MILITARY COUP WELCOMED BY PRISONERS

 

 

 

On the morning of the 20th we awoke to the news that overnight the Thai army had staged a military Coup D’etat and were now in control of the country. Tanks and troops had been mobilized from outlying army bases and rolled across the city to take up defensive positions around the Royal Palace, Government Buildings and major road intersections. Meanwhile radio and TV stations were taken off the air with regular programs being replaced by broadcasts of statements and instructions to the populace by military top brass. Martial law was declared and a curfew put in place. Restrictions were also put on flight operations from Bangkok international airport, Don Muang. It soon became apparent that this latest in a string of military Coups that we have dotted Thailand’s

 

 Political history was thankfully free from bloodshed unlike in the recent past.

 

For the majority of us prisoners serving time in Bangkwang the news that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his entourage of cronies had finally been ousted from power was music to our ears and greeted with a great deal of satisfaction. It was his policies, including his highly criticized ‘War on Drugs’ implemented in 2003, that saw an already highly corrupt police force and justice system sink farther into its mire of unlawful and unjust practices, pulling a lot of innocent people down with it. Over 2.500 people had died and thousands more jailed in a ‘Slaphappy’ rush by regional police forces to ‘Clean House’ whilst consolidating their own tight grip on Thailand’s huge narcotics trade. Many people became victims of what Amnesty International have described as ‘Extra Judicial’ and ‘Unlawful’ killings by the Royal Thai Police in their panicked rush to be rid of anybody with the knowledge to compromise their position and expose their countrywide involvement in the import and trafficking of drugs such as Heroin and Ya-Baa.

 

Furthermore, Thaksin, himself an ex-police colonel, had emboldened the police and criminal courts and handed the tools they needed by publicly stating that drug criminals were the number one threat to Thailand’s security and as such should not enjoy the benefits that a fair and balanced justice system would normally provide them. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ was a fundamental concept in any justice system but should not be given the same value when dealing with suspects involved in the Drugs trade.

 

In the ensuing months thousands of ‘Suspects’ were rounded up and put through the ‘Meat Grinder’ that is the Thai justice system. In an effort by the police to produce tangible results for what by now had become a media feeding frenzy and at the same time draw attention away from their own complicity in the trade of illegal drugs.

 

Thaksin had also doubled the length of sentences handed down by the courts for drug offences, already amongst the most severe in the world, and also lowered the limit deemed to be personal use roping in the casual, weekend users of recreational drugs like Marijuana and ecstasy and turning them automatically into ‘Dealers’ in the eyes of the courts, attracting prison sentences of 25 years upward.

 

Possession of a mere 20 grams of a class one drug (including ecstasy and amphetamine but not cocaine) could now quite easily attract the Death penalty.

 

It was because of Thaksins ‘War on Drugs’ policies and his refusal to rein in a police force and justice system out of control and left to make up its own rules that many of us find ourselves serving unbelievably extreme sentences is squalid Thai prisons today. From the moment of our arrests onwards we have been constantly denied anything even resembling real justice and consider ourselves the victims of a deeply flawed and corrupt system that has no place in Thailand’s future.

 

Thaksin himself came close to admitting his own complicity in the meeting out of unlawful verdicts by the criminal courts when in 2004 on National TV he conceded that over 20% of Thailand’s fast growing prison population were ‘almost certainly innocent’ but unashamedly went on to suggest that this was acceptable if it meant that the other 80% had been guilty when jailed by the courts.

 

Try explaining that to the approximately 70.000 innocent men and women languishing in Thai prisons as a result!

 

A lot of us here blame Thaksin and his crooked Government personally for our plight, and for good reason. If he had concentrated his ‘War’ on the real Kingpins and Druglords in the illicit trade he may have actually made a difference to the country’s “Huge Drug Problem” he so readily espoused and at the same time uprooted and scattered the deep seated corruption that is at the heart of all of Thailand’s national problems. Instead he chose the easy option, to create a media bandwagon and vote winner at the expense on many thousands of lives, liberty and justice.

 

But finally some of his many mistakes have caught up with him and bitten him in the arse. We can only hope that the system he helped to create in all its unjust glory will eventually swallow him up too. When they push him through the gates here at Bangkwang we will be here to give him the most warmest of welcomes.