THAILAND WAR ON DRUGS TURNS MURDEROUS, 600 KILLED THIS MONTH

Human Rights Groups Denounce Death Squads, Executions

Early this year, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced an
ambitious campaign to eradicate drugs in Thailand by April
(http://www.drcnet.org/wol/273.html#southeastasia). While initially
greeted with raised eyebrows as an unachievable goal, a mounting death
toll since the campaign got underway on February 1 shows that the Thai
government is deadly serious in its effort to wipe out the drug trade.
According to the Thai Interior Ministry, 596 alleged drug dealers had
been killed in the first two weeks of the campaign.

Thailand is one of the world's leading consumers of methamphetamine
pills, which are smuggled by the hundreds of millions annually from
factories operated by the United Wa State Army in neighboring Burma.
According to the Thai government, approximately one million of the
country's 62 million inhabitants are regular methamphetamine users.

Prime Minister Thaksin and police officials have said that the vast
majority of the killings were the result of vendettas among drug
traffickers and the rest were committed by police acting in
self-defense, but few observers are buying that. Thai police have
admitted killing at least a dozen "blacklisted" drug dealers in what
they frankly refer to as a "no red tape" policy of state-sanctioned
murder, the South China Morning Post reported.

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have expressed
"grave concern" about the rapid rise in apparent police murders of
drug suspects. "It is getting worse by the day," Amnesty
International's Thailand office director, Srirak Plipat, told the Asia
Times. "The number of extrajudicial deaths is unusually high, but that
does not mean there were no extrajudicial killings before during
anti-drug crackdowns," he added. But the current crackdown is
different, he said. "The language is new. The government is taking the
cause very seriously, and has conveyed that it will use violence to
pursue it."

Local human rights organizations are also raising the alarm. "This
smacks of a great wrong being done," Somchai Homlaor,
secretary-general of the regional human rights group Asia Forum, told
the Morning Post.

Members of the Thai national human rights commission have also warned
about the excesses of the campaign, saying it could usher in a new era
of rule by "gun and goon." "This is supposed to be a democracy under
the rule of law," commissioner Pradit Charoenthaithawee told the
Morning Post. "But there is no law that covers the gunning down of
people on the whim of the local authorities. This is a step back into
the dark ages," said Pradit.

"This has become a land of fear. It is very ugly. Who is killing
whom?" asked Jaran Ditapichai, another human rights
commissioner.

Yet another human rights commissioner, Jaran Ditapichai, told the
Guardian (London) last week that public support for the anti-drug
campaign was diminishing as the rising death toll led to fears of
creeping authoritarianism. "The public see death tolls rising, but
they don't know who killed those people," he said.

On Saturday, the Bangkok Post weighed in with an editorial scoffing at
the government's claims that the killings were the result of gang
vendettas and police were obeying the law. "Such assurances ring
hollow, given the poor records of the police, where scapegoats abound
and unexplained deaths of prisoners in detention cells are all too
frequent," it said. "If Mr. Thaksin is not careful we will be taken
back to those dark days when suspects are presumed guilty until proven
innocent."

The Thai government and its backer in the anti-drug struggle, the
United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCP),
appear unconcerned, even defiant. "The government is firm in its
policy," said Prime Minister Thaksin, responding to criticism last
week. "Whoever wants to criticize, let them criticize. It's bandits
killing bandits," he baldly claimed. Thaksin also appealed for
understanding of the killings, which he characterized as
"self-defense." "These officers do not deal drugs. I think it quite
unusual that the drug dealers getting killed by the police are getting
sympathy," he told the Bangkok Post.

And the UNDCP's East Asia and Pacific office head, Sandro Calvani,
sounded downright supportive of the mass killings. "The Thai campaign
makes sense," he told the Bangkok Post, because it is a broad campaign
against an entrenched problem. "There is a sense of urgency," he
added. When asked by the Post about the mass killings, Calvani gave
lip service to the UN's support of human rights and the rule of law,
but also noted that the UN is committed "to the rights of the children
and youth to live in a drug-free environment."

If the Thai government is having no problems with the UNDCP, it is
apparently much more skittish about another UN organization, the
Office of the Secretary General. Hina Jilani, a representative of that
office, was scheduled to arrive in Thailand at the end of this month
to gather information about the situation facing human rights
activists there, which would presumably include an interest in
extrajudicial killings. The Thai government last week postponed that
visit. A new trip has not been scheduled, according to the Bangkok
Post.

Thailand is set to host the International Harm Reduction Association's
(http://www.ihra.net) 2003 14th International Harm Reduction
Conference, set for April 6-10 in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. At
press time, IHRA had not responded to a DRCNet query about whether the
conference is considering relocating or responding in some other
fashion to the wave of state-sanctioned murders sweeping the country.
The mass murder of drug suspects would appear to be incompatible with
the principles of harm reduction.