Thailand and the "war on drugs"

Thailand’s “new war on drugs” has been much in the news in the last few days.

“There will be no licence to kill involved,” Deputy Prime Minister Chalerm insists, seeking to head off concerns from human rights groups that the new campaign will turn out to be a repeat of the one carried out under Mr Thaksin’s administration.

Bangkok Post quotes Wasant Panich, a former human rights commissioner involved in the investigation of the 2003 version: "We do not want to see a recurrence of the Thaksin war on drugs, which took the lives of 2,600 people suspected of being involved in narcotics… There must be no torture or extrajudicial killings of suspects."

The Nation recalls that Thai society, “being largely indifferent to the notion of due legal process”, welcomed the 2003 campaign “in spite of the many questions surrounding human rights issues”.

That was indeed one of the curious things about the Mark-1 version of the war on drugs. The high levels of public support that were expressed at the time were discussed, for example, in a contemporary article reproduced here.

It’s not unknown, of course, for a policy that seems inhumane from the outside to be regarded as necessary, even commendable, from the inside – any number of contemporary examples spring to mind – but that was then, The Nation implies, and things in Thailand have changed: “Today, a body count of alleged drug dealers can no longer be regarded as a benchmark for success. Instead we must focus on how many lives the government can turn around, as it says it will do.”

It will be difficult to convince The Nation, which has already announced that there is “no sign of any leadership quality from Yingluck”.  

But the conduct of the campaign this time round, its motivation, the way it is received in Thailand, and the way it plays into the current Burma/Myanmar debate, will be interesting signs of the way several winds are blowing.