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Somchai Neelaphaijit, a human rights lawyer who had accused police of torturing his Muslim clients, disappeared in Bangkok on March 12, 2004 at around 8:30 p.m. after he decided to quit waiting for someone he was supposed to meet at the Chalina Hotel.
Despite repeated assurances from Thailand’s sometimes notorious Department of Special Investigations that it was either hot on the trail or would soon disclose vital information about the case, it has dragged on for five years without a solution. There have been a number of misleading instances involving supposedly connected evidence that did not pan out. Expectations of progress in the case are now not only muted but negative.
They are negative with good reason. On Dec. 11 Abdulah Arbukaree, an important witness in Somchai’s case who had been under DSI protection, joined his colleague on the kingdom’s list of disappeared persons after returning home to celebrate a major religious festival. Abdullah may well have shared Somchai’s fate. Although the DSI is investigating, there seems little doubt that verifiable progress will elude authorities.
Angkhana Neelaphaijit has asked the DSI to accept responsibility for the disappearance of Abdullah because he was one of its protected witnesses. But the agency that was supposed to be watching and protecting Abdullah instead may have “allowed” – certain observers are saying “arranged for” – him to disappear.
The “Department of Special Interests,” as not a few Thais have called the DSI, has in the past been viewed with outright disgust for its failure to act on cases involving serious violent crimes perpetrated in the kingdom by state authorities or by those who otherwise direct the affairs of state over and above the government.
In her Dec. 23 letter to the Thai prime minister, Neelaphaijit’s widow made three specific requests: she asked for the acceleration of the investigation into her husband’s disappearance, for the protection of all witnesses in criminal cases, and for changes in the law to define involuntary disappearances as punishable crimes. Her letter also asked for justice and equal treatment under the law.
The letter makes an often repeated and equally often ignored or dismissed point – that the Thai justice system frequently commits injustice rather than ensuring justice, and that it is likely to favor those with power, influence and money over those without.
In this respect Thailand may be merely another country in a world full of unjust systems, but the appeal brings a singular coloration to a justice system that current political fugitive Thaksin Shinawatra had earlier called “second to none.” He said this while he was prime minister, following Somchai’s disappearance. He said this as he oversaw the elimination of over 2,500 victims of extrajudicial killings in the country’s anti-drug war launched in 2003.
According to Thaksin at the time, almost all the murdered people were killed by fellow drug dealers to maintain silence; apparently none were killed by police involved in drugs. This is another area in which the DSI shuns revealing details.
There is a sector of Thai society that is proud of opposing human rights and freedom of speech, maintaining that these values reflect external Western interference in the kingdom’s sacrosanct culture. That sector is by and large in the majority.
Whenever one hears of newspaper editors being killed, village activists shot and tossed by the paddy dike, Burmese refugees found dead in prison cells hanging by their own shoestrings, students shooting one another in the middle of Bangkok, or such unparalleled events as the attempted assassination of media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul during an emergency decree at an intersection where all security cameras somehow failed to be operating, one gains some insight into the nature of Thailand’s national security.
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post – www.thekoratpost.com – he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
