Action needed on state killings

Thailand’s peace talks with the Barisan Revolusi Nasional or any other separatist groups have no chance of success if the authorities on the ground are unable to put a lid on the culture of impunity among its officials and repair the historic and current mistrust between local Malay Muslims and state agencies.

It is this resentment that feeds the separatist insurgency, generation after generation.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) was spot on when it said Thai authorities have failed to honour past pledges to resolve cases of enforced disappearance and investigate the recent spate of killings of ethnic Malay Muslims in the southern provinces.

“The government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for such killings has fed a deadly cycle of reprisal attacks by alleged government forces and secessionist insurgents,” HRW said in one of the two back-to-back statements.

In the past three months, at least six ethnic Malay Muslims, including some suspected insurgents, have been killed by gunmen who may be linked to state security forces.

“The killing in southern Thailand goes on but officials do little to bring those responsible to justice, especially when the victim is a Malay Muslim,” Brad Adams, HRW’s director for Asia, said. “The failure to prosecute these killings is widely interpreted in Muslim communities as a government attempt to cover up for state security forces and protect them from criminal responsibility.”

Another statement addressed the issue of justice, or the lack thereof, for victims still missing. The statement was released on Friday to mark the International Day of the Disappeared. 

It should be noted that the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance on January 9, 2012.

Unfortunately, the government has not lived up to the stated commitment and there has been no progress in the Parliament on moves to ratify this treaty. 

Moreover, the Thai penal code still does not recognise enforced disappearance as a criminal offence and officials who abduct and/or murder people have little fear of being held accountable for their crimes.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC or ‘Por Por Chor’ in Thai), set up to take such cases against state officials, has received many complaints. Needless to say, little progress has been made on this front. 

The delay permits the accused officials and the respective agency to arrange an out-of-court deal with a victim’s family, usually through financial settlement. Exhausted by the long queue, some families simply give up on the idea of getting any justice from the state. 

HRW gave an example: Nasulan Pi was last seen on January 17, 2012, at a teashop near his house in Joh Ai Rong district in Narathiwat, when two armed men in military uniform forced him into a car and drove off. His fate and whereabouts remain unknown. Nasulan is the 39th person reported “disappeared” since 2002 in connection with the government’s counterinsurgency operations in the Malay-speaking South. 

The Justice Peace Foundation, a well-respected Thai human rights group, has documented enforced dis?appearance cases in other parts of the country since 2011 – including 12 people from the North, five from the western region, and seven from the Northeast.