Before the panel marking 20 years since the enforced disappearance of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand on Monday began, I asked Somchai’s wife, Angkhana Neelapajit, whether she is still living in the same Bangkok house in which Somchai resided before he disappeared 20 years ago.
“Yes,” Angkhana, who has since abandoned her old job as a nurse and eventually became Thailand’s prominent human rights activist, including a stint as a national human rights commissioner, told me. She adds that for the family of those who disappeared, they always hold on to the hope that if one day their loved one is freed, the first thing he or she would do is to head straight home.
But it has been 20 years now and when I went up to the panel as one of the four speakers that evening, which included Angkhana, I told the audience that I think for family members of those abducted, as long as no remains are discovered, closure is the hardest thing to do. I dare not ask people like Angkhana whether she had a closure and accepted the fact that perhaps Somchai is most likely never coming home. It just seems inconsiderate.
The enforced disappearance of Somchai, who was a prominent attorney representing suspect Thai-Malay Muslim separatists in the Deep South, occurred on March 12, 2004, when Thaksin Shinawatra was PM. Many government and coup makers come and go during the two decades and now the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai government is back in power again.
One constant is that there was no real breakthrough and impunity prevailed. This led to my hypothesis that such crimes are works of the deep state and not just a particular government and those forced to disappear, or abducted and killed, were regarded as the enemy of the state – or the enemy of the deep state. That is why no government dares or wants to dig deep and reveal the very dark side of its own state.
In the case of Somchai, though some police officers were arrested and put on trial, including a tourist police officer, no one was punished in the end and the public as well as the family never got an answer as to why Somchai must die. The crime, BTW, audaciously took place very near Hua Mak Police Station in Bangkok.
In two other prominent cases, anti-monarchist Surachai Danwattanusorn, who fled to Laos after the May 2014 coup and actively calling for the abolishment of the monarchy, disappeared in December 2018. Although the bodies of his two close aides were found at the end of December that year floating up on the Thai side of the Mekong river, covered with clothes, binded, and with their stomachs cut up and stuffed with concrete poles – a dehumanizing way to kill and probably a warning to others. In another case, ethnic Karen activist Billy Porlajee Rakchongcharoen, a land rights leader, was last seen on April 17, 2014, in Phetchaburi province.
Supporting, or affording legal representation to alleged Thai-Malay separatists, is akin to being an enemy of the state. Being anti-monarchist, or republican, is being an enemy of the state. Fighting for land rights in protected forests is akin to being an enemy of the state. This is also probably why Thailand, despite being a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, would not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction over the kingdom.
Angkhana, who became a prominent human rights activist in her own right and arguably the most prominent spouse of a victim of enforced disappearance in Thailand, laments at the panel on Monday evening that despite the parliament finally passing the Anti-Torture and Anti-Enforced-Disappearance Act was finally passed in 2022, Angkhana said little has been done to prevent enforced disappearances from occurring in the future.
Meanwhile, people like Phil Robertson, the Deputy Asia Director of Human Rights Watch, said during the introduction of the panel on Monday, (which by the way, was organized not by the FCCT but by organizations including Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch and Forum-Asia) that now that Thaksin is back, he “owes it to the Neepapaijit family, and to the Thai people to come clean and fully reveal all that he knows about the enforced disappearance of Somchai Neelapaijit.
“No more excuses, Khun Thaksin,” Robertson said. “And since Thaksin continues to have a significant say in what the ruling Pheu Thai Party and government actually do, he should also push the current Thai PM Srettha Thavisin and his government to reopen the case and prioritize it.”
I told Angkhana at the panel that she needs to go and see PM Srettha and cajole him to do more on the problem of enforced disappearance and ensure justice not just for Somchai but 76 others (as tallied by the UN and local NGOs) and she replied:
“I’m really exhausted. Twenty years, hundreds of petitions. Sometimes I feel like a beggar, asking for mercy.”
Perhaps we should ask the deep state if it has an iota of mercy at all.
