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If the law is imposed, one of the persons charged with implementing it will be Suthep’s choice for the capital’s top police post, Police Lieutenant General Santhan Chayanont, who began his new job as acting metropolitan police commissioner a week ago.
The 57-year-old has earned a name as a protest buster. He comes to the capital after ensuring smooth sailing for the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Phuket last July, where the Internal Security Act was also enforced.
Elsewhere in the south during 2009, Santhan’s subordinates in Police Region 8 repeatedly raided and destroyed the huts of villagers who had occupied land in a dispute with a company in Chaiburi district of Surat Thani province.
In the same province seven years earlier Santhan was himself the subject of protests. Then, as the Surat Thani provincial commander, he protected subordinates accused of having tortured a young man to death.
Police under his command had arrested Sutthisak Rimdusit over the alleged rape of a four-year-old girl. He died in police custody. When his relatives obtained his body, they found it was covered with injuries.
The family took Sutthisak’s corpse to renowned forensic scientist Pornthip Rojanasunan. She concluded that he had been brutally tortured. A plastic bottle had been melted onto his genitals and his chest had been crushed.
She also investigated the girl at the center of the case and found no evidence of rape. The police refused to release the semen that, they claimed, they had in evidence against Sutthisak.
Santhan took no action against his men, who lodged a charge of criminal defamation against Pornthip. A court later found her not guilty.
Meanwhile, thousands of Surat Thani residents marched through the city, carrying Sutthisak’s body to the front of the police station and demanding that action be taken against Santhan. Protestors accused him of allowing police to assault and torture detainees with impunity, and of allowing organized crime gangs to operate in police cells.
The provincial commander took charge of dispersing the demonstrators. When he suffered a minor injury while at the scene he lodged a criminal complaint of attempted murder, but the prosecutor never took it further.
Santhan was transferred to Songkhla, further to the south. There he became notorious for putting down protests against a gas pipeline to Malaysia.
Throughout 2003, police under Santhan arrested and detained pipeline opponents, many allegedly without charge or access to lawyers. Officers patrolled villages, harassed residents and in at least one case pummeled a teenager unconscious after they saw him taking photos of pipeline surveyors. The police charged the assault victim with an offence; the defendant won the case on appeal.
In a November 2003 letter to the provincial governor, Santhan wrote that he had discussed with company representatives how to “get rid of the problem of opposition to the pipeline” through the use of a special force trained to suppress further protests, and through use of the media for propaganda.
Santhan personally oversaw a case in which police charged 32 persons over a protest against the pipeline in December 2002. The provincial court heard the case over the next two years and acquitted all the defendants, who later successfully claimed compensation. Some lodged a criminal case against Santhan and five other senior officers for wrongful exercise of duty resulting in injury.
Rather than having been suspended or transferred to an inactive post, Santhan comes to his new job in Bangkok with this case against him, and a deserved reputation for protest busting. While hearings are pending over his treatment of demonstrators in 2002, everyone in the capital should be watching closely to see what he does the next time a group takes to the streets there.
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(Awzar Thi is the pen name of a member of the Asian Human Rights Commission with over 15 years of experience as an advocate of human rights and the rule of law in Thailand and Burma. His Rule of Lords blog can be read at http://ratchasima.net)
