More shameful conduct in the deep South

Rights groups and civic organisations are understandably up in arms following the publication in the media of photos showing an Army officer taking a DNA sample from a five-month-old baby in Pattani. The child’s father stands accused of being among the separatist militants behind a March 2012 bombing in Hat Yai.

It is not yet clear why the authorities felt compelled to gather a fluid sample from the boy’s mouth (while his mother held him), but the government does seem to have overstepped the bounds of decency. Its conduct also violates the 1989 UN Convention on Child Rights.

The officials claimed to have obtained the permission of the mother, and the photo would seem to back that up, but someone other than the mother signed the document acceding to the DNA swab.

Quite beyond the matter of trampling on the rights of a child, this episode becomes another added to the volumes of injustices emerging in the ongoing harassment of southern citizens by the military.

There is a shocking culture of impunity in the three southernmost provinces, where more than 6,500 people have been killed since January 2004. Most of those killed have been Muslims who supported the very plausible claim to a cultural identity quite separate from that of the rest of the Thai populace.

This Malay-speaking region came under Bangkok’s direct rule only at the turn of the last century. Assimilation was grudgingly accepted by most residents and kept the provinces peaceful until the early 1960s, when complaints that the southerners were being robbed of their religious identity exploded into an armed insurrection.

Thai authorities have long relied on DNA sampling in the South to try and determine who is involved in the insurrection, but there has never been agreement on when it is permissible.

Local people working for civil society organisations – particularly those critical of government behaviour – have been compelled to give DNA samples, in some cases more than once in a single year. This is despite the fact that DNA is a constant, which prompts disturbing questions. Does every security unit have its own DNA databank, or are samples being carelessly lost – or it this another form of harassment, plain and simple? Private residences are routinely searched without a court warrant, and not necessarily in hot pursuit of armed suspects.

This is no way to “win the hearts and minds” of citizens in the midst of a war against separatist insurgents. Nor is such conduct gaining the Thai government any friends overseas. The country is already seen as a police state where corruption, sham justice and authoritarianism are the norm.

Quite apart from routine harassment, the spectre of torture hangs over the deep South like a choking smog. Rights organisations both foreign and domestic have documented case after case, as well as abductions and target killings, in the battered region.

In one memorable and telling case, a young man filed suit against Pol Gen Chakthip Chajinda, claiming he had inflicted torture on him in 2004. Now national police chief, Chakthip was at the time active in the South, sent there by the Thaksin administration following the embarrassing January 2004 arms heist in Narathiwat.

When Chakthip counter-sued, his accuser decided that the justice system was unlikely to take his side, so he fled to the forests and joined the separatist insurgents.

Forensic science is a boon to law enforcement – but only if the enforcers don’t twist it to serve their preconceived notions. As long as we lack specific regulations to govern DNA sampling, the practice should be abandoned. Only when the public knows where it stands does faith in authority have a chance to grow.