Another setback for Thailand's rights reputation
A new report by Human Rights Watch says that much more needs to be done to end the authorities' culture of impunity in the deep South and elsewhere in the country
A few years ago a European government translated a manual into Yawee (a Malay dialect written in Arabic text), among other languages. The booklet was designed for human rights defenders working in Thailand, including the deep South, where Malay is spoken and Yawee is taught in private Islamic and public elementary schools.
But bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry and Government House got upset about it and scolded the international community, accusing the Europeans of sticking their noses in where they don’t belong.
The logic behind their argument was not very clear, but what was clear was the racist and ethnocentric attitude that officials in Bangkok have over the Malay Muslims in the southernmost provinces, a restive region where an ongoing separatist insurgency has claimed more than 5,000 lives, most of them local Malays, since 2004.
The establishment still doesn’t seem to understand that it is such a racist attitude from the Thai side that gave birth to the armed insurgency and keeps it going to this day, with no end in sight. Have these bureaucrats and politicians ever asked themselves how the Thai State and the Malays of Patani were able to live together for 60 years after the annexation that took place at the turn of the century? The separatist insurgency didn’t surface until the late 1960s.
But instead of looking back to see what went wrong, we continue with the same racist attitude and half-baked development policies that are supposed to win the local Malays over to the side of the state. Well, these policies have not succeeded. And it has become increasingly embarrassing for Bangkok to keep going to Muslim countries in Asean, urging them to help Thailand by fending off the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC). The pitch to these countries goes something along this line: The Thai State has done all it can to provide for the Muslims in the deep South, but they simply do not appreciate the generosity of the state.
The fact is that ordinary Malays in the deep South may or may not agree with the militants and their brutal methods, but they are not going to turn these young men in to the authorities. And the reason is because they share the same sentiment and mistrust towards the state. And the billions in development money? Well, the vast majority of it goes to the military for their expenditure and government development projects that do little in terms of winning hearts and minds.
The Thai government tends to huff and puff when members of the international community say something about the handling of the conflict, not to mention the culture of impunity, in the deep South. And yet Thailand still signs this or that convention vowing to protect the rights of its citizens.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) just days ago released its annual report, and Thailand is not spared.
“The human rights situation in Thailand deteriorated in 2011 as the government failed to address impunity for human rights abuses by security forces,” HRW’s World Report 2012 stated boldly in the first line of its press statement.
These abuses are not confined to the South, but are also apparent in the rest of the country. Moreover, despite public assurances, the government has provided little support to the independent inquiry being conducted by the Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand into politically motivated violence, the report said.
And while the government pushes the police to make progress in the investigations of 13 murder cases on the Mekong River in which soldiers have been implicated, unfortunately the administration doesn’t seem to be as interested in 12 murder cases that preliminary investigations by the Justice Ministry’s Department of Special Investigation (DSI) found were connected to attacks by armed red-shirt elements.
“The new government came to power promising justice to victims of the violence in 2010,” HRW’s Brad Adams said. “Yet it has done nothing to reassure those victims that it will do more than previous governments to hold accountable the people responsible for abuses.”
Like it or not, the government will have to learn how to engage with the international community in a more sensible manner. Wrapping oneself in the nation’s flag and screaming “sovereignty” is not an answer.
