Koh Tao case a time bomb for Thailand's reputation

Your editorial rightly focuses attention on the Koh Tao case as it has become a touchstone for Thailand’s reputation, that of the Thai police and, more pointedly, that of the “new brooms” in Bangkok. The press, as the so-called fourth estate, occupies an important place in the civil society of a nation as both inquisitor and conscience, particularly when the institutions of the state are weak, not impartial or corrupt. Readers can draw their own conclusions as to which, if any, apply here in Thailand.

Your editorial position now seems clear and Steph’s recent cartoons, as usual, distil much in visual form.

This case is nothing more than a miasma of misinformation, miscalculation and mistakes. As your editorial notes, the most glaringly public so far is the inconsistency regarding the female victim’s mobile phone, which was initially said to have been handed to police at the start of their investigation. However, National Police Chief Somyot Pumpunmuang has publicly declared the telephone was retrieved by police “from the suspect’s living quarters”. How can this blatant dichotomy be resolved? Clearly one version is true and the other is not, and if it is not the police version that is true then it is right that all their other conclusions be brought into sharp focus, particularly given the claims that suspects were tortured.

What those in power may have failed to realise is that the scrutiny on this case is both intense and international and the usual methodology of someone in power deciding on an acceptable outcome and then the “facts” being conveniently massaged to give him his wished-for result is simply not going to work in this case.  Merrily announcing that British and Myanmar embassies “have no problems” with the Thai police’s handling of the case is fatuous at best and will, I suspect, come to haunt those in power.

If, as the mounting evidence is beginning to suggest, the case is not sound and the police have sought to simply get the case off their desks, passing such a “time bomb” onto prosecutors almost guarantees a serious and cataclysmic loss of national face. 

Regretfully, the only positive outcome will be that those who hold power will be severely chastened and shown that, in 2014, they cannot please themselves as to what is and is not true when foreigners are involved, and that such a misunderstanding of what is in the national good renders them permanently unsuitable for public office.

John Patterson