THAILAND'S DRUG WAR SOWS FEAR, BLOODSHED

BAN HUAY RUA, Thailand - At dawn, two men with close-cropped hair arrived
at Sairung Chuwong's farmhouse in a black sedan, claiming they had a search
warrant.

When the woman's husband, Sompong, came outside, one of the men shot him
three times with an M-16 rifle. The second man pulled out a pistol and
finished the job with bullets to his skull and neck as Sairung clung to her
husband's body. The men left without identifying themselves.

Sompong was on a government list of suspected drug dealers but his wife
denies he had any connection to the narcotics trade.

"He wasn't involved in drugs," Sairung, 37, said as she cried and cradled a
portrait of her dead husband. "We're just farmers."

Blood is spilling across Thailand, with nearly 600 slayings, many in murky
circumstances, since the government launched a crackdown on the drug trade
on Feb. 1.

Authorities said police were involved in just 15 of the killings, and that
those were in self-defense. They blamed the other deaths on drug gangs
seeking to silence potential informants.

But human rights advocates fear police officers are arranging the killings
or executing suspects without trial. A Thai forensics expert also suspects
police involvement, and alleges that officers have planted drugs on some
victims to link them to criminal activities.

Few places have seen more bloodshed than in the drug-infested villages of
Nakhon Sawan, a province 130 miles north of Bangkok whose name translates
as "city of heaven."

"In this province, the spread of drugs is mostly the work of small- and
medium-size dealers. They're everywhere in all 15 districts," said Maj.
Gen. Thawat Boonfueng, commander of the province's police force.

The area is rife with drug trafficking because it is on a route to Bangkok
from the frontiers of Myanmar and Laos, where drug production thrives.

Thawat said the main target of the three-month crackdown is methamphetamine
- - known to Thais as "yaa baa," or crazy medicine. It is thought to be the
drug of choice for many of the country's 3 million addicts. Officials say
up to a billion yaa baa pills will be smuggled into Thailand this year from
jungle factories mostly in neighboring Myanmar.

To coax dealers, traffickers and addicts to change their ways, Nakhon Sawan
provincial authorities are offering an amnesty of sorts: Register with
authorities and be spared the wrath of police.

"So far, we have registered 5,199 people who turned themselves in and would
become our informants," Thawat said. "We will take pictures of them, record
the fingerprints and interrogate them thoroughly."

Provincial police erected more than 300 checkpoints, raided 324 houses and
detained some 183 suspects in the first three weeks of the crackdown.

In Ban Huay Rua, a town of 1,000 people, at least four families suspected
of roles in the narcotics trade have fled in fear of reprisals from other
dealers and police, village headman Pakdee Anutarangkool said.

"There are a lot of drug dealers in this village, but so far only one has
been killed," he said, sitting under a banner facing the main road into the
village that reads, "Drug dealers will die unless they report themselves."

Pakdee said 30 volunteers from the town had formed a local militia with
training from the Thai army and now work to sniff out traffickers. He said
their weapons include six 12-gauge shotguns donated by provincial authorities.

Echoing an assessment from the provincial police commander, Pakdee said
many drug dealers are lying low and selling only to longtime customers.

Bullet-riddled bodies turn up almost daily.

Four days before Sompong was killed, a hooded gunman went to the house of
Samphaew Poonkatenakorn, a woman suspected of dealing in a nearby village,
and shot her to death.

"I don't know who killed her," her 69-year-old mother-in-law, Hlong, said
through tears. "I cannot imagine who did that."

Local residents said Samphaew's house had been searched last year by
police, who pried up floorboards and found about $2,325. Her husband was
arrested on drug charges a few years ago.

Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand, a celebrated forensics expert at Thailand's
Central Institute of Forensic Science, alleges that drugs have been placed
in the pockets of victims to suggest the killings resulted from drug gang
infighting.

"We don't believe that the people behind the killings are those who wanted
to silence their accomplices," she said. "We can only say that it was the
police who arranged the murders."

Human rights groups doubt drug gangsters are savaging one another. "Why
can't police arrest anyone or bother to investigate?" asked Wasan Panich at
the Office of the National Human Rights Commission.

London-based Amnesty International called the crackdown "a de facto
shoot-to-kill policy" that encourages extra-judicial killings and puts
police officers under heavy pressure to produce results or lose their jobs.

A police spokesman, Maj. Gen. Pongsaphat Pongcharoen, conceded it was
possible some rogue officers are involved in killings, but defended the
crackdown.

"The war is just beginning," he said. "I don't follow the death toll. The
most important thing is how to rid the community of drugs."