Kneejerk reaction from police chief is the WRONG RESPONSE

In what came across as a face saving measure, Thailand’s national police chief, Pol General Chakthip Chaijinda is contemplating filing defamation charges against the former chief investigator behind a high profile human smuggling cases.
Pol Maj-General Paween Pongsirin, who quit the police force last month and is now seeking political asylum in Australia, said he fears for his life because the charges he had file against these suspects put him in danger.
He told Australian media shortly after his arrival on a tourist visa that some corrupt senior police and military officers, along with members of crime syndicates, were after him because of the breakthrough he had made during the course of investigation on human trafficking through Thailand.
“There are some bad police and bad military who do this kind of thing,” Paween told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Unfortunately, those bad police and military are the ones that have power.”
National police chief General Chakthip Chaijinda said the police was exploring suing Paween for remarks that he claimed were intended to damage Thailand’s reputation.
Whether damaging Thailand’s reputation was Paween’s intention or not, we may never know. But the fact speaks for itself. With nearly 100 indictments on human trafficking charges over this past year after an investigation was launched, it is really hard to see Thailand any other way.
The police force may be patting themselves in the back for a job well done with all these indictments. But we have to ask our selves and the police about why the trade was able to flourish so much and why it went undetected for years.
Some of the camps for Rohingya boat people, for example, were just a stone’s throw away from Thailand’s Border Patrol Police along the Thai-Malaysian border.
Instead of huffing and puffing and threatening legal action against Paween, Pol General Chakthip should take a good look at his force – and himself – and he might come to realise that threatening Paween with legal action may not be the way to go about this.
No doubt about it, a former senior police officer accusing fellow officers to wanting to kill him for exposing their corrupt actions is a very serious matter. But instead of threatening him, Chakthip should take his comment seriously.
Chakthip would have come out as a level-headed gentleman who takes such a claim – which is not unprecedented, by the way – seriously. Instead, he chose to be his old self.
Back in 2004 when he was assigned to investigate the January 4, 2004 arms heist in Narathiwat, Chakthip was sued by a local suspect who accused him of torture.
Chakthip counter-sued the suspect who was represented by a well-known and respected Muslim human rights lawyer, Somchai Neelaphaijit. Feeling outclassed, not to mention the fact that few people in the deep South had much faith in the country’s justice system, the suspect fled into the jungle and joined the armed separatist movement.
Needless to say, Paween’s resignation and now a bid for asylum reflect poorly on Thailand’s commitment to end human trafficking.
More than 150 arrest warrants have been issued and more than 90 suspects have been arrested. At least one was a military general and many others were considered to be highly influential.
But examination of some 500
witnesses could take the Criminal Court up to two years.
Thailand came down hard on the human trafficking case but that was only after trade partners were threatening the country with sanctions.
The discovery of mass graves along the Thai-Malaysian border, as well as the arrival of Rohingya boat people, had promoted foreign and local journalists who exposed that the country was not only a hub for human trafficking but Thai government officials were deeply involved and benefiting from the trade.
The US and European Union placed Thailand on blacklist that could translate into trade sanctions. One way to avoid trade sanction was to prove that the government was getting tough with human traffickers. That’s where Paween come in.
But he didn’t stop with underworld criminals; he went after people in uniform as well, and thus, stirred trouble for himself. So, the government needs to take heed about what he said instead of
brushing it aside as something politically motivated.