ASIA
HAND The
democratic way to prosecute
Thaksin By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - Thailand's new
military-appointed interim government finds itself
on the horns of a crucial dilemma: how best to
charge and prosecute ousted prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra in a way that would lend democratic
legitimacy to its September 19 putsch.
Thailand's coupmakers first justified
their takeover on the grounds that Thaksin's rule
was divisive, abusive and corrupt - not to
mention insulting to the
crown. So far, military-appointed investigative
commissions have concentrated their energies on
financial irregularities and corruption
allegations, including his family's hot-button
US$1.9 billion Shin Corp-Temasek Holdings
transaction.
Yet thorough investigations
into the ousted premier's abysmal human-rights
record would arguably send an even stronger signal
to both the international community and the Thai
public that the military's political intervention
was just and necessary to return Thailand toward a
rule-of-law-based society after five years of
misrule under Thaksin.
As skepticism
predictably entrenches against Thailand's new
military rulers, nothing arguably would contribute
more toward genuine national reconciliation and
allay doubts about their own democratic intentions
and credentials than a vigorous investigation and
follow-up prosecution of Thaksin's many
rights-based abuses. And investigators clearly
wouldn't have to look very far.
Thaksin's
"war on drugs" campaign in 2003 resulted in the
extrajudicial killing of more than 2,500 people.
Although local and international media reported
and recorded hundreds of cases of police officials
shooting and killing unarmed civilians - always in
self-defense according to official accounts - to
date not one Thai official has been prosecuted or
even reprimanded for his or her role in the
unprecedented orgy of violence.
Thaksin's
heavy-handed counterinsurgency policies in
Thailand's conflict-ridden south resemble an
Augusto Pinochet-style dirty war. Rights groups
say hundreds of Thai Muslims have gone missing
since the conflict kicked up in 2004, a charge
Thaksin has consistently contested. Yet there are
many examples of security forces implementing his
policies using arbitrary and often excessive
force, including the April 2004 siege on the Krue
Se Mosque, the point-blank shooting in the back of
the heads of 19 restrained and handcuffed young
Muslims at Saba Yoi, and the October 2004 death by
suffocation of at least 78 Muslim civilians at Tak
Bai.
There are plenty of other cases where
individual liberties, then protected by the
progressive 1997 constitution, were apparently
smothered without legal recourse by Thaksin's
abuse of state power. For instance, Thaksin has
publicly admitted to state complicity in the
still-unresolved disappearance case of Muslim
human-rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit, who was
abducted by Thai intelligence officials in Bangkok
in an apparent effort to suppress his submitting
evidence of police torture of five detained Muslim
men he was representing. That damning evidence, it
was later revealed, included medical proof of
security forces' using electric-shock treatment on
one of the bound suspects' testicles.
Then
there is the mysterious unresolved shooting death
of Kornthep Wiriya, a former customs employee of
Shin Satellite, the publicly listed
telecommunication concern established by Thaksin
and until last January majority-owned by his
family. Kornthep apparently made the mistake of
agreeing to serve as a prosecution witness in a
politically charged 100 million baht (US$2.6
million) tax-evasion case against the company. He
was ambushed and shot in the head by unidentified
assailants while riding his motorcycle before he
could testify in court.
Subverting
justice All of these cases are on file at
Thailand's National Human Rights Commission and
have been reported in either the local or
international media. Because Thaksin, who
ironically holds a PhD in criminal justice,
exerted his extraordinary political power to
subvert Thailand's judicial system, none of these
have been properly investigated, and only the case
involving the disappearance of Muslim lawyer
Somchai was heard in court. In that case, five
secret-police officials were given a slap on the
wrist rather than prison sentences for their
admitted role in the lawyer's abduction.
The
underlying problem in resurrecting and pursuing these cases of
apparent abuse is that too many of the crimes
hit too close to home for Thailand's new military-appointed
government and would badly
undermine ongoing efforts to portray the
military as the country's democratic guardian of
last resort. Because security forces, both
military and police, are no doubt complicit in
many of the aforementioned crimes, there are
doubts among human-rights advocates that Prime
Minister Surayud Chulanont, a former army
general, has the political will to implicate its own.
Yet if these cases are pursued properly
and not as a political witch-hunt, Surayud has a
historic opportunity to catapult Thailand on to a
higher democratic plane while also seeing through
the next crucial phase of the military-reform
program he initiated in 1998 but which was
truncated when Thaksin took the premiership in
2001.
The international community is still
wholly uncertain about which Thai military has
seized power - the abusive coupmakers of old or a
new generation of more democratic-minded generals.
Past Thai-style exercises in national
reconciliation after political crises have
universally included blanket clemencies for those
complicit in state-sponsored violence and
political killings.
The Thai military's
counter-communism campaign and its attendant
crimes against members of the Communist Party of
Thailand (CPT) in the 1970s and 1980s have never
been properly investigated, according to
historians and human-rights advocates. Subsequent
academic research has uncovered that rogue
military officials often covered their abusive
tracks by immolating captured communists in oil
drums - a Thai twist on the burning-your-enemy
practice known as "necklacing".
Nor were
any senior Thai officials brought to book for
their role in cracking down on unarmed
pro-democracy protesters in 1973 and 1976 -
indeed, some even held high political office under
Thaksin's rule. The same is true for military
officials involved with the killing of scores, if
not hundreds, of pro-democracy demonstrators on
the streets of Bangkok in 1992 - an episode in
which Surayud was in charge of crack troops. And,
although it was not directly a human-rights abuse,
nobody was convicted for the widespread financial
fraud in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis.
Well-worn tradition Impunity
for high crimes, be they financial, official or
human-rights related, is a well-worn Thai
tradition of behind-the-scenes elite settlements.
Obviously, with Thaksin's enormous financial
clout, there is a high risk that a similar
settlement is reached that allows him to return to
Thailand a free man. But if Thai democracy must
truly take one step backward to take two steps
ahead, then that shouldn't be the case.
Past exercises in national reconciliation
attended by blanket clemencies, rather than moving
Thailand's democracy toward a more rules-based
society, have over time left the door open for
future state-sponsored abuses. And that tradition
arguably has failed to achieve long-lasting
reconciliation. Many former student leaders and
CPT members in Thaksin's political camp were
instrumental in implementing policies aimed at
undermining the traditional elites that opened
fire on them in the 1970s.
Unpunished
state-sponsored abuses against southern Thai
Muslims in the 1960s and 1970s are still a
cause celebre for a new generation of
insurgent fighters, who after a century within the
Thai state still feel like second-class citizens.
One Muslim Thai senator once told me that he had
information that his father was captured by Thai
security officials and dumped into the ocean from
a helicopter.
Any hints of a Thaksin
whitewash will enrage the country's strong
progressive movement, which is already peeved
about the possibility that they will be
under-represented during a new
constitution-drafting process. Blanket clemencies
will only ensure that Thailand stays on its same
tortuous course vacillating between abusive
democracy and military interventions.
Yet
there are early indications that that is exactly
what the country's military leaders have in mind.
The coupmakers notably included a blanket clemency
for themselves in the interim constitution they
promulgated last weekend. And because
intra-military and intra-police relations are
still dangerously divided between pro- and
anti-Thaksin camps, it seems unlikely that
prosecuting wayward Thaksin loyalists among the
security forces is what Surayud's government has
in mind when it speaks of national reconciliation.
Thaksin famously snipped that "the UN is
not my father" after a United Nations human-rights
official raised questions about official
complicity in his controversial "war on drugs"
campaign. It was a comment that grossly
underscored the tough-talking former premier's
utter disdain for protecting basic human rights.
It's the duty of Thailand's new leadership to
respond by investigating and prosecuting Thaksin
for his government's many human-rights abuses and,
in doing so, putting all future Thai politicians
on notice that, besides Thailand's respected
monarch, the rule of law is indeed their father.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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