Pubdate: Mon, 03 Mar 2003
Source: Nation, The (Thailand)
Copyright: 2003 Nation Multimedia Group
Contact:  http://www.nationmultimedia.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1963
Author: Surin Pitsuwan
Note: Surin Pitsuwan is a member of Parliament and former foreign minister.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND HUMAN SECURITY

The current anti-drug campaign is getting out of hand. The headlines
are changing every day. One day the government affirms its confidence
in the moral righteousness of its hard-line approach. The next day the
minister of the interior - the campaign manager of this shoot-to-kill,
ask-no-questions strategy - extols the virtue of the extrajudicial
elimination of drug suspects.

And the Prime Minister comes out lambasting any doubter or critic of
his tactics as unpatriotic. And a government party spokesman claims
that "drug dealers are colluding with the opposition to bring down the
government". How strange and ridiculous can things be?

In this campaign against drug-pushers, babies are being killed,
innocent lives are being lost. Not all the victims are "beyond
reasonable doubt" guilty of the charges. The human toll is rising, and
the anxiety is building up around the country.

The government seems to waver only when its polls show that the public
is uncomfortable with the strategy and the increasing suffering of the
families of unknowing bystanders. Now the government will not reveal
the daily tally for fear of public concern and disapproval.

That is the tragedy of it all. Management by opinion poll and populist
appeals can go wrong, very wrong, but it is always too late to salvage
the public good and to save those innocent lives already lost.

And then there is this admission from the western border: the District
Officer of Mae Sot in Tak province revealed on Saturday that
"traffickers are using mobile phones to place their orders and
transactions, circumventing the official monitoring and suppression
drive. The big bosses cannot be identified. They are protected by this
marketing practice."

What a revelation! After so many lives have been lost. That fact
should have been known a long time ago. The government should not
embark upon this Campaign of Cruelty only to admit that nearly a
thousand lives, human lives, that have been lost were those of "small
fish" in the ocean of the drug underworld.

The logic of that admission is that drug trafficking will go on. The
drug menace will come back. And the Mae Sot district officer was
honest enough to admit that drugs continued to flow across the western
border. So the killings will go on even after the end of the current
campaign, April 30. This vicious cycle has no end to it.

The extrajudicial killings are, as the phrase indicates, outside the
due process of law. By resorting to this, the government is admitting
that it is trampling on the principle of the rule of law, which any
civilised and democratic society must abide by.

By explaining it away that the "traffickers are cutting each other
off" in order to protect the top bosses in the drug-supply chains, the
government is also admitting to its failure to ensure its supreme duty
to protect the sanctity of the law. It is guilty of contributing to
the general feeling that any individual can take the law into his own
hands and go on a rampage of violence.

Our society is plunging back into the "state of nature" where "the war
of every man against every other man" is waged with full fury. That
was life before the law, before civility and before government; life
that was "poor, nasty, brutish and short", as a political theorist
once described it.

This extrajudicial power is extremely dangerous. Once unleashed, there
is no stopping it. The danger will manifest itself in various forms.
Personal grudges will be settled by personal violence. Local officials
will be unrestrained in their use of violence to terrorise the ever
more restless people around the country. Local political differences
will turn into violent confrontations. Like a bush fire, once ignited,
it will be very difficult to contain and suppress. The losers will be
the people and the rule of law.

The real and permanent damage will not be our image in the
international community, although that too will inevitably suffer. The
most serious damage will be our own social peace and security. We have
fought long and hard to bring the ambiguous power of the state and the
bureaucracy under the sacred control of the law. We have made a lot of
sacrifices, some of them ultimate sacrifices, to tame the vagaries of
our security forces. We are now losing control over them for the sake
of short-term satisfaction and irresponsible play with the public
imagination.

For those who yearn for long-term security in the face of the drug
menace, the only certain strategy is to follow the due process of law.
If the efficiency of the judicial process is wanting, then the place
to fix it is not in the open field of killings as it is currently
happening. A lot of improvements are needed in the execution and
adjudication of the law. To jump to the conclusion that since the
process is inefficient we must disregard it and apply the power of
violence with no limits is to abdicate the supreme obligation of government.

There will be louder cries for justice from across the land. There
will be more innocent lives being cut down along the road of this
campaign of terror. There will be a rising sense of insecurity among
our people.

While the world is mulling over ways and means to increase "human
security" among our unfortunate millions all over the world, our Thai
people are feeling less and less secure.

This anti-drug campaign with no regard for the due process of law is a
real threat to our society in the long run. It ushers in an era of
"human insecurity".
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MAP posted-by: Derek