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 The Rohingyas aren't the Thai military's only problem
While Thailand’s military has come under fire in the last few weeks for the navy’s treatment of Bangladeshi and Burmese Rohingya Muslims, the fact is that the country’s security forces operate with impunity and there appears little chance that a wide array of gross human rights violations will stop until the government prosecutes those responsible.
To date, no Thai official has ever been sent down for such activities, despite the deaths of thousands in the south of the country particularly, and some experts doubt the state's ability to reign in its agents on the ground, which they see as a law unto itself. Last week, Amnesty International published a damning report accusing Thai security forces of carrying out the "widespread, systematic torture" of detainees, amidst a "culture of impunity," in the country's conflict-torn southern border provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and Songkhla.
On Wednesday, the Working Group on Justice for Peace (WGJP), an NGO, said human rights defenders are "specifically targeted" by the police and military. "Assassinations, forced disappearances, assaults, threats, and being identified as insurgents or enemies of the state are part of their day-to-day reality and unacceptable in any context."
Also, the latest Human Rights Watch World Report for 2009 severely criticizes the Thai military, saying that "Although the government and General Anupong (Poachinda, commander in chief of the Thai army) vowed to deliver justice to the ethnic Malay Muslim population, Thai security forces still faced little or no consequences for extrajudicial killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests of suspected insurgents. After a sharp decline in 2007, new cases of enforced disappearances emerged again in 2008."
Thailand's latest human rights scandal is its navy's treatment of the Rohingya –destitute boat people who were allegedly detained, beaten, then cast out to sea in unpowered boats with insufficient food and water in December. Several hundred of the more than 1,000-strong group are still missing.
Senior army officials said the Rohingyas were a potential security threat because, as Muslims, they might have been intending to join the southern insurgency.
Certainly, Thailand clearly faces serious internal security threats. Since 2004, there has been a marked surge in violence from Islamic militias, driven by separatist and religious ideologies, who are fighting a low-intensity conflict in Thailand's Deep South.
Around 45 percent of Thailand's military forces are deployed in the region, where more than 3,500 people have been killed in the past six years – the vast majority at the hands of the insurgents. Shootings, bombings, arson and beheadings have become a daily reality. But none of the nebulous insurgent groups has ever claimed responsibilities for the attacks and killings.
The region's population is predominantly ethnic Malay and Muslim, and rebellion has been commonplace, due to entrenched issues of disenfranchisement, ever since the Buddhist kingdom annexed the former Sultanate of Patani in 1909.
But linking the Rohingyas with the insurgency is pure fallacy, says Dr Bichit Rattakul, a prominent human rights expert.
"It's very dangerous when law enforcers say the Rohingyas are a threat to Thailand's security just because they are Muslims and are travelling to Thailand's south," he says. "It is an ignorance of the origins of the Rohingya's problems and there is this misconception in linking ethnicity and religion, where the two concepts are totally different."
While the cases outlined in the reports and the plight of the Rohingyas are not directly linked, they share continuity in terms of their treatment by the military.
"There's a clear connection with the security forces' activities in the south and the Rohingya's case," says an international legal analyst. "Look at the footage of how they were treated. The men were lying face down in the dirt with their hands bound behind their back in the blazing sun. This is a direct parallel of the treatment of Muslim men at Tak Bai in 2004 before they were loaded onto the army trucks where they suffocated," he says.
"It all gives a general flavour of what the Thai military is actually about, especially in Thailand's border regions, it is a law unto itself," he says. "As long as they're not dealing with ethnic Buddhist Thais, then their practices are some of the worst in the world."
Behind Thailand's much-coveted Land of Smiles facade lies a dark history of violent repression. Its military ran anti-communist death squads in the 1970s, and thousands of suspected communists were burnt alive in oil drums in the "Red Barrel" killings, in Pattalung in 1972; security forces and militias massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in 1973, 1976, and 1992; former-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's 2003 War on Drugs resulted in more than 2,700 extrajudicial killings; and in 2004, the army killed 32 insurgents at Khrue Se mosque, another 78 Muslim demonstrators from Tak Bai died at its hands while being transported in trucks; and in the same year Somchai Neelaphaijit, a human rights lawyer defending suspected Muslim insurgents, was abducted and presumed murdered by security forces.
Despite this laundry list of abuse, Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs know of no cases where state officials have been prosecuted for torture or human rights violations.
As a signatory to at least seven global agreements to uphold international human rights law in the country – most notably the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which it ratified in 2007 – Thailand is legally required to prevent torture and prosecute perpetrators.
Yet Amnesty International's report "Thailand: Torture in the southern counter-insurgency" identifies 34 cases of torture – including four where detainees died in custody – carried out between March 2007 and May 2008. The victims' ages' range from six-to-46 years, all but one male.
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The grim truth of war remains: hearts and minds are lost in the campaign to get the enemy by the balls
Government objective: Hear no evil, speak no evil
best regards,