BANGKOK – The Thai government’s credibility among the country’s Muslim minority has taken a nosedive thanks to the cavalier approach Bangkok has adopted in explaining the deaths of 78 men and boys while in military custody following a protest early this week in the southern province of Narathiwat.
Outraged Muslim leaders have dismissed the defiant stance of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who sought to deflect blame away from security forces for the manner in which these Thais died on Monday after troops opened fire on the demonstrators.
"We don’t believe the government’s version of events," the usually moderate Niti Hassan, president of the Council of Muslim Organizations of Thailand, told IPS. "The people in the south are not satisfied with what the government is saying because they know what happened."
Nideh Waba, chairman of a private religious schools association in Thailand’s predominantly Muslim southern provinces, was as critical. "They [the government] have to kill thousands of us or hundreds of thousands of our brothers here to prevent us from standing up against this massacre," he was quoted as having told the Bangkok Post newspaper on Wednesday.
The showdown on Monday initially resulted in six Muslim demonstrators killed. But word soon got out that a further 78 had died due to "suffocation" while being transported in packed military trucks.
Thaksin, however, blamed the suffocation on the Muslim protesters being exhausted due to the fast they were observing in the two-week old Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Then he pointed the finger at drugs – saying that the arrested protesters were in a "drug-induced state."
By Thursday, Bangkok was still holding on to the view that the military remained blameless, although with a slight hint of regret. "It was a tragic incident, but we would like to point out that the military did their best to exercise self-restraint and did not use force during the demonstrations," Sihasak Phuangketkeow, foreign ministry spokesman, told IPS.
"It is not the government’s policy to treat people inhumanely," he added in reference to the deaths in custody.
But television footage, photographs appearing in local newspapers, and eyewitness accounts are shredding the portrait of innocent Thai soldiers that Bangkok has been determined to project.
Television images flashed across the world have revealed scenes of uniformed soldiers ramming rifle-butts into the heads of protesters, forced to lie on the ground. Plainclothes policemen were also filmed kicking protesters repeatedly as they lay unconscious.
And Thursday’s edition of The Nation, an English-language daily here, ran a photo on its front page that contradicted the government’s explanation that troops did not fire into the crowd of some 2,000 Muslim protesters on Monday.
The picture showed soldiers stretched on the ground, firing at the protesters at body-level rather than into the air.
One reporter at the scene was quoted in The Nation saying: "Soldiers fired at below knee-level, targeting protesters hiding under a car. They were killed and thrown onto army trucks. There were at least 14 dead bodies that I could count."
Another reporter told the paper: "I saw at least three protesters kicked to death with my own eyes."
A photograph appearing in Matichon, a Thai-language newspaper, provided damning evidence about the harsh manner in which the estimated 1,300 protesters who were arrested at Narathiwat were transported to a military camp in Pattani.
Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were then packed in the military trucks in layers, with some being five-deep in a truck.
It was during this journey, which the army says took six hours, that the 78 men suffocated to death, a senior army commander in charge of security in the country’s south admitted to the press on Tuesday.
But even that reason is being questioned by senior Muslim political figures like Den Tomeena, a member of Thailand’s Senate who represents Pattani. "I don’t believe it takes five to six hours for that journey, because it normally takes about one-and-a half hours," he told IPS. "And Monday was a holiday, so there was no traffic."
A respected forensic expert, Pornthip Rojanasunan, has not made it easy on the government, either, after declaring on Tuesday that nearly 80 percent of the men who died had no open wounds and could have succumbed due to a lack of air.
"It wasn’t a case of not enough air to breathe," Pornthip was quoted in a Reuters report. "But they might have had something stuffed in their mouths or nostrils."
Bangkok’s attitude toward the grim events this week has fueled concern that an increasing number of moderates from among the Malay-Muslim minority in the south will begin to identify with the more radical and militant voices in their community.
And one Muslim separatist group that had waged a struggle against Bangkok in the 1970s has revealed the extent to which the militants would go to seek revenge for Monday’s deaths.
"Their Phra Nakhon [capital, meaning Bangkok] will be burned to the ground like the capital of Pattani," stated the Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO) on its Web site. "Our weapons are fire and oil."
Since early January this year, violence in southern Thailand has killed over 400 people, the majority of them falling victim to the bullets or knives of men the government identifies as Muslim militants. The victims have included Buddhist monks, civil servants, teachers, policemen, and soldiers.
The death toll also includes Muslims, such as those killed this week, and nearly 110 of them were killed on April 28 during an attack that knife- and machete-wielding Muslim men launched on heavily armed Thai troops.
The reasons for the violence have included the dismal economic conditions faced by the Malay-Muslims who live in Thailand’s five southern provinces. The different culture, history, language, and religion that distinguish these Muslims in Buddhist Thailand have been exploited by the militants attacking the state.
Malay-Muslims account for 2.3 million people of Thailand’s 63 million population. Over a century ago these five southern provinces – considered the Muslim homeland – belonged to the kingdom of Pattani, which was annexed in 1902 by Siam, as Thailand was then known.
"Muslim anger is understandable; what happened is terrible," Jaran Ditapichai, a member of Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission, said in an interview. "Only some of the details of the government’s story can be believed."
