Self-Defense or Murder?

After surrendering, the suspects were taken back to their hideout to be searched. What happened next is unclear, but reporters and villagers at the scene heard shots fired at regular intervals. Suddenly, the six were dead, carried out in white shrouds and taken away. “These people were not saints,” Thailand’s deputy police chief, Gen. Salang Bunnag, who led the stake-out, said shortly afterwards. “Today we have closed their cases.”

Not quite. A heated debate opened over whether the police played executioners. Officially, the line is that the suspects tried to grab a lawman’s gun and that the police fired in self-defense. Yet a few days later, according to local press reports, Salang told military officers and journalists present at an army function in Bangkok that he had ordered the killings. “I consulted both the local police and the mass media, and everyone agreed that we should not keep the traffickers around,” he was quoted as saying.

Salang is now keeping quiet, and his boss, Gen. Pote Boonyachinda, says he will not be specifically investigated, though a general inquiry will be held. Few expect it to lead anywhere. “The police should not be left to investigate the police,” said the Bangkok Post in an editorial. “Should evidence of extrajudicial killings emerge, the case must be brought before the courts. The police officers involved must receive what the six [suspects] did not -- a fair hearing.”

Over the years, police performing extrajudicial killings -- shooting “known” criminals to avoid court proceedings -- has been a common occurrence not only in Thailand but elsewhere in Asia, notably in Indonesia, India and the Philippines. Often it is done on an ad hoc basis, with superiors implicitly giving approval by not taking action against officers involved. Sometimes it takes the form of a quietly sanctioned campaign. In Indonesia in the early 1980s, for example, a war on crime waged by death squads claimed as many as 5,000 lives. And in India’s Punjab state, the authorities made little effort to hide their on-the-spot executions of militant separatists.

But nowhere in Asia do such killings seem to happen with as much regularity as in Thailand. The Attorney General’s Office says that a suspect is killed every three days by the police. Each time, self-defense is cited as the cause. Small wonder that civil and human rights groups are enraged. Says activist lawyer Thongbai Thongbao: “The police are not supposed to act like a judge sentencing people to death.” Somchai Homla-or, president of the Civil Liberty Union, agrees: “Who can guarantee the rights of the people if the police decide who is right or wrong and who should live or die?”

The Forum of the Poor, a non-governmental organization, says that police have killed several villagers accused of fomenting unrest in northeastern Ubon Ratchathani province and who were under detention. In another case, the NGO’s own leader, Jun Boonkhuntod, was killed after he was detained for possessing marijuana. Police say he was resisting arrest and was accidentally shot. Relatives of the Suphan Buri dead have also queried the police’s assertion that all six were known criminals. A woman identified one of the men killed as her husband -- a carpenter just returned from working in Bangkok.

What is not disputed is how the use of amphetamines such as speed has grown dramatically in Thailand. Despite numerous drug-related deaths, it has traditionally been considered fairly harmless and, at between $3 to $6 a tablet, relatively cheap. “The trade and abuse of amphetamines is Thailand’s No. 1 drug problem,” says Prija Champaratna of the Narcotics Control Board. The government has responded with public awareness campaigns -- including changing the Thai name for amphetamines from yaa maa, “horse drug,” to the more ominous yaa baa, or “crazy drug.”

Not everyone is against the police action. The Indonesian campaign had widespread public support. And because drugs are such a scourge in their society, many Thais back a tough approach. Noted The Nation: “Don’t cry for the bad guys, several people are saying. Keep your sympathy for, say, policemen killed or injured because of their reluctance to shoot first.” The trouble is if they are the only people doing the shooting.