The Law Applies To All, Regardless Of Background: Thai Opinion

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EDITORIAL

The law applies to all, regardless of background

By The Nation

Suspected gunman in southern 'revenge' killings must be brought to justice, and this must be seen to be done

Late last week the Fourth Army commander, Lieutenant General Udomchai Thammasarotrat detained a suspected gunman, a former ranger, believed to have been one of four people involved in a shooting spree that left four dead and 21 injured local residents in Yala's Bannang Sata district.

From the back of a pickup truck the assailants had shot at just about any victim they came across with their AK47 and M16 automatic rifles. The first target was a village teashop. Thirty metres from that was a local grocery store. Two fuel dispensers were hit but luckily they didn't explode. Two young men on a motorbike in front of a local private Islamic school were also hit. One died and the other survived with serious injuries.

In all, the gunmen attacked six targets within a three-kilometre radius. All the victims were local Malay Muslims. An Army task force, at company level, was just 200 metres up the road. Nobody from there showed up. Almost an hour later, the clerk from the district office and a group of Defence Volunteers came to the crime scenes.

From the look of it, the Bannang Sata shooting spree was the Ai Bayae massacre revisited. That June 2009 incident involved a group of six gunmen led by a former paramilitary ranger. They gunned down a mosque full of Muslims praying inside, killing 12 and injuring as many.

The suspected gunman detained last Thursday evening, Pirapan Pandam, 27, was also a former paramiliary ranger. The official account of the incident sees it as a hate crime. Pirapan's motive could have been related to the killing of his brother, Sombat, 32, who was shot dead, along with his dog, during a hunting trip in Bannang Sata on April 27, by members of local militant cell. The drive-by shooting spree was a form of a payback, officials believe.

Unlike the Ai Bayae massacre, the Army has been quick to produce a suspect. Pirapan was detained under martial law about 48 hours later. He became the first Thai Buddhist to have been taken in under martial law. But locals in Bannang Sata say they can't get over the fact that soldiers there didn't even bother to poke their heads out of their compound. Why soldiers and security forces react so quickly in some incidents and not others, one will never know; colluding with the culprit or simply turning a blind eye are some of the reasons that local residents believe.

In the end, it will require considerable political will to get to the bottom of the incident - the kind of political will that was absent in the case of Ai Bayae.

Officials who are working on the case say arresting a Buddhist in connection to such a crime isn't easy, pointing to the resistance put up by the Buddhist community when the authorities came after Pirapan. No one was trying to cover up for the former ranger but the logic they employed was disturbing. The Malay Muslim separatists have killed many people, and it was only right to hit back at them, regardless of whether they were unarmed, innocent bystanders. So goes the argument. Under this logic, all Malay Muslims are culpable and are legitimate targets.

Authorities tried to reason with Pirapan's supporters, saying the law must be upheld and the loss of a relative is no justification to go on a killing spree. For the time being, the suspect is being held without charge. The Army has ten days, until this coming weekend, to set him free unless he confesses to the crime.

The state is not exactly innocent in this matter. The lack of political will to tackle incidents such as the Ai Bayae killings and the Tak Bai massacre of 2004, for example, continue to alienate Malay Muslim residents from the state.

At the policy level the Thai government does not want to portray the violence in the deep South as a conflict because people on the street are satisfied with the state-constructed narrative that the Malay Muslim separatists are just criminals and therefore the historical grievances they share with the local people don't really matter.

Even the government's amnesty programme, which is referred to as Article 21, stipulates that an insurgent with a pending arrest warrant can have a new lease on life with no concern about being on someone's blacklist, as long as he admits that he has been "misled" into taking up arms against the state.

Again, here is an example of how one is not permitted to even think differently as to how Thailand's nation-state should be understood or embraced.

-- The Nation 2011-05-11