In Thailand: Accountability and Justice in the South
By John Brandon
John Brandon is The Asia Foundation’s Director for International Relations.
On April 9th, three Muslim children were killed riding home on their school bus in Thailand’s southern province of Yala. Two weeks before, nine Buddhist passengers (including two teenage girls) in a commuter van were viciously murdered on a main road in broad daylight. These are just two recent examples of savage sectarian violence underway in southern Thailand. Currently, more people are dying from violence in southern Thailand than in the southern Philippines and in ethnic-strife areas of Indonesia. Since the September 19, 2006 coup, the monthly death toll of the insurgency has averaged 65 people, compared with an average of 50 during the last five months of the Thaksin government. Nearly 2,100 people have been killed in the violence since the insurgency resurfaced in January 2004. Most of the victims have been police, soldiers, teachers, and other government targets, but a disturbing new trend is that randomly selected civilians – from monks to farmers to schoolchildren – are now considered fair game.
In many respects, this is surprising as the post-coup, Thai military-backed government announced shortly after assuming power that it would adopt a policy of negotiating and enhancing dialogue with Muslim insurgents. Last November, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont made an unprecedented apology to southern Thai Muslims for decades of strife and injustice, and the heavy-handedness of previous Thai governments. In the effort to build stronger ties between the Thai government and local Muslim community, Mr. Surayud banned the practice of blacklisting people with suspected links to the insurgency and dropped charges against Muslim protesters involved in the 2004 “Tak Bai incident,” where 78 Muslim men died in army custody after a protest was violently suppressed. The government also reinstituted the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Command (SBPAC) – designed to help integrate the strategies of the 18 government agencies in the South – and the Civilian-Police-Military (CPM) Task Force – created to harmonize the security policies of police, military, and civilian agencies – both of which were disbanded under the former Thaksin government.
Why, despite these efforts, has the Thai government not yet gained the confidence of the South? The extension of the Emergency Decree, issued on January 20, 2007, grants police and military officers’ immunity from prosecution and suspends the jurisdiction of administrative courts in human rights cases. There are well-documented cases where the military has used excessive force in the Krue Sae mosque and at the Tak Bai demonstration. To date, not a single person has been brought to trial for any of these abuses. As a result, winning hearts and minds of a disgruntled Muslim population is difficult to achieve. They see a government that has not taken any concrete measures to investigate prior abuses and have no confidence in the court system when the country’s most prominent Muslim lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaijit, remains missing and is likely dead.
Although there are 20,000 Thai soldiers stationed in the four southern provinces, it seems security forces lack the ability to quell the insurgency as bombings, murders, and arson happen everyday. With violence escalating and the insurgents’ refusal to negotiate with the Thai government, newspaper editorials have been urging the government to disown its policy of negotiations with insurgents. Certainly, Muslim complaints of injustice, no matter how strong and valid, do not give insurgents the right to massacre commuters in broad daylight, behead monks, and kill teachers and children on their way to school. Like those individuals responsible for the violence and death at the Krue Sae mosque and at Tak Bai, insurgents who have committed such atrocious acts must also be arrested and held responsible.
At the moment, the Thai government is preoccupied with trying to restore stability and economic confidence, prosecute former Prime Minister Thaksin for corruption, and oversee the process of writing a new constitution in order to hand power back to a democratically elected government before the end of 2007. Given poor economic decisions and a perceived inability to protect Bangkok from a series of bombings on New Year’s Eve, public confidence in the Thai government is low and has pushed managing the difficulties in the South further down the agenda. Thus, the difficulties in southern Thailand will likely continue to escalate, leaving this very significant problem to the next democratically elected government to find a solution. To be viable, such a solution should include ensuring accountability, access to justice, and upholding the rule of law for all Thais.
