THAI STORY ABOUT SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

The skirmishes between the Thai government and human rights
organizations are escalating into a full-blown war. This is silly, and
too many people are getting hurt.

Hina Jilani's job at the United Nations is to monitor the safety and
freedom of people around the world who work on behalf of human rights.
She came to Thailand for eight days in May 2003, in the aftermath of
the first, bloody phase of the government's war on drugs. She has now
presented her report.

Jilani says she is concerned that the current government has declared
war on non-government organizations. In the past, the vitality of
Thailand's NGOs contributed much to Thailand's good image in the
world. But now the government tries to undermine their legitimacy by
denigrating them publicly. It tries to block funding from abroad. She
concludes: "Some officials perceive the function of serving the people
as exclusive to the government."

They think NGOs just get in the way. This is bad in itself. It also
sends a clear message to people with bad intentions. The result is
evident from the nine mysterious murder cases listed in the report.

They all had the same pattern: an activist opposing some attempt to
wreck the local environment is killed. These incidents come from all
over the country.

This handful of cases includes just those which Jilani managed to
document during a short eight-day visit. Jilani was told that police
had made arrests in some of these cases but had not been able to bring
a single suspect to trial. She draws the quiet conclusion that this
must be because of "collusion between local authorities and
commercially powerful actors from the private sector." Translated from
reportspeak: big people shoot little people who get in their way.

Another very vulnerable group includes leaders or supporters of hill
communities. Jilani steers clear of the drug war, claiming that
extrajudicial killings are not part of her work. She does, however,
note that hill-community leaders who had been critical of police work
in the past tended to find their way onto the blacklists of drug suspects.

A group of community forest activists who set up roadblocks to exclude
loggers from a forest were attacked and shot at by an armed band. A
leader of the Northern Peasants Federation was shot and injured in
Lamphun.

Sadly, the government has reacted to this report rather negatively. It
has tried to suggest that the report was prematurely leaked (versions
have been officially available on Internet for some time). The foreign
minister has made some huffy comments. The Thai representative to the
United Nations officially responded to the report by rebuking Jilani
as an ungrateful guest and accusing her of not knowing how to write a
report.

He says: "We obviously cannot accept generalized comments and the
inclusion of unsubstantiated information." He complains that Jilani's
visit has not turned out to be a "learning experience," implying that
she is at fault.

Whisper "human rights" now, and the government goes into full
counter-strike mode. This is sad. The root problem is obviously the
drug war. Jilani skips past this but does note "the intense
sensitivity of the government on this issue."

The more antagonistic the government becomes to human rights and their
defenders, the more it encourages those who regularly violate human
rights for fun, power or profit.

The fact that the ministerial team at the forefront of the drug war
(Chavalit, Thammarak) has been pulled off the case in the South is
very significant. Thaksin knows what forces are at work. The costs of
allowing them free rein in the South have become too high.

But breaking down the broader antagonism between this government and
the human rights community will be much more difficult. This
government has identified itself too closely with some of the bad old
authoritarian ways. And that means people at the grass-roots level
will continue to get shot for defending the environment, their
communities and their ways of life.