“Why are you [media] so concerned about the fate of drug traffickers?”
Back on the planet Tatooine (Thailand), Jabba the Hutt (Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej) has continued his criticism of the media, this time accusing media and various human rights agencies of being too concerned about the fate of drug traffickers.
“Why are you [media] so concerned about the fate of drug traffickers?” he asked the press last week, before saying that the best way not to die in the next phase of the controversial “War on Drugs” that his government is about to revive is not to get involved with drugs in the first place.
Further painting himself into a corner (as he usually does), Jabba reiterated his stand on his weekly TV show and this time blamed Media and human rights groups and other NGOs of misleading people and trying to make people misunderstand him and his government’s good policy on drugs.
Today, former senator and long time human rights activist Kraisak Choonhavan returned to the limelight to hit back at these irresponsible, if somewhat predictable (by now) remarks with some hard facts on a television talkshow, Roo Tan Pratate Thai (Thailand Watchdog) on ASTV.
The total number of people killed in the War on Drugs stands at 2,819.
An independent panel back in 2005 set up by the Senate and National Human Rights Commission to look into the War on Drugs policy that began in 2003 under the Thaksin Shinawatra (a.k.a. Senator Palpatine) found that in 837 cases involving 878 deaths, the victims had no evidence of drug dealing or involvement in drugs at all. This number includes extra-judicial killings and where it is deemed that drug dealers kill their agents to prevent a case from going to court. Extra-judicial here is generally defined as when police have to fire back when fired upon.
571 people on the blacklist were killed for “unexplained reasons”.
Kraisak noted the the committee was comprised of the Permanent Secretary and Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice and the former Chief Public Prosecutor.
“He’s (Jabba) talking about the new war on drugs and another three to four thousand more deaths as if he doesn’t care about the value of life,” Kraisak said.
The former senator reminded us that along with the 108 dead in the massacre and the Krue Se mosque and 85 dead at Tak Bai, the previous Thaksin government has a pretty appalling human rights record.
Sunai Pasuk, Thailand adviser to Human Rights Watch joined Kraisak to explain how the blacklist was compiled in only two weeks. Each provincial governor was given two weeks to compile the list and they did so by cobbling together names of those with drug related backgrounds. However, when the Office of the Narcotics Control Board later examined the list, they said that it was not compiled properly with due procedure.
The government then gave each provincial governor a target of three months by which the 5, 25 and 50 percent of the names on each list had to be taken off the list. There were only three ways to be taken off that list: being arrested, being the subject of an extra-judicial killing or dying for an unknown cause.
“Dying for unknown reasons should not be a reason to call an anti-drug drug policy a success,” he said.
Sunai said that it was the Thaksin government, the Surayud Chulanont Government and also today’s Jabba government that has to be responsible to resolve each and every one of those murder cases.
He also alluded that the War on Drugs was probably the reason that Thailand did not sign up to be a founding member the International Criminal Court as if it did, then the TRT government could have been tried at that court. As things stand, joining the court at a later date does not give the court retroactive jurisdiction.
Kraisak noted that Thailand is now the third largest exporter of drugs after Afghanistan and Myanmar. He said that the Thaksin government had a number of Ministers who could not enter the US as they were on a drugs blacklist and that the economic policy at the time was very amicable to the military regime there.
“Today, why are drugs back? It means that the War on Drugs did not do anything to solve the root cause, the producers, and today Thailand is addicted to drugs,” he said.
Smartbrain is of the opinion that if anything, the media are guilty; guilty of not highlighting these atrocities enough and making people understand the big picture beyond the headline of “over 2,000 killed”.
Yes, we do care, and we should care, if half the people killed in the last War on Drugs were not really involved in drug trafficking. So should the people of Thailand. People should not be killed as part of what boils down to just a propaganda campaign.
