Asia-Pacific, Headlines, Human Rights

THAILAND: Courts to Military, ‘Deaths in Custody’ Are Okay

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jun 1 2009 (IPS) - A verdict by a provincial court is poised to deepen the sense of injustice felt by Thailand’s Malay-Muslim minority in the country’s southern provinces, where an insurgency has been raging for over five years.

The Songkhla provincial court ruled on Friday that military officers involved in the deaths of 78 Malay-Muslim boys and men in army custody in October 2004 did not commit a crime.

According to the two judges who sat on the bench for this post-mortem inquest, which began in 2005, the security officials were acting in accordance with the special law enforced at the time to bring a "hectic situation" and an "emergency on the day" under control.

The "hectic situation" refers to the pressure the army and police officers were under after over 1,500 Malay-Muslims gathered outside the police station in the Tak Bai district in the southern province of Narathiwat on Oct. 25, 2004 to protest the arrest of six villagers.

A clash ensued, resulting in the police first responding by firing tear gas at the demonstrators and, later, turning to live rounds of ammunition, which were fired into the air and at crowd level.

While seven demonstrators died in that clash, it is the large number of deaths that followed the arrest of 1,292 protesters that security officials have gotten away with. The victims were among these protesters whose hands were tied behind their backs and packed one on top of each other into army trucks for a 150-km journey to an army camp in a neighbouring province.

By the end of this journey, which lasted many hours through the night, 78 protesters were found dead. The cause, according to the court, was "suffocation".

"It is not fair. I am not satisfied with this decision. Justice needs to be delivered," were the words that flowed from a 26-year-old woman, who identified herself as Yoh, in an interview after the May 29 judgement. Her brother was among the 78 victims.

"My heart was beating hard when the verdict was being read. My heart dropped after the verdict," was how 33-year-old Wae Moh described her reaction to the court’s verdict when asked by IPS. She has been left to bring up four children following her husband’s death in military custody.

A lawyer appearing for some of the victims was also troubled by the outcome. "The verdict was given in a way that the testimony of one side was stronger than the other side," said Rasada Manu-rasada in an interview. "The (state) prosecutors’ testimony was stronger than the victims."

Rasada also expressed surprise that "the forensic report (for the 78 deaths) was not used enough."

It was a reality not lost on a respected global watchdog that had been monitoring this case. The court had remained "silent on critical details of the cause of death," noted the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in a statement released after the verdict.

"The ICJ is disappointed at the verdict delivered today by the Songkhla Provincial Court, which found that the 78 men who were transported from Tak Bai to the Ingkayuthaborihaan Army Camp in October 2004 died as a result of suffocation, without acknowledging all the factual circumstances that caused their deaths," said Roger Normand, ICJ’s Asia-Pacific director.

Immediately after the Tak Bai deaths, the country’s national human rights commission conducted its own inquiry. Its findings had revealed that the detained protesters were beaten by security officials, some while they were lying on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, before being packed into the back of covered military trucks.

The verdict in favour of the military could undermine the efforts of the six-month-old coalition government, led by the Democrat Party. The latter has a strong following in Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, the three southern provinces close to the Malaysian border that is home to the Malay-Muslims in this predominantly Buddhist country.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has pledged to resolve the insurgency in the three provinces by ensuring a softer approach built around justice, reconciliation and greater civilian oversight of the local administrative structure.

Yet the Tak Bai verdict adds to a pattern emerging in the south, where no military or police official has been prosecuted for human rights violations or deaths of Malay-Muslim civilians since the current cycle of violence began in January 2004.

"There has not been a single criminal prosecution against an army or police officer in the south," says Pornpen Khongkachonkieat, coordinator of the access to judicial and legal protection project at the Cross Cultural Foundation, a local human rights monitor. "Even the one case the state prosecutor has is not moving forward. It has become a ball they are kicking around; a delaying tactic."

On the other hand, over 1,500 Malay-Muslim men have been arrested during the first five years of the conflict in the south.

The current conflict, which has resulted in over 3,500 deaths, pits the Thai army against a shadowy network of armed Malay-Muslims who are fighting a separatist campaign. They want independence for the area that spans Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani.

This separatist campaign is the latest round of violence going back decades, when a previous generation of rebels mounted an armed uprising in the 1970s for the same political goal.

The tensions evolved after Siam, as Thailand was then known, annexed the three southern provinces in 1902. Until then these provinces were part of the Malay-Muslim kingdom of Pattani.

Malay-Muslims have, since the annexation, faulted Bangkok for pursuing heavily centralised policies, resulting in cultural and linguistic discrimination – the Malay-Muslims speak Yawi, a Malay dialect, as opposed to Thai – and economic marginalisation.