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". - --- MAP posted-by: Derek