International Herald Tribune  Original Story

Thais blame police for deadly war on drugs 
Seth Mydans/NYT The New York Times 
Tuesday, April 8, 2003 

BANGKOK An extraordinary campaign of government-approved killings is
under way in Thailand - a crackdown on drug dealers that has taken as
many as 2,000 lives over the past two months, an average of 30 a day.

The death toll - equal to that of the carnage in East Timor in 1999 - has
drawn outrage from local and foreign human rights groups. It seems
particularly shocking in a country where democracy has replaced the
coups and strongman rule of past decades.

From the start, the police have disavowed most of the killings, saying they
are the work of drug dealers trying to silence informers. Few people here
accept that explanation. A variety of other government statements and
independent monitoring make it clear that the police are carrying out
widespread summary executions.

In rural areas and city slums, residents say they now stay indoors at night
for fear of what have become known as "silent killings." The most
dangerous thing, they say, is to answer a police summons to respond to an
accusation of drug dealing. "Most of them got killed on the way back from
the police office," said Sunai Phasuk, a member of an independent human
rights group, ForumAsia. "People found their name on a blacklist, went to
the police, then end up dead."

The Interior Ministry says its lists include 41,914 people around the
country who are "targets for monitoring." According to the police, there
are rarely any witnesses to the killings. Bodies are often removed without
autopsies. Often, they are found with plastic bags of drugs placed neatly
by their side. Few homicide arrests have been made.

The official death toll of 2,052, announced by a police spokesman last
week, is believed to include a number of other killings carried out under
cover of the narcotics crackdown.

When it began at the start of February, the crackdown, ordered by Prime
Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had broad public backing.
Methampheta-mines, trafficked from Burma over the old opium routes
through the Golden Triangle, are ravaging all sectors of society, from
laborers to bankers, young and old.

But the campaign has become less popular as it has taken innocent lives,
and the shooting death of a 9-year-old boy just over a month ago jolted the
public into outrage.

The campaign has also drawn criticism from the United Nations as well as
from human rights groups. Initially, the prime minister said he would rid
Thailand of illicit drugs within three months. Now he says it will take until
the end of year.

"The scale of these killings is absolutely appalling," said Mike
Jendrzejczyk, the Washington director for Asia for Human Rights Watch.
"Thailand's image as a place where the rule of law is respected is clearly
under assault."

He added: "I think the United States should suspend all assistance to the
Thai police until there can be a credible, independent investigation into the
killings and the United States takes steps to ensure it is not directly or
indirectly complicit in them."

Thaksin has brushed aside the criticism, saying, "The United Nations is
not my father." He added sarcastically: "Opponents can gather signatures
to back their call for the government to let the drug dealers live happily.
Why care about our children?"

The government says 700 million methamphetamine pills are smuggled from
Burma every year, most of them for use in Thailand. It says 3 million people
use the drug - which is known here as yaa baa, or "crazy medicine" -
including 300,000 people who are addicted, in a population of 63 million.

Officials say dozens of organized crime groups run the drug trade,
protected by or run by powerful civilian and military figures. Critics note
that the current campaign targeting low-level dealers and traffickers leaves
these organizations intact.

Initial surveys by an independent polling company showed that 90 percent
of the public supported the crackdown, even though 40 percent of those
polled said they were afraid of being falsely accused, and 30 percent said
they were afraid of being killed.

Then, just over a month ago, three undercover policemen firing at a
getaway car killed the 9-year-old boy, Chakraphan Srisa-ard, with two
bullets in the back. The police had just arrested his father for trying to sell
them 6,000 pills, and his mother was fleeing for her life with the boy in the
back seat. The killing drew the biggest headlines since the start of the
crackdown, and the boy's funeral was widely publicized.

"The war on drugs is getting more violent every day," one of his uncles,
Chlaermpol Kerdrungruang, said. "The police kept shooting and shooting
at the car. They wanted them to die."

As public opinion began to turn, officials stopped issuing regular reports
of the death toll, and the government appointed a commission to
investigate complaints of summary killings.

Last week, however, Deputy Attorney General Praphan Naiyakowit, who
runs the investigation, said the police had failed to produce any of the
reports he had requested.

The killings appear to have continued, though possibly at a somewhat
lower rate. A police spokesman, Pongsapat Pongchaeroen, gave the latest
death toll last week, adding that the police had made 46,776 drug arrests,
had seized 12.51 million methamphetamine pills and had confiscated $14.94
million in property belonging to suspected traffickers.

As with earlier reports, he insisted that most of the victims had been killed
by fellow drug dealers. Just 46 had been killed by the police, he said, and
all of those killings had been in self-defense. He said that six police officers
had been killed and 15 wounded. 

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