Thai war on drugs: Hollow victory
By David Fullbrook

BANGKOK - While Thailand declared victory in its war on drugs after just 10 months on December 3, without one narcotics kingpin being arrested or killed, justice is unlikely to be so swift for the families of those murdered during the campaign. With hardly any murder suspects apprehended and their apparent reluctance to investigate the deaths with any enthusiasm, the police themselves are looking increasingly culpable, something they vehemently deny.

"In most cases investigated by the NHRC [National Human Rights Commission], the police in charge of the investigation did not get any support from the government or their superiors. It's very strange," said Somchai Homla-or, secretary general of regional human rights organization Forum Asia and chairman of the Law Society of Thailand's human rights committee.

He does not expect a sudden blossoming of zeal for tracking down the killers. Justice may take decades to find its mark, as has been the case with death squads in many Latin American countries, he said.

The killers' boldness - often executing victims in busy places - combined with an envelope of pills, purportedly drugs, and a handgun usually found upon the corpse fueled accusations and rumors that police death squads were at work. Thai police have said most of the deaths were due to turf wars among drug dealers, or murders of would-be informants, with a few deaths caused by officers forced to act in self-defense.

Anna Kumatorn, 28, believes the police killed her Thai husband, Suweep, who she insists never had anything to do with drugs, after witnesses saw him being handcuffed and bundled into a car on a busy street in the Thai resort city of Pattaya, southeast of Bangkok. "Two policemen, one a former friend, put him on a blacklist. They were trying to blackmail him. A week before my husband was killed a policeman told us to get of the area," said Kumatorn, now back in her homeland Sweden, with two fatherless young sons.

She believes justice is thwarted in the absence of independent investigators. "It is difficult because the police investigate the police." Even the NHRC appears powerless to help. "They say they are not able to help because the police have all the materials relating to the case. [Police] have not given them anything," said the Swedish widow.

Kumatorn's case is by no means unusual. With so many cases demanding investigation and so little progress, Somchai is equally pessimistic. "If government officers, like the police, were involved in killings, we cannot find justice under this government. Government policy was responsible."

That policy seemed flawed from the beginning, yet itself was a child of corruption and public opinion. With public concern growing last year about the extent of drug use, especially methamphetamines, and revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej airing his worries publicly, Thaksin Shinawatra's government decided to act, fast.

It laid out plans for a war on drugs starting in February this year, ordering police and other agencies to draw up blacklists of drug trade suspects. Immediately academics, human rights campaigners, lawyers and senators warned that those murky lists, which did not even agree, were being compiled at best on circumstantial evidence, at worst on hearsay and unsubstantiated tips from questionable sources.

Arrest quotas were based on those lists. The government's overriding aim was to put big dealers out of business and cut users off from their supplies by breaking distribution networks through jailing couriers and dealers. With publicly announced targets to meet, the police were under intense pressure from the government to deliver.

Blacklists, arrest targets and a declared "war" on drugs offered a quick, media-friendly solution to the problem. It was also a way of forcing the corruption-riddled police to work. Arrest targets, which arguably might have had some role to play in places such as the United Kingdom or the United States where law enforcement is by and large clean, came under heavy critical fire during the Thai campaign. But a more complex approach requiring painstaking, costly investigations by police, of whom some were widely suspected of drug dealing themselves, would have been slow to deliver results and less likely to catch editors' eyes.

The price of this approach, unfortunately, was damage to the international reputation of Thai law enforcement. At home, the cost for some was much higher: a poisonous atmosphere of fear and, in some cases, loss of liberty or even life. "Many people were killed unjustly, many people were incarcerated unjustly. The due process of law was ignored," said Senator Kraisak Choonhaven, a senior government adviser during the 1980s and 1990s.

Just how many were murdered remains a matter of intense debate, because the government stopped issuing body counts last March when the soaring death toll prompted a torrent of criticism by local and foreign human rights groups, not to mention murmuring by diplomats, and charges that state-sanctioned death squads were at work.

"Over the last 10 months the government never gave us a clear explanation. Until now we don't exactly know the number, who, when and where they were killed. If they show the real figures, we will see very few percent of murderers have been arrested," said Somchai.

He thinks the figure could be about 1,100-1,200, which is similar to the figure now being bandied about by police generals investigating the killings to determine if any were by police or other state agents, but he cautions that the true figure could be much higher.

Before His Majesty the King's birthday speech on December 4, the government recorded about 2,500 murders during the first three months of the campaign. That fell to about 1,200 a few days after the launch of government inquiries immediately following the speech, which expressed grave concern about the killings, advised Thaksin to accept criticism humbly and praised the merits of press freedom.

However, a credible push to find and try the killers remains absent. Police blithely blame drug syndicates for the murders, without offering any firm evidence. Only about 30 suspects were killed by police in self-defense. A call for an independent inquiry from the NHRC was immediately dismissed by the government as unnecessary. Kraisak is unimpressed. "The solution is not to have 2,000 cases uninvestigated. It is not to reduce the cases as they are trying to do now."

That the King should comment is noteworthy in itself. "Normally if the Palace does not take a case seriously, our monarch will not comment. He will only come out in very critical events. It means this situation is quite serious," said Somchai.

"I believe the King is genuinely worried about these killings. He has expressed his worries about the effects of drugs on people," said Kraisak.

It is telling that despite the war on drugs, the war on organized crime, the war on this, that, and the other, no kingpins in any of the big illegal industries in Thailand - drugs, slavery, arms trading and gambling - have been arrested, tried and handed lengthy jail terms. How serious a government can be when it gives criminals plenty of warning before a crackdown begins is hard to say.

And with drug labs inside Myanmar, where much of Thailand's methamphetamine supply supposedly originates, still bubbling away despite quiet diplomatic pressure, the pills will be back if demand remains. "It must also be a war on drug producers on the other side of the border," said Kraisak.

Thaksin and some generals have hinted that they are prepared to launch cross-border raids, but that seems unlikely right now given the government's desire to tighten business links with Myanmar and soothing words from the Yongon junta. Thailand's apparent success in throttling the drug trade is unlikely to be anything more than a short-lived victory in an unwinnable war the US has been losing for 33 years. Society has never been able to beat the market; it will supply what people want come what may.

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