According to an Associated Press news report, police have arrested and charged a sergeant of the Royal Thai Army who was among a gang of around 30 that assaulted three British men in Nakhon Sawan, north of Bangkok, on 19 July 2007. No reason for the assault, which reportedly left one of the three seriously men injured, was given in the brief article; however, the interim prime minister of Thailand, General Surayud Chulanont, was quoted as saying that the police should thoroughly investigate it.
In another article from around a week ago, from the Prachatai news service, the army commander and head of the September 19 coup group was reported as having ordered that a committee be set up to investigate allegations of torture at the Ingkhayuthboriharn army camp in Pattani Province. As the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has said previously, at least 100 persons are currently being held at the camp without charge under extraordinary emergency regulations that have been in force across the southern border provinces for two years; they were renewed this week. General Sonthi Boonyaratglin has reportedly said that if allegations of torture are found to be true then they will be referred to “the justice system”.
The question that naturally arises is why the different treatment of the soldiers accused of criminal acts in these cases? An alleged crime, whether assault on the street or torture in an army camp, obliges a criminal inquiry. The “justice system” is not a secondary, optional set of institutions upon which the army may choose to call after having conducted its own inquiries to determine innocence or guilt. In the first case, perhaps due to the fact that the victims were foreigners, the police and judicial process have rightly come in to the picture from the start; in the second they have been kept at bay by an army that is patently disinterested in having anything to do with either notions or institutions of justice where allegations pertaining to systemic torture, arbitrary detention, abduction and murder arise.
The proposal by General Sonthi to establish a committee to investigate cases of torture is nothing other than the same method of using fraudulent non-criminal investigations to displace and undermine the judicial process as was used by the former government of Pol. Lt. Col. Thaksin Shinawatra. After the 2004 killings at both Krue Se and Tak Bai, the then-prime minister ordered the setting up of political inquiries. Although these pointed the finger at certain army officers, not one has ever been held criminally liable for the hundreds of deaths and injuries that occurred on those occasions, 78 of them in army custody. This is despite the fact that a post-mortem inquest last year identified General Pallop Pinmanee and two of his subordinates as the officers responsible for the Krue Se killings, thereby obliging the public prosecutor to refer the case to the police for criminal investigation; nothing has been heard of it since.
The simple fact that General Surayud has to mention the need for a criminal investigation of the Nakhon Sawan assault speaks to the level of impunity enjoyed by all state officers in Thailand, and the decrepit and deformed condition of its investigative agencies: in a functioning legal system, a police force goes to work irrespective of the identity of the accused; in Thailand, it is apparently first necessary for it to be reassured by senior persons that it should do its job. Thus, what should be the norm must instead first be insisted upon to be done. In the last few years, the AHRC has documented literally hundreds of cases that prove this point: not one has yet been properly investigated and successfully prosecuted.
The Asian Human Rights Commission thus calls upon the government of Thailand to see that all criminal acts, not only those that it picks and chooses, be subject to proper criminal investigation, prosecution and punishment through the courts, not ad hoc committees, tribunals and internal inquiries. It calls upon the police to immediately and thoroughly investigate the allegations emerging from Ingkhayuthboriharn and other military facilities in the south. It calls for prompt investigations of all alleged criminal wrongdoing by soldiers, paramilitaries, police and other state officers anywhere throughout the country. It calls, for the umpteenth time, for the government of Thailand to join the UN Convention against Torture and make torture a crime. And it calls for recognition of the simple fact that there is no such thing as selectively-applied criminal justice: occasional justice is no justice at all.
