamic clerics accused of links with Malay-Muslim separatists and three students arrested for murders in the south.

What is more, Thai prosecutors have yet to win a single conviction for cases related to the insurgency that have been heard over the past two years in courtrooms in the south. ”This makes all the publicity and press conferences that follow the arrest of suspected militants quite ridiculous,” Sunai Phasuk, Thai researcher for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights lobby, told IPS. ”Nothing has been proved after that and the suspects are freed later.”

The bloodshed began on Jan. 4, 2004, after a still unidentified group attacked an army base in the Narathiwat province, killed four soldiers and made away with nearly 400 guns. In response, the government poured more troops into the region and imposed tough laws that give the armed forces and police impunity.

Yet, the militarisation of the region has done little to stop mounting assaults using guns, bombs and knives. The victims, some of whom were beheaded, include teachers, community leaders, rubber tappers, soldiers and policemen from both the Buddhist and Muslim communities.

Thai troops killed 108 Malay-Muslim militants armed with machetes and guns, during a clash in April 2004, and were responsible for the deaths of 78 Muslim boys and men who died due to suffocation while in military custody.

Clashes between Malay-Muslim separatist groups and Thai forces in the 1970s are rooted in a feeling of alienation by the Muslim minority due to perceived cultural and economic discrimination.

The three Muslim provinces caught up in the current violence were once part of the Malay-Muslim kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.