Feuds and envy fuelled deadly Thai drug war: rights body

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej should learn the lessons of the 2003 war on drugs, in which more than 2,600 people were killed, before reviving the campaign, a top state human rights official said on Wednesday.

The National Human Rights Commission would forward its recommendations, including compensating the families of innocent victims, later this month to Samak, who has vowed to wage another anti-drug war "rigorously", commissioner Vasant Panich said.

"Instead of reviving the campaign now, the government should instead learn from the mistakes and try to compensate families of those victims," Vasant told Reuters.

The Commission, which has no penal powers, hoped its findings on the previous campaign would convince Samak to ensure there were no innocent victims, Vasant said.

"We can only hope the new government will carry out the campaign in accordance with the law," Vasant said.

Many of the people killed in the three-month war on drugs were victims of envy of neighbors or feuds with police rather than a strict enforcement of the rule of law, Vasant said, citing investigations of complaints by the families of victims.

The agency had found many of the dead involved in 70 complaints filed by their families were on government lists of suspected dealers because of fights with police or fingered by neighbors suspicious of their wealth.

There had been no arrests of people who used automatic weapons to eliminate suspected drug dealers, Vasant said, hinting at accusations by human rights groups that many of the dead were victims of extra-judicial killings by police.

Vasant said the first war was launched by then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who blamed most of the deaths on intra-gang wars, in a speech to top bureaucrats and police officers.

"We have to be as ruthless to drug dealers as they are to our children," Thaksin said in the speech in Bangkok in January 2003, according to a transcript, given to Reuters by the Commission.

Thaksin said drug dealers "deserved" to be shot dead and have their assets seized.

He commended one police force who had done that and said the "ruthlessness we did to them was trivial compared to what they have done".

MANY COMPLAINTS

Police data given to the Commission showed only 68 of the 2,624 people killed during the February-April 2006 campaign were shot dead by police, Vasant said.

But complaints filed to the Commission by families of the victims suggested that figure should be much higher, he said.