Feuds, envy fuelled deadly Thai drug war - rights body

Enlarge Photo Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej holds up his ballot during an election for members of...

Wed, Mar 5 09:53 AM

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej should learn the lessons of the 2003 war on drugs, in which more than 2,600 people were killed, before reviving the campaign, a top state human rights official said on Wednesday.

The National Human Rights Commission would forward its recommendations, including compensating the families of innocent victims, later this month to Samak, who has vowed to wage another anti-drug war "rigorously", commissioner Vasant Panich said.

"Instead of reviving the campaign now, the government should instead learn from the mistakes and try to compensate families of those victims," Vasant told Reuters.

The Commission, which has no penal powers, hoped its findings on the previous campaign would convince Samak to ensure there were no innocent victims, Vasant said.

"We can only hope the new government will carry out the campaign in accordance with the law," Vasant said.

Many of the people killed in the three-month war on drugs were victims of envy of neighbours or feuds with police rather than a strict enforcement of the rule of law, Vasant said, citing investigations of complaints by the families of victims.

The agency had found many of the dead involved in 70 complaints filed by their families were on government lists of suspected dealers because of fights with police or fingered by neighbours suspicious of their wealth.

There had been no arrests of people who used automatic weapons to eliminate suspected drug dealers, Vasant said, hinting at accusations by human rights groups that many of the dead were victims of extra-judicial killings by police.

Vasant said the first war was launched by then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who blamed most of the deaths on intra-gang wars, in a speech to top bureaucrats and police officers.

"We have to be as ruthless to drug dealers as they are to our children," Thaksin said in the speech in Bangkok in January 2003, according to a transcript, given to Reuters by the Commission.

Thaksin said drug dealers "deserved" to be shot dead and have their assets seized.

He commended one police force who had done that and said the "ruthlessness we did to them was trivial compared to what they have done".

MANY COMPLAINTS

Police data given to the Commission showed only 68 of the 2,624 people killed during the February-April 2006 campaign were shot dead by police, Vasant said.

But complaints filed to the Commission by families of the victims suggested that figure should be much higher, he said.

One case investigated by the Commission was of a couple who took bank loans of almost $1 million to expand their trucking firm in a town near the border with Myanmar, the main source of methamphetamines then swamping Thailand.

They were woken up in the night to settle a traffic dispute involving one of their trucks and found later dead in their car.

Police said they found a pack of 200 methamphetamine tablets in the heel of the woman's shoe, which relatives insisted was not hers, and that their business or drug dealing might be behind their murder, the Commission's report said.

Although police said the couple was not on their drug suspect list, anti-drug agencies seized their assets worth more than $2 million and auctioned them off at a third of their value.

Despite criticism from human rights groups, the war on drug was praised by most Thais and helped Thaksin win a second landslide election victory in 2004.

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