THE UNJUST WAR

The Thaksin Shinawatra government will never fully recover from the
crushing assault to its name for waging a war on drugs, and this
government must think carefully before launching a new drugs offensive.

At the cost of 2,500-plus lives, the 2003 campaign was trumpeted by
supporters who said it had pulled down the floodgates on the torrents
of drugs flowing into, through and throughout the country.

In the process, it splatteed blood on the country's human rights
record, as some human rights advocates have phrased it.

Five years on and the new government is all fired up with plans to
form a national centre with the prime minister as chairman to flush
out illicit drugs. This is ominously familiar.

Justice Minister Sompong Amornwiwat hammered home the pressing need to
put drugs suppression on the national agenda and said he is consulting
Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej on the best day to convene the first
meeting of concerned ministries to finalise the centre's priority missions.

The centre is eerily reminiscent of when Mr Thaksin inaugurated his
drugs war campaign made sensational by the deadlines handed down for
"cleansing" the drugs networks.

Interior Minister Chalerm Yubamrung instantly jumped on the Sompong
bandwagon to offer his services by promising to coax drugs barons into
giving up their billions from the illegal trade and switch to
agricultural farming.

It sounds as though the ruling People Power party is acting on its
election promise that there will be a sequel to the 2003 war on drugs.
But the best advice for the government right now is to hold its horses
and exercise some restraint.

Unless the justice minister can assure people the government's
anti-drugs initiative will not be a repeat of the 2003 drugs war, and
back it up with an unequivocal definition of the term 'suppression',
he should steer away from the issue which could potentially bring the
government to its knees.

The drugs fight launched in phases by the Thaksin administration was
slammed by opponents as a propagandistic vehicle to purport the
government's firm-handedness in dealing with drugs problems. The
policy operated on a rather simplistic and frightening assumption that
availability of state resources and actions to 'expedite justice'
would culminate in the decimation of drugs traders and
traffickers.

But the equation represented a blatant disrespect of the judicial
process because more than 2,500 people finger-pointed as drugs traders
or those connected with them were allegedly killed by authorities on
sight.

Extra-judicial killings are a travesty of justice which any society
must not tolerate. Many suspects were judged guilty the moment they
were tallied up on the blacklist and the warrants signed for their
arrest were essentially licences for them to be executed, families of
many of the victims have charged.

Often 'secret' intelligence reports were referred to in implicating
the suspects in drugs syndicates and there were perceived patterns to
label most of them as someone high up the gang hierarchy. Another
popular theory was that many of the murdered suspects were actually
insiders silenced by their bosses to keep police from getting any
higher up the chain of command of these gangs.

Any piece of 'intelligence' appeared to have been enough to warrant
the taking of these suspects' lives when it should have been presented
to the court so the accused could be tried and allowed their rightful
opportunity to defend the allegations against them.

Mr Thaksin, hounded by allegations of corruption and power abuse,
should understand, more so now than ever, the importance of being
accorded legal protection and a proper defence in court.

The war on drugs in principle came across as a cause worthy of
support. But the means of policy delivery had clearly jeopardised the
ends - and the mistake has cost the country far too dearly to be repeated.

So, when Mr Sompong uttered 'suppression' and the forthcoming
establishment of a national anti-narcotic centre in the same sentence,
he has re-awakened the dread of many people fearful of renewed carnage
on our streets.

The justice minister should first accept that the 2003 drugs war was a
glaring policy error.

He has yet to give everyone his word the national anti-drugs centre
will see to it that the drugs suspects are captured alive and brought
to court and that extra-judicial killings are not to be the mantra of
the new campaign.