8 Dec 2003

The end of the government’s campaign against methamphetamines has polarised opinions. On one side, the government has declared victory in a blizzard of statistics. Prices are up, volume down, and a handful of key dealers are in jail. On the other side, human rights advocates say there is only one important statistic – the 2,626 people murdered. Whether the police did it, or opened the door for others, or simply let the murderers get away with it, makes no difference. This is not the rule of law but the law of the jungle.

Behind this polarisation, there is a very difficult question: why has this Buddhist society overwhelmingly approved this killing? Last March, 72 per cent of people told the Rangsit Poll they approved of the campaign. At that time, the nightly TV news carried clip after clip of bodies lying in pools of blood. A few days earlier, a 9-year old boy had been shot dead in the crossfire. Despite this, 76 per cent of the poll respondents thought government should continue the violent methods of pre-emptive and extra-judicial killing.

Another poll found that 70 per cent of monks supported the campaign. And in a Ramkhamhaeng poll, almost two thirds said specifically that human rights advocates should stop calling for justice for drug suspects.

There is no doubt the campaign was popular. There is also no doubt that many petty users and traders who deserved at most a mild punishment (and several totally innocent people) were unjustly served with the death penalty. Jaran Cosananund, a Ramkhamhaeng law lecturer and human rights supporter, has wrestled with the question why Thai society has embraced this obvious violence and cruelty.

One explanation is that Thai society values a kind of crude pragmatism more than any systematic ethics. If something works, then it’s okay. This is based in turn on a crude egoism. People look after themselves and have little empathy for the rights and dignity of others. Probably this is part of the heavy legacy of absolutism and dictatorship in the society’s history. The whole idea of rights, human dignity, and the rule of law has never meant all that much. The result today is “a political culture of self-interest, looking after oneself, and the devil take the hindmost”. The government can exploit this mentality to argue that the end justifies the means. Normal judicial process can be bypassed because conquering drugs is a “national” goal.

But this explanation may focus too narrowly on a supposed failing of “Thai” society and ethics. If you look around the world, there is a trend to “populist justice”. Under globalisation, the world is becoming more socially divided, more riven by conflicts, and more violent. Terrorism is on the rise at the international level, and violent crime in everyone’s backyard. Formal processes (police, law, courts) cannot deal with it, so other methods are sought. The US, the cradle of human rights, began to destroy its own citizens’ rights when it got desperate in its own drug wars. And now it does the same at the international level in the campaign against “terrorism”.

It is often the poor who suffer most from violent crime and support this “populist justice”. When ya ba boomed in Thailand, a lot of ordinary people became victims of the trade. In effect, their rights were being violated. Some lost their rights to livelihood or education. Families lost their rights to peace and contentment. But advocates of human rights paid no attention to this. Instead they focused on the violations of the human rights of those targeted on the government’s blacklists. Perhaps, Jaran gently suggests, this was a bit one-eyed. Perhaps it was not surprising that the mass of people thought human rights idealists had got their priorities wrong.

Maybe the problem is broader. Maybe most people don’t care about human rights at all because they have no meaning for themselves. Ordinary people in Thai society, especially the poor, have low expectations of the police and judicial system. They expect them to be corrupt and biassed against them. They are used to having their own rights violated. They face violence in their everyday lives as a matter of course. What difference then are they likely to see between a proper judicial punishment on the one hand, and an extra-judicial killing on the other? Where is the magic in such ideas as human rights, human dignity, and the rule of law if there are no rational reasons for ordinary people to value them? In Jaran’s words, “It is hardly surprising that people who face crime problems should be prepared to sacrifice or ignore human rights principles, and reject the value of human rights in general, on grounds they lack any real significance and are too much of a luxury for their society.”

This comes down to a chicken-and-egg problem. People will only value human rights and the rule of law if these concepts have real benefits for themselves. But this can never happen as long as government takes advantage of people’s crude pragmatism and low expectations of the judicial system to by-pass rights and the rule of law at every opportunity.

What bothers Jaran most is the polarisation of views because it blocks any dialogue to break this circular logic. As a start, everyone involved needs to recognise their own ignorance and limitations. Those planning and enforcing the drug policy may be just as confused ethically as someone high on ya ba. Those protesting violation of human rights by the police may be shutting their eyes to much larger violations committed by the drug traders. The only way to break down this polarisation is compassion on both sides.

[Jaran Cosanund’s article on ‘Human rights and the war on drugs’ appears in Thai and English in the Thailand Human Rights Journal.]