Since it was reported on April 26 that General Sonthi Boonyaratglin admitted that the Thai army and police are using “blacklists” to hunt for alleged insurgents in the south, discussion has turned on how the lists are being made. “One wonders exactly what sort of evidence is needed to have a person put on one of these blacklists?” asks The Nation editorial of April 28, before suggesting that a thorough investigation is needed “if only to separate the innocent from suspects who pose a real menace to the nation”. Other reports indicate that a special committee will be established to monitor use of the lists.
These reports impliedly justify the use of blacklists, so long as they distinguish correctly between the innocent and the ‘real menaces’. But how are the innocent separated from the real menaces? In making a list, who is the judge of guilt? A police officer? An army or intelligence officer? A governor, deputy governor or district chief? And what is the real purpose for separating them anyway?
Does anybody have the right to put someone’s name on a list to be killed or kidnapped? That is the question. By referring to death lists as “blacklists” their real purpose is disguised. The real meaning of what has been said is lost. A blacklist can be a list for many purposes. These are variously described in current reports as arrest or “re-education”. But if these were the real objectives, then ordinary criminal procedures would be adequate. Under normal circumstances, criminal suspects are already apprehended and jailed. Under emergency regulations, with the use of lists, they are murdered. That is the added purpose of a blacklist. Blacklists are kidnapping lists. Blacklists are killing lists. Let there be no misunderstanding about that.??lt;br />
Under normal circumstances, to establish guilt or innocence requires a number of agencies operating independently from one another with specific powers, qualified persons and resources assigned to each. An informer or complainant may come to a police officer regarding an alleged crime. The police officer does not decide there and then if the person is telling the truth or not. He conducts an investigation to find out. But even after the most thorough inquiries, he alone cannot decide that a person is guilty. He is not even entitled to determine if his investigation is worthy of being put before a judge. Rather, he must refer evidence to a prosecutor. The prosecutor weighs up the evidence and makes another decision. But she too cannot decide if the person is guilty or not. She only determines whether or not the case presented by the police officer is sufficient to bring it before a judge. Only at that stage is the question of guilt or innocence determined, and only through an evolved system of hearing evidence in a court of law.
Under emergency conditions, all of this is made irrelevant. There is only one basic rule: maintain order, with or without the law. The firm ties between the criminal justice system, the rule of law and basic morality are loosened. The limitations on police and army officers that exist under normal conditions no longer apply. A policeman becomes informer, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner all in one. Judicial supervision is discarded, and with it all checks and balances associated with a rational law-enforcement system. And although these are easily lost, they are hard to regain. Ultimately, what a blacklist invites is the surrender of civilisation; a return to barbarism.
The experience of other parts of Asia where lists have been used to abduct, torture, and murder people–including Sri Lanka, Nepal and Kashmir–informs of how they precipitate social collapse. Take the horrendous example of Sri Lanka. There, at least 30,000 persons were forcibly abducted and killed in the late 1980s. A series of presidential commissions in the 1990s uncovered the use of “lists” as a key method for organising mass kidnappings and murder under the cover of emergency laws. In one inquiry, Lt. Gen. Rohan Daluwatta, commander of the Sri Lankan Army, is reported as stating that
“While I was co-ordinating Officer [in] Ratnapura certain political pressures were brought to bear on me. I was given a list of names with the direction to take them into custody, that they were [insurgents]. I received the List from a former Minister… When I checked the List with the Police, I came to know that they were [other insurgents]. I was told that area could be cleared were I to catch them.”
What Lt. Gen. Daluwatta means, of course, is that he was ordered to catch and kill the persons on the list, then dispose of their bodies by dumping them in the sea, beheading them and scattering the body parts, or burning the remains with car tyres and petrol. The army, police, paramilitary units and others were all involved, with the guidance of local politicians, administrators and their informers. In the same report, E E B Perera, the Sri Lankan police chief at the height of the emergency explains how
“When the second insurrection-wave struck the Police Force was dependent on informers. Hence the phenomenon of Members of Parliament who were providing the political direction to the anti-subversive drive being supplied with ‘Lists’ of names by informers, who in turn passed them over to the Forces and the Police.”
The admission by the Thai army chief that blacklists are being used is the same admission as these senior Sri Lankan officers. It is an admission that the security forces are abducting and killing people. It is an admission that under “certain political pressures”, blanketed by emergency regulations, the basic norms that have been laid down by society and law have been abandoned, as is always the case where an army or police force is given unrestricted control.
Any proposal that the use of blacklists be monitored, for whatever purposes, is immoral, illegal and nothing short of sheer madness. The idea that blacklists can be used systematically is atrocious. It is repulsive. It is to invite the very chaos that in recent days the King of Thailand has warned the country’s top judges to avoid, through exertion of their authority. The “real menace to the nation” consists of the persons and agencies that draw up and use these lists, not the persons named in them. They must be vigorously and unequivocally opposed, in every form, and at every opportunity.
The Asian Human Rights Commission again calls upon the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand, Lawyers Council of Thailand, concerned outgoing senators and members of parliament, all human rights defenders and other concerned persons in Thailand, together with UN human rights officials and other international bodies to unreservedly condemn the use of blacklists by the security forces in Thailand, demand full disclosure and investigations, and an immediate end to this heinous practice. We also call upon the country’s judges to follow the King’s exhortation, and press their authority to oppose the expansion of political, military and police powers at every opportunity, especially in the south. Failure to resist the move by the Thai army to incorporate the use of blacklists into its official practices by way of committees and public announcements will spell disaster, and destroy any possibility of Thailand building a society founded upon human rights and the rule of law at any time in the foreseeable future. At such a critical time in Thailand’s history, this cannot be allowed to happen. ?lt;br />
