BANGKOK – By shooting down a plan to give the country’s police wide powers to go after suspected Muslim insurgents in the south, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has generated an image that he might care about human rights after all.
That impression was amplified Saturday, when Deputy Prime Minister Visanu Krua-ngam was quoted in the Bangkok Post newspaper saying that Thaksin wanted "a balance between civil liberties and national security protection in enforcing any law."
The proposed decree that was spiked on Friday has been described by some as draconian for the sweeping powers it grants the police. They include the power to search citizens and to tap their telephone lines without a court warrant.
The decree, which was submitted to the government last week, also sought to give police the power of holding suspects in custody for seven days, rather than the current 48-hour period, before charging them.
But human rights activists are holding back their praises given that the Thai police and the army still enjoy sweeping powers to target civilians in the predominantly Muslim provinces in southern Thailand for being suspected insurgents.
They include the Martial Law Act, the Administration in Emergency Situation Act, the Criminal Procedures Act, and the Special Investigation Act.
"The Martial Law Act is very harsh when fully imposed," Sunai Phasuk, the Thai representative of the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch, told IPS. "The army can use it to destroy buildings and property, too."
This act also gives the military the power to arrest and detain people for 14 days without being charged, he added.
The Special Investigation Act, on the other hand, provides the police the power to tap the telephones of citizens suspected of being insurgents.
What is more, a leading human rights lawyer accuses the police of exploiting the existing laws to torment suspected Muslim insurgents in custody to extract information.
"There are many cases of torture that have happened when people are taken into police custody," Somchai Homlaor told IPS. "This happens all over the country, not just in the south."
The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) echoes Somchai’s charge in a statement released late November about the torture of citizens while in police custody.
A typical example was how suspected Muslim insurgents taken in by the police to a station in Tanyong, in the southern province of Narathiwat, were abused. "The five men were allegedly beaten, strangled, electrocuted, and urinated upon by police officers," stated the AHRC.
Still, for all, the authorities have failed to initiate a single case in Thai courts to prove unequivocally that at least one of the scores of Muslims in the south arrested by the police is a militant involved in the escalating violence in the region.
"The public prosecutor has been unable to take the cases to court because of a lack of evidence," says Somchai, the human rights lawyer. "It means the police have failed to get sufficient proof to get the suspects to face justice."
Concerns about the eroding human rights climate in Thailand have dogged Thaksin since his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT) party swept into power with an unprecedented majority at the January 2001 parliamentary elections.
The government’s use of the police to prosecute civilians deemed a threat to society has been one of the issues human rights groups have used to assail the Thaksin administration. Bangkok’s war on drugs last year to cleanse Thailand of its narcotic habit was among them.
During that 10-month campaign in 2003, over an estimated 2,500 civilians were killed. Most of the deaths, according to the government, were the result of in-fighting between narcotic gangs in the country.
Human rights groups, including the London-based Amnesty International, thought otherwise. They accused the government of granting the police the license to shoot to kill suspected drug suppliers, resulting in scores of extra-judicial killings.
Similar charges of police abuse in the south have been made by Amnesty, the independent Law Society of Thailand, and even Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng this year.
Police brutality is a key reason that has triggered the violence in southern Thailand, Chaturon said in April soon after conducting an independent investigation in the region. The police "must stop torturing, abducting, and murdering people," he added.
Consequently, Malay-Muslims in the south avoid going to the local police stations to lodge complaints about troubling developments in their villages, a Thai human rights activist told IPS. "They fear being interrogated or tortured as if they were suspects. Some fear being disappeared."
Over 500 people have died in the violence that has shaken southern Thailand since early January. The victims have included civilians, Buddhist monks, village leaders, government officials, policemen, and soldiers.
The dead also include the over 100 Muslim youth who launched an attack against police and army security posts in April and the 78 Muslim boys and men who died due to "suffocation" while in military custody in late October.
This escalating conflict is threatening to tear apart the social fabric that binds the Malay-Muslim and the Buddhist community in the region. Thailand is a predominantly Buddhist country with a concentrated Malay-Muslim minority in the south.
The current outburst of violence comes after a relative calm in an area that has experienced clashes between Muslim separatists and government troops from the 1970s through the ’80s.
The three southern provinces that are under seige – Narathiwat, Yala, and Pattani – were once part of the independent kingdom of Pattani that was annexed by Siam, as Thailand was then called, in 1902.
