Going the wrong way on rights issues

The Thai military is once again using the legal system to intimidate human rights organisations critical of the Army’s activities in the southernmost provinces.
Last year, the Navy sued a Phuket-based newspaper that had quoted a news report from an international news agency alleging how naval and other officials benefited from the human-trafficking activities going on in their area of jurisdiction in the Andaman Sea.
The Navy pursued this course of action in spite of evidence supporting the allegations – from testimonies and video footage of boat people from Burma being stranded in makeshift camps and a remote island, to dead bodies buried in temporary holding areas that are often a stone’s throw from military and police outposts.
The revelations were a stain on the country’s image. The government responded by cracking down and arrested scores of officials in the hope that the criticism and pressure from abroad and at home would abate.
Cracking down on shady officers may have been the right thing to do but it was for the wrong reason. If the military were sincere about resolving the problem, they would have ordered a thorough investigation on the entire network of people and agencies involved.
The same insincere approach is being employed in the southernmost provinces where more than 6,600 have been killed – about 60 per cent of them Muslims of Malay ethnicity – in the ongoing separatist insurgency.
There, the Fourth Army Area has filed a defamation lawsuit against three human rights defenders, accusing them of “ill intention” towards the military and spreading negative information in the wake of international human rights meetings at this time of the year.
As a public relations exercise, no doubt the release of the report in February was perfect. The United Nations was talking about Thailand’s human rights situation and local activists used the occasion to remind the world that more work needed to be done in the far South.
The report was produced by the Cross-Cultural Foundation, Hearty Support Group (Duay Jai), and the Patani Human Rights Network. They documented 54 cases in which security personnel allegedly tortured ethnic Patani Malay insurgent suspects between 2004 and 2015.
Obviously, the Army was incensed by the report. But instead of asking how to address these allegations, they decided to threaten the activists with lawsuits.
The Army has to deal with the culture of impunity in its rank-and-file.
Over the past 12 years, no officials have been prosecuted for any crime even when the evidence was so obvious. Whatever happened to the paramilitary rangers suspected of involvement in the shooting to death of five unarmed funeral-goers in Pattani’s Nong Chik district in January 2012? And how can anyone forget the Tak Bai massacre when troops fired live rounds at an unarmed crowd, killing seven. Hundreds were rounded up and stacked one on top of another on the back of military transport trucks on a long journey – from Tak Bai to a Pattani military camp. At the end of the trip, 78 had suffocated to death. The then Fourth Army commander was transferred but no other personnel were punished for the death of the 85 innocent, unarmed demonstrators.
And what about the standoff between the militants and security officials at the Krue Se Mosque on April 28, 2004, and the execution-style killing of 14 young men in Saba Yoi district of Songkhla?
International human rights organisations have documented these atrocities but the Thai Army has never addressed them with any meaningful action – legal or conciliatory. Monetary compensations were offered but insurgent violence continues unabated. People have died while in military custody.
With or without the report by the three organisations, the locals are convinced that illegal and questionable practices by the Army in the Malay-speaking South are far too common.
Ironically, the Army still thinks it could be a source of comfort to the local Malay people and expects to win their hearts and minds to counter the insurgency.
Without healing the scars of the past, reconciliation will be an uphill climb.
Documenting the wrongs of the past is part of that healing process and that’s what the three human rights organisations were trying to accomplish with this report.