The Government of Thailand has been murdering people for decades now evidence is emerging of a systematic cover up in the form of lies and denials of the events of the past week in which 78 people where suffocated and murdered by the Thai armed forces!
BANGKOK, Oct 28 (IPS) - The Thai government’s credibility among the country’s Muslim minority has taken a nosedive thanks to the cavalier approach Bangkok has adopted in explaining the deaths of 78 men and boys while in military custody.
Outraged Muslim leaders have dismissed the defiant stance of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who sought to deflect blame away from security forces for the manner in which these Thais died on Monday after troops opened fire on the demonstrators.
‘‘We don’t believe the government’s version of events,’’ the usually moderate Niti Hassan, president of the Council of Muslim Organisations of Thailand, told IPS. ‘‘The people in the south are not satisfied with what the government is saying because they know what happened.’’
Nideh Waba, chairman of a private religious schools association in Thailand’s predominantly Muslim southern provinces, was as critical.** ‘‘They (the government) have to kill thousands of us or hundreds of thousands of our brothers here to prevent us from standing up against this massacre,’’** he was quoted as having told the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper on Wednesday.
**1.**Prime Minister Thaksin, however, blamed the suffocation on the Muslim protesters being exhausted due to the fast they were observing in the two-week old Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
**2.**Then he pointed the finger at drugs - saying that the arrested protesters were in a ‘‘drug-induced state.’’
**3.**By Thursday, Bangkok was still holding on to the view that the military remained blameless, although with a slight hint of regret. ‘‘It was a tragic incident, but we would like to point out that the military did their best to exercise self-restraint and did not use force during the demonstrations,’’ Sihasak Phuangketkeow, foreign ministry spokesman, told IPS.
But television footage, photographs appearing in local newspapers and eyewitness accounts are shredding the portrait of innocent Thai soldiers that Bangkok has been determined to project.
Television images flashed across the world have revealed scenes of uniformed soldiers ramming rifle-butts into the heads of protesters, forced to lie on the ground. Plainclothes policemen were also filmed kicking protesters repeatedly as they lay unconscious.
And Thursday’s edition of ‘The Nation,’ an English-language daily here, ran a photo on its front page that contradicted the government’s explanation that troops did not fire into the crowd of some 2,000 Muslim protesters on Monday.
The picture showed soldiers stretched on the ground firing at the protesters at body- level rather than into the air.
**One reporter at the scene was quoted in ‘The Nation’ saying: ‘‘Soldiers fired at below knee-level, targeting protesters hiding under a car. They were killed and thrown onto army trucks. There were at least 14 dead bodies that I could count.’’
Another reporter told the paper: ‘‘I saw at least three protesters kicked to death with my own eyes.’’**
A respected forensic expert, Pornthip Rojanasunan, has not made it easy on the government either after declaring on Tuesday that nearly 80 percent of the men who died had no open wounds and could have succumbed due to a lack of air.
‘‘It wasn’t a case of not enough air to breathe,’’ Pornthip was quoted in a ‘Reuters’ report. ‘‘But they might have had something stuffed in their mouths or nostrils.’’
‘‘Muslim anger is understandable; what happened is terrible,’’ Jaran Ditapichai, a member of Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission, said in an interview. ‘‘Only some of the details of the government’s story can be believed.’’
Muslim Leaders Doubt Official Version of Killings