BANGKOK, 1 November 2004 — Last week’s deaths of 78 Muslim detainees in southern Thailand have crystallized the warnings of analysts, rights watchdogs and critics that the government’s policy in the south is a colossal failure.
The disaster has fueled concern that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s hardball tactics to pacify the Muslim area, where he admits a separatist insurgency has claimed about 460 lives this year, have backfired.
After the unrest resurfaced in January, Thaksin clamped into force martial law that had been in nominal effect for years in parts of southern Thailand and deployed thousands of extra troops and police to the region.
But the crackdown has yielded few arrests of those fomenting the unrest and the security forces were accused of using excessive force, exacerbating the situation. Last Monday 87 people were killed when security forces quelled a chaotic demonstration by Muslims at Tak Bai in Narathiwat province.
The government admits six were shot dead and 78 detainees suffocated or were crushed to death when they were crammed into military trucks. Another three were found drowned in a river near the protest.
The security forces were also responsible for the worst day of bloodshed in the area’s modern history when they killed 108 rebels, some sheltering in a mosque, on April 28.
The government has meanwhile scrapped plans for face-to-face talks with a leader of one of the separatist movements and, after government buildings were torched, suspended a $306-million financial aid package for the region. And this month Thaksin sacked his defense minister because the violence had not been quelled. Gen. Chetta Thanajaro had only been appointed seven months earlier in another shuffle triggered by the southern violence. “The policy applied to the south is totally lacking any sense of direction,” one Bangkok-based diplomat told AFP.
The government needs to “re-examine the whole policy and attitude toward the south,” said Saneh Chamarik, chairman of the independent National Human Rights Commission investigating the Tak Bai tragedy.
“They need to give a certain degree of rights and liberties to the people there.”
In a stinging open letter to Thaksin, the US-based Human Rights Watch charged that “security forces trample the rule of law and violate human rights without fear of accountability.” “Since your government assumed power, Thai security forces have increasingly used excessive force and operated with impunity, particularly in southern Thailand,” wrote the group’s executive director for Asia, Brad Adams.
Policies adopted by Thaksin since he came to power in 2001 have often worsened the problems in the Buddhist kingdom’s Muslim areas, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a lecturer at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
“A long string of tough strategies and harsh tactics since January have failed time and again, and have only inflamed the tensions down south,” he wrote in a blistering opinion piece in the Bangkok Post.
“Separatism is a political problem which merits a political solution, not just soldiers, guns and curfews.” Muslims in the poor and underdeveloped south, which borders Malaysia, have long complained that the far-away Bangkok administration is insensitive to their culture and religion.
