15 June 2048

The 38-year wait for truth and justice for those killed in the political conflicts of April and May 2010 finally ended today with the publication of the final report of the 12-year inquiry headed by former Supreme Court Judge Sawin Niwdeegate.

In declaring most of the dead to be victims of a grave injustice, the report also overturned the findings of an earlier inquiry by a tribunal headed by former Supreme Court President, the late Vicharee Pokpidkhwamching. The Vicharee report, produced shortly after the conflict under intense pressure from the government of the day, had been widely denounced as a whitewash. Many of the victims’ families and numerous independent observers claimed it had been carefully drafted to exonerate the abuse of lethal force by the armed forces.

In its repeated use of the word ‘unjustifiable’, the Sawin report concludes that the testimony by military personnel was unreliable – in effect calling them liars and opening the possibility of prosecutions for perjury. Soldiers had been allowed to give evidence under aliases and no evidence revealed by the inquiry can be used for criminal prosecutions, with the exception of perjury.

It is not clear at present if the Office of the Attorney-General will in fact start any legal proceedings against the military personnel involved. Senior armed forces commanders, even though they were junior-ranking officers at the time of the Ratchaprasong and Ratchadamnoen incidents and bore no personal responsibility, have recently been calling for the nation to ‘move forward’ and stop dwelling on the past.

The most telling comment in the Sawin report may be the one that deals with the decisions by individual officers to open fire on persons who they knew to be unarmed, or medical personnel, or members of the press, or who could reasonably be assumed to be unarmed:

“In the case of those soldiers who fired in either the knowledge or belief that no one in the areas into which they fired was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or not caring whether or not anyone there was posing such a threat, it is at least possible that they did so in the indefensible belief that all the civilians they fired at were probably either terrorist members of the UDD or were terrorist supporters of former Prime Minister and terrorist Thaksin Shinawatra; and so deserved to be shot notwithstanding that they were not armed or posing any threat of causing death or serious injury.”

The Sawin Report, damning as it is, was constrained in its remit. It was tasked to look only at the violent events in March and April 2010 and was not authorised to review other violations of constitutional rights, such as the widespread government censorship of the media or the abuse of the Emergency Decree and Internal Security Act to incarcerate government critics without charge or trial. Importantly, it was also barred from looking at the responsibility of politicians for the way events unfolded.

The earlier and now discredited Vicharee tribunal also operated under strict limits and hampered itself even further by the voluntarily declaration at the outset that its true purpose was to seek national reconciliation and forgiveness. “There will be no pointing fingers in the work plan towards reconciliation,” said Judge Vicharee at the time, confusingly adding “we may adopt a truth commission model rather than a fact-finding panel.” It was never made clear how truth could be established without finding out the facts.

The difference between the two reports is most clear in the way they evaluated the evidence given by soldiers. The Vicharee report noted: ‘They [the military personnel] gave their evidence with confidence and without hesitation or prevarication and withstood a rigorous cross-examination without contradicting themselves or each other. With one or two exceptions I accept that they were telling the truth as they remembered it.”

In contrast, Judge Sawin found: “We have considered in detail the accounts of the soldiers whose firing caused the casualties. We have concluded that apart from one case, many of these soldiers have knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing.”

The publication of the report caused widespread public celebrations in many parts of the North and Northeast and in the Din Daeng and Bon Kai areas of Bangkok, with jubilant crowds pouring onto the streets and blocking traffic. In response, the government imposed a State of Emergency, announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and warned what they called anti-government terrorist protestors to keep out of designated ‘Live Fire Zones’ or face the consequence of being shot dead.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).