Getting away with murder in Thailand: State violence and impunity in Phatthalung

In February 1975, student activists exposed a series of brutal murders of citizens by the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC) and other state security forces that had taken place two and a half years earlier in Phatthalung province in Thailand.1 The thang daeng, or "red drum," killings gained their name from the method of killing employed. Accused of engaging in communist activities or tacit support for them, citizens were arrested, or simply taken, in large sweeps across districts throughout the province and brought to detention camps for interrogation. While some detainees were released after being interrogated, others were tortured and then killed. At night, after being beaten until unconscious or with irons around their necks, individual citizens were placed into empty two-hundred-liter oil drums at the edge of the detention camps, doused in oil, and then burned alive. While the bodies were burning, truck engines were revved to partially mask the screams of those who were being murdered. The engines only partially masked the evidence of what was occurring, because those who survived recalled both the screams and the sounds of the engines. Villagers and students estimated that several thousand people in Phatthalung, perhaps as many as three thousand, were killed as alleged communists in this manner. Between February and March 1975, the killings became open knowledge as details of them, sometimes conflicting, were brought to light in newspapers and at public events. Nearly every day for two months, most major Thai newspapers carried extensive coverage of the exposure of the thang daeng killings, including the testimonies of survivors and of the families of those who were killed and the varied state responses to the exposure.2 This information then became the foundation for debate as survivors, students, and state officials discussed and disagreed about what should be done in the aftermath of the killings. When the thang daeng killings were perpetrated in late 1972, the dictatorial and severely anti-communist regime of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, Field Marshal Praphat Jarusathien, and Colonel Narong Kittikachorn ensured that there was no public outcry or opposition. In sharp contrast, the public exposure of the killings occurred during the brief period of democratic politics and increased political participation from all sectors of society that began with the end of dictatorship, with the October 14, 1973, movement.While the open murder of citizens was possible under a dictatorship, within the context of open politics, survivors and student activists demanded that the state officially investigate the killings, and the state was forced to respond. In mid-February 1975, the minister of the interior, Atthasit Sitthisunthorn, created a committee to investigate the allegations; Atthasit claimed that if state officials had acted improperly, then they would be punished according to the law.4 But a little over a month later, when the committee concluded that state officials had acted improperly, they were not punished. The summary of the investigation released to the press stated that yes, innocent citizens had been killed in thang daeng, but only seventy or eighty people were involved, rather than thousands. No one was punished, and the work of the Internal Secu rity Operations Command (ISOC), which replaced the CSOC in 1973, continued as usual.5 Over thirty years later, the ISOC remains active in protecting the nebulously defined "national security" of Thailand; questions continue to be raised about the precise role of ISOC within the Thai military and security apparatus and where the protection of human rights falls in their policies and actions. While the exposure by students and villagers was marked, and made possible, by the events of October 14, 1973, the Ministry of the Interior investigation perhaps foreshadowed the return to dictatorship that came a year and a half later in the form of the October 6, 1976, massacre and coup.6 Yet for a variety of reasons, and heralding the production of impunity that contributed to making it possible for unarmed students to be killed in broad daylight on October 6, 1976, the calls for state accountability for the thang daeng killings were silenced and then refuted by the 1975 Ministry of the Interior report. In Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence, Leigh Payne examines state confessions in four nations-Chile, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina-undergoing both democratization and a range of judicial processes focused on past violence. Payne argues that "confessions do not settle accounts with the past; rather, they unsettle them."7 Public discussion and telling of what happened does not create a single truth about the past but instead facilitates what she calls "contentious coexistence." This mode of being and relating socially and politically in the aftermath of violence "rejects infeasible official and healing truth in favor of multiple and contending truths that reflect different political viewpoints in society" and "is stimulated by dramatic stories, actors, or images that provoke widespread participation, contestation over prevailing political viewpoints, and competition over ideas. Contentious coexistence, in other words, is democracy in action."8 Payne's analysis is provocative and hopeful, suggesting that it is precisely at the moment that past state violence becomes public, even when denied by perpetrators, that it becomes challengeable by citizens. It is this sense of possibility that makes contentious coexistence a part of democratization. Yet what happens when exposure of past violence and confessions of state involvement occur not during a period of democratization, but while a nation is precariously perched between democracy and dictatorship and hurtling toward dictatorship? Is it possible that then exposure, discussion, and ultimately a lack of accountability contribute to the pro duction of increased impunity, manifested in the failure to stop the violent actions of state officials and hold them accountable? This question is the point of departure for the remainder of this chapter. Forty years after the killings occurred, what is known about them remains plagued by inconsistencies, lacunae, and a persistent lack of resolution. The duration of the killings is unknown, although survivor and family accounts cite August 7, 1972, as the beginning of the arrests. The number of people who disappeared and were murdered varies widely, with some state officials estimating approximately eighty deaths and student activists instead estimating three thousand deaths. Most troubling, the precise nature of state involvement-including units, motivation, actions, and recordkeeping-remains obscured. The involvement of the Thai monarchy, even at the level of knowledge of the killings, remains obscured and unquestionable given the sanctions raised by the specter of Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code (the lese majeste law). At a minimum, these questions will require the Thai state to make its documents about the killings available.9 State documents related to the killings, including the 1975 report, remain unavailable in the National Archives of Thailand. In Vince Boudreau's terms (see chapter 1, this volume), the thang daeng killings and the subsequent failure to secure accountability were examples of both instrumental and exemplary violence. The public production of impunity served as both an event silencing dissent and a pedagogical reminder to dissident (and nondissident) citizens of the lack of paths for redress and justice open to them. My contention in the case of the thang daeng killings in Phatthalung province is not only that the public exposure of the killings, and subsequent failure to hold state actors accountable, led to the further consolidation of impunity, but that an end to impunity can, and perhaps must, begin with understanding this process. This means tracing how the thang daeng killings were exposed, how state officials publicly responded, and how the decision not to take action to hold officials responsible emerged. In so doing, questions of how citizen fear of violence at the hands of state actors is consolidated, how state actors systematically evade responsibility, and ultimately how justice is foreclosed come to the surface. Perhaps surprisingly, given that a blanket restriction on the release of documents pertinent to "national security" means that state documents related to the thang daeng killings in 1972 will not be publicly available in the foreseeable future, there are documents in the National Archives that can aid in this endeavor. In particular, there is a file of news clippings about the exposure in 1975, comprising three folders containing a total of 149 pages of news coverage about "the work of the Internal Security Operations Command and the case of thang daeng" (kan damnoen ngan khong amnuaeykan raksa khwam mankhong phai nai lae karani thang daeng).10 The presence in the National Archives of the thang daeng file, which is a document of inaction and what was not done, provides a sliver of hope. The Thai state records and preserves the public accounting of its inaction, even as its own documents are unavailable for survivors, scholars, and others concerned about the thang daeng killings. Before turning to the exposure, I begin with the stories of Teacher Lim and Teacher Ploy, which I summarized from reports in Thai Rat, the largest-circulation daily Thai-language newspaper, contained in one of the folders.