Next week, Japan hosts a conference on sexually exploited children. Some say it ignores other problems.
By Rafael D. Frankel | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BATTAMBANG, CAMBODIA - Head downcast, the boy peers nervously between strands of thick, black hair that fall in front of his eyes.
He won't give his name. He is reluctant even to sit at the table with an adult stranger. Trust does not come easily.
When he was 12, his parents in rural Cambodia sold him to a trafficker who forced him to beg on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, and the resort town Pattaya. He lived with seven other children in one room. All were Cambodian. Some were as young as six.
"The trafficker told my parents he would send them $55 a month," the boy says. "But I would earn $18 or $25 every day or night I begged."
Over the next three years, the boy escaped twice and made his way home. But the trafficker found him, repurchased him, and took him back to Thailand. The second time, his parents sold his younger brother as well.
Finally, the boy, now 15, wound up at the Battambang Reception Center in Battambang, Cambodia. Since its founding three years ago, the center, on a pothole-ridden road 75 miles from the Thai border, has sheltered children who make it back to Cambodia. At first, most were teenage girls exploited in the vast and lucrative sex trade. But lately, aid workers say, they are also helping younger children, mostly boys, forced to beg or perform manual labor in Thailand.
"There are now many more reports of exploitation for labor, begging, and domestic work, not just prostitution as it was before," says Thetis Mangahas, regional adviser for the International Labor Organization's (IOM) international program for the elimination of child labor.
The Mekong region of Southeast Asia has seen rapid growth in the past five years of children trafficked from poorer countries - Cambodia, Laos, Burma (also known as Myanmar) and Vietnam - into relatively wealthy Thailand for purposes besides sex. And with the second world congress against commercial sexual exploitation of children set to begin Dec. 17 in Yokohama, Japan, some experts say a broader focus is needed.
"Child prostitution is dwarfing issues of child labor and begging, and these children are [also] in very hazardous situations and are being exploited," says Margie de Monchy, UNICEF's East Asia and Pacific regional adviser for child protection.
"There is the sense that some of these other forms of trafficking are being lost. But if we don't take a specific focus, then it's hard to get things done on an international level," says Ms. de Monchy, who is working on some of the legal issues to be addressed at next week's congress.
Exact figures, even reasonable estimates, of children trafficked are nearly impossible to calculate, according to the numerous nongovernmental and state-run organizations in this region.
Still, a report released Friday by UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, as part of the Yokohama conference, said 30-35 percent of sex workers in the Mekong are between ages 12 and 17.
Another recent study, by the UN-affiliated Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), found there are 1 million child victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation alone in the Mekong region. "And if you' re talking about trafficking for nonsexual purposes, there's just no figures available, because they can be in places where they're very hard to find," says Laura Skolnik, ESCAP's social affairs officer.
Smuggling children into Thailand is not difficult. At the Cambodian border town of Poipet, thousands of people cross over and under a chaotic bridge each day. With hundreds of children working at the border pushing carts, selling flowers, and begging, police on both sides pay little attention to who crosses.
Corruption and insufficient resources can mean that even traffickers who are caught, are rarely punished. "There's a problem of corruption and lack of law enforcement in the countries throughout the region, because [the traffickers] act like a network of organized crime, transnational crime, with complexity and influence and money involved," says Thailand Senior State Attorney Piyatida Jermhansa. "Even though we have the laws, it's kind of a failure because there are only one or two cases [of traffickers] indicted to the court."
Meanwhile, at the Battambang Center, the boy awaits a decision on his permanent relocation. It's not clear if he will be sent home a third time.
"There are some situations where [the children] can be reunited with their family. But often, the family needs support in terms of their own sustainable survival," says Linda Manning, technical advisor to the shelter for the International Organization for Migration.
"Some [children] who have been repatriated wind up back on the streets of Bangkok before the social worker who took them gets there."
©2001 The Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Monday, August 27, 2001
Frenzy in Thailand over 'drug' for AIDS
Experts outraged that creators call it a cure
Rafael D. Frankel, Chronicle Foreign Service
San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, August 27, 2001
Chiang Mai, Thailand -- Wearing sunglasses to shield his eyes and a towel draped around his neck to cough into, Uthai Narangasuna sat with 5,000 other HIV-stricken people in a soccer stadium here early this month waiting for his number to be called.
He soon received a one-month free supply of a controversial, locally produced drug advertised as the first-ever clinically tested oral AIDS vaccine, which he hopes will cure the deadly virus that is ravaging his body.
"I heard that people who took it got much better," he said. "I hope it will help me."
Without the financial means to obtain conventional drugs and virtually no government assistance, tens of thousands of AIDS victims like Narangasuna are packing stadiums throughout Thailand to obtain little pink pills -- free, at least for now -- called the V-1 Immunitor. In June, the first two handouts in Bangkok drew more than 20,000 people, including a few so sick that they died at the stadium.
V-1's creators say the drug not only helps AIDS victims but has completely cured four people. Such claims have outraged health experts, who point out that V-1 has undergone no rigorous scientific testing and is registered in Thailand only as a food supplement.
'SENSE OF A SCAM'
"There is a sense of a scam about it," said Dr. Chris Duncombe, senior physician for a program headed by the Thai Red Cross that helps 1,300 AIDS patients. "They give small amounts that are not enough to do anybody any good and charge for blood tests."
Sen. Jon Ungphakorn, a longtime AIDS activist, insists that V-1 is setting back the cause of AIDS treatment in Thailand by distracting from a campaign to obtain generic AIDS drugs for the poor.
"If (V-1's makers) give it out of the kindness of their hearts and call it a food supplement, I wouldn't interfere," said Ungphakorn. "But if they claim it's an oral vaccine that treats and cures AIDS, the Ministry of Public Health should charge them with making false claims."
But an intense media campaign and a sense that someone is finally doing something to alleviate their suffering is prompting the poor to flock to receive the so-called miracle cure, creating a frenzy over its distribution.
Thailand has 755,000 AIDS patients, according to U.N. figures. And with an annual per capita income of $2,000, the majority cannot afford the $125-a- month price tag for conventional anti-retroviral drugs. Neither can the government, which is still feeling the effects of the Asian financial crisis in 1997.
"It's the usual story of what happens when there is an absence of any sort of orthodox treatment," said Prof. David Cooper, director of the National Center in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "People start looking for other solutions."
Even though a government condom distribution program has slowed the spread of the disease, relaxed attitudes toward sex and prostitution, and poverty that forces families to sell their children into the sex trade continue to be potent vehicles for transmission of HIV.
About 300,000 Thais have already died and unless the government provides anti-retroviral drugs, 50,000 more will perish each year for the next decade, according to AIDS Access Group in Bangkok.
EX-POLICE CHIEF TOP PROMOTER
The production and distribution of V-1 involves a tangled web of scientists, politicians and government officials. At the center is a retired police chief turned philanthropist.
Salang Bunnag, whose foundation sponsored the V-1 giveaways in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, is best known for directing a high-profile 1996 hostage-rescue operation that freed all captives from a drug gang. He was later accused of ordering the summary executions of the six kidnappers while they were in custody.
Although never indicted, Bunnag was suspended and forced to resign in 1998. Observers say the ex-cop still has strong connections with high government officials and has re-created himself as a fighter for justice in the health field.
In the past three months, the 62-year-old Bunnag has used the media spotlight to trumpet the virtues of V-1 and attack skeptics as tools of foreign pharmaceutical companies.
"International companies, European companies, American companies -- they don't care about life, they care about money," he recently told The Chronicle. Dr. Vichai Jirathitikal, the Bangkok pharmacologist who developed V-1, claims his invention is the solution for poor countries that cannot afford expensive Western remedies.
"We cannot simply sit by and let our people die without help," said Jirathitikal, whose scientific expertise has been with prawns and not people. Jirathitikal, 44, says V-1 pills contain inactivated HIV antigens capable of withstanding digestive degradation in the stomach. He says V-1 fights HIV in the digestive tract rather than in the bloodstream, the focus of other treatments. And, he claims, the pill reverses the decline of CD-8 interceptor cells, which protect the body's immune system.
When a reporter asked Jirathitikal to list the drug's ingredients, he was told that such information couldn't be made public until patents had been granted.
All he has said is that the key components are magnesium, calcium and "nonliving chemical matter."
"People are skeptical of V-1 because it does not take the traditional approach to treating AIDS," said Sen. Samaporn Thepsithar, the vice president of the National Council on Social Welfare of Thailand, a foundation operated under royal patronage. "But there has never been any medicine like this before. It gives patients new life, new hope."
CRITICISM FROM HEALTH OFFICIALS
A recent report by the Ministry of Public Health disagrees. After studying the drug's effect on 50 patients over six months, the ministry said the pills had no effect, either positive or negative.
When ministry officials suggested that the U.S. Center for Communicable Disease Control examine the drug, they were rebuffed by V-1's creators, who argued that an outside study could breach their intellectual property rights.
Some say the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has opted not to halt the V-1 giveaways for fear of losing popularity. Duncombe says the prime minister is looking for a "cost-effective way to manage the epidemic" and believes V-1 "deserves a chance to prove itself."
Paul Cawthorne of Doctors Without Borders fears that V-1 will soon be marketed in other emerging nations that are being overwhelmed by AIDS and have few resources. "If they use this kind of mass hysteria, governments will be under a lot of pressure to let it happen," he said.
Deputy Public Health Minister Dr. Surapong Suebwonglee said he told Bunnag recently at a private dinner to cease calling V-1 an AIDS remedy or face punishment.
"They have no right to tell people it is a cure," Suebwonglee told The Chronicle. "If (Bunnag) does, he will be fined. I don't know how much."
Bunnag, however, remains defiant and says his foundation will continue to distribute the pink pills and estimates that 100,000 will have received the drug by the end of the year.
"If he wants to arrest me, let him arrest me," he said. "I will then tell my patients to go to public health and demand V-1. Then we will see what happens when 30,000 people come" to the public health ministry.
Bunnag says the proof of the drug's effectiveness is in talking to AIDS victims who have taken it.
Rungreng Sripunyawong, a Bangkok transsexual and former prostitute, was near death three months ago. "A doctor told me that I would be dead by the fall," she said.
After listening to a radio report about V-1, Sripunyawong's sister went to the first handout in Bangkok and brought home a month's supply. Soon Sripunyawong, who had been too weak to get out of bed, began to gain weight and now volunteers her time to tout V-1 to anyone who will listen.
There are huge profits to be made if the drug is ever approved for sale. A Salang Foundation member who asked not to be named said annual revenues in Thailand alone could be $36.5 million -- a fortune in a nation where an average lunch costs less than a dollar.
"Our vaccine will expand to other countries," said Dr. Aldar Bourinbaiar, an American AIDS researcher who works with Jirathitikal. "In a couple of months, we will be in Africa, China and Russia. There is nothing that can stop us."
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Press
Rafael D. Frankel, Chronicle Foreign Service
San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, August 27, 2001
Chiang Mai, Thailand -- Wearing sunglasses to shield his eyes and a towel draped around his neck to cough into, Uthai Narangasuna sat with 5,000 other HIV-stricken people in a soccer stadium here early this month waiting for his number to be called.
He soon received a one-month free supply of a controversial, locally produced drug advertised as the first-ever clinically tested oral AIDS vaccine, which he hopes will cure the deadly virus that is ravaging his body.
"I heard that people who took it got much better," he said. "I hope it will help me."
Without the financial means to obtain conventional drugs and virtually no government assistance, tens of thousands of AIDS victims like Narangasuna are packing stadiums throughout Thailand to obtain little pink pills -- free, at least for now -- called the V-1 Immunitor. In June, the first two handouts in Bangkok drew more than 20,000 people, including a few so sick that they died at the stadium.
V-1's creators say the drug not only helps AIDS victims but has completely cured four people. Such claims have outraged health experts, who point out that V-1 has undergone no rigorous scientific testing and is registered in Thailand only as a food supplement.
'SENSE OF A SCAM'
"There is a sense of a scam about it," said Dr. Chris Duncombe, senior physician for a program headed by the Thai Red Cross that helps 1,300 AIDS patients. "They give small amounts that are not enough to do anybody any good and charge for blood tests."
Sen. Jon Ungphakorn, a longtime AIDS activist, insists that V-1 is setting back the cause of AIDS treatment in Thailand by distracting from a campaign to obtain generic AIDS drugs for the poor.
"If (V-1's makers) give it out of the kindness of their hearts and call it a food supplement, I wouldn't interfere," said Ungphakorn. "But if they claim it's an oral vaccine that treats and cures AIDS, the Ministry of Public Health should charge them with making false claims."
But an intense media campaign and a sense that someone is finally doing something to alleviate their suffering is prompting the poor to flock to receive the so-called miracle cure, creating a frenzy over its distribution.
Thailand has 755,000 AIDS patients, according to U.N. figures. And with an annual per capita income of $2,000, the majority cannot afford the $125-a- month price tag for conventional anti-retroviral drugs. Neither can the government, which is still feeling the effects of the Asian financial crisis in 1997.
"It's the usual story of what happens when there is an absence of any sort of orthodox treatment," said Prof. David Cooper, director of the National Center in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "People start looking for other solutions."
Even though a government condom distribution program has slowed the spread of the disease, relaxed attitudes toward sex and prostitution, and poverty that forces families to sell their children into the sex trade continue to be potent vehicles for transmission of HIV.
About 300,000 Thais have already died and unless the government provides anti-retroviral drugs, 50,000 more will perish each year for the next decade, according to AIDS Access Group in Bangkok.
EX-POLICE CHIEF TOP PROMOTER
The production and distribution of V-1 involves a tangled web of scientists, politicians and government officials. At the center is a retired police chief turned philanthropist.
Salang Bunnag, whose foundation sponsored the V-1 giveaways in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, is best known for directing a high-profile 1996 hostage-rescue operation that freed all captives from a drug gang. He was later accused of ordering the summary executions of the six kidnappers while they were in custody.
Although never indicted, Bunnag was suspended and forced to resign in 1998. Observers say the ex-cop still has strong connections with high government officials and has re-created himself as a fighter for justice in the health field.
In the past three months, the 62-year-old Bunnag has used the media spotlight to trumpet the virtues of V-1 and attack skeptics as tools of foreign pharmaceutical companies.
"International companies, European companies, American companies -- they don't care about life, they care about money," he recently told The Chronicle. Dr. Vichai Jirathitikal, the Bangkok pharmacologist who developed V-1, claims his invention is the solution for poor countries that cannot afford expensive Western remedies.
"We cannot simply sit by and let our people die without help," said Jirathitikal, whose scientific expertise has been with prawns and not people. Jirathitikal, 44, says V-1 pills contain inactivated HIV antigens capable of withstanding digestive degradation in the stomach. He says V-1 fights HIV in the digestive tract rather than in the bloodstream, the focus of other treatments. And, he claims, the pill reverses the decline of CD-8 interceptor cells, which protect the body's immune system.
When a reporter asked Jirathitikal to list the drug's ingredients, he was told that such information couldn't be made public until patents had been granted.
All he has said is that the key components are magnesium, calcium and "nonliving chemical matter."
"People are skeptical of V-1 because it does not take the traditional approach to treating AIDS," said Sen. Samaporn Thepsithar, the vice president of the National Council on Social Welfare of Thailand, a foundation operated under royal patronage. "But there has never been any medicine like this before. It gives patients new life, new hope."
CRITICISM FROM HEALTH OFFICIALS
A recent report by the Ministry of Public Health disagrees. After studying the drug's effect on 50 patients over six months, the ministry said the pills had no effect, either positive or negative.
When ministry officials suggested that the U.S. Center for Communicable Disease Control examine the drug, they were rebuffed by V-1's creators, who argued that an outside study could breach their intellectual property rights.
Some say the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has opted not to halt the V-1 giveaways for fear of losing popularity. Duncombe says the prime minister is looking for a "cost-effective way to manage the epidemic" and believes V-1 "deserves a chance to prove itself."
Paul Cawthorne of Doctors Without Borders fears that V-1 will soon be marketed in other emerging nations that are being overwhelmed by AIDS and have few resources. "If they use this kind of mass hysteria, governments will be under a lot of pressure to let it happen," he said.
Deputy Public Health Minister Dr. Surapong Suebwonglee said he told Bunnag recently at a private dinner to cease calling V-1 an AIDS remedy or face punishment.
"They have no right to tell people it is a cure," Suebwonglee told The Chronicle. "If (Bunnag) does, he will be fined. I don't know how much."
Bunnag, however, remains defiant and says his foundation will continue to distribute the pink pills and estimates that 100,000 will have received the drug by the end of the year.
"If he wants to arrest me, let him arrest me," he said. "I will then tell my patients to go to public health and demand V-1. Then we will see what happens when 30,000 people come" to the public health ministry.
Bunnag says the proof of the drug's effectiveness is in talking to AIDS victims who have taken it.
Rungreng Sripunyawong, a Bangkok transsexual and former prostitute, was near death three months ago. "A doctor told me that I would be dead by the fall," she said.
After listening to a radio report about V-1, Sripunyawong's sister went to the first handout in Bangkok and brought home a month's supply. Soon Sripunyawong, who had been too weak to get out of bed, began to gain weight and now volunteers her time to tout V-1 to anyone who will listen.
There are huge profits to be made if the drug is ever approved for sale. A Salang Foundation member who asked not to be named said annual revenues in Thailand alone could be $36.5 million -- a fortune in a nation where an average lunch costs less than a dollar.
"Our vaccine will expand to other countries," said Dr. Aldar Bourinbaiar, an American AIDS researcher who works with Jirathitikal. "In a couple of months, we will be in Africa, China and Russia. There is nothing that can stop us."
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Press
Friday, May 11, 2001
Thai executions meant to shock
The public supports the government's antinarcotics strategy - a fast-track death row for convicts.
By Rafael D. Frankel
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BANGKOK, THAILAND
When Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra swept to victory here in January, he said his government would focus on three main areas: rooting out corruption, saving the beleaguered economy, and combating drugs with increased vigor.
The public and pundits may dispute his intentions, let alone his success with the first two goals. But there is no arguing that he is fulfilling his promise to hit hard on drug criminals.
Thailand's escalation in its war on drugs was most evident on April 18, when it executed four convicted drug traffickers at the Bangkwang Maximum Security Prison in Bangkok. Two of those executed were foreigners - a Hong Kong national and a Taiwan national. One week before, the government went ahead with its first execution since it came to power, and the first of a drug offender in years.
But not only were the latest executions carried out by firing squad, one after the other, the news media was invited to cover the prisoners' last moments, after they were informed at 4 p.m. that they were to be executed just one hour later. Reporters were not present at the execution, but pictures of the convicts eating their last meals and kissing the earth filled television reports that evening and newspapers the next day.
"Right now, in China and Malaysia, they do the same thing," Deputy Prime Minister Gen. Thammarak Isurangura told the Monitor in a statement explaining why the media was invited. "We need to have the population be afraid of committing offenses such as these, and be submissive to the law."
Strong public support
Indeed, in contrast to weakening support in the United States for the death penalty, the latest poll taken by the Rajjapatra Institute in Bangkok showed that 88.4 percent of Thais support capital punishment. In a 2000 Harris poll, 64 percent of Americans approved, versus 75 percent in 1997.
Currently, seven drug traffickers are on death row at Bangkwang and 180 other convicted drug criminals have been sentenced to die, but have not yet exhausted their appeals. A total of 318 inmates, 288 men and 30 women, are on death row for various crimes.
According to Chartchai Suthiklom, the deputy secretary general of the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), capital punishment is a useful tool in their war, and is a punishment that fits the crime. "The punishment is quite high, but is meant for the big-timers, and it's not only Thailand that has execution," Mr. Chartchai says. "The method of punishment must actually punish the perpetrator, and if you look at drug criminals, they are worse than murderers. Murderers kill one person, a drug dealer kills 1,000, and kills the future of the country as well, so why not give them the highest punishment?"
Although cultivation of drugs such as opium and marijuana, and the production of heroin and methamphetamines, has decreased considerably here due to highly successful crop eradication programs, Thailand still finds itself a major transit hub of illicit narcotics.
As part of the "Golden Triangle," the flow of drugs into Thailand from neighboring Burma, and to a lesser extent, Laos and Cambodia, is still rampant, and is now the main target of Thailand's counter-narcotics operations. While figures on the quantity of narcotics being smuggled through Thailand are difficult to estimate, several seizures - each consisting of dozens of kilograms of heroin and millions of methamphetamine pills over the last year - indicate the drug trade here is alive and kicking.
While many of the drugs flowing through Thailand eventually find their way out of the country, drug use among Thais continues to rise, and is used by the government as further justification for the hard line on drug traffickers.
According to the ONCB, there are now 300,000 Thais addicted to drugs, and 2 million casual users, in a country of 66 million. Moreover, they are not using "softer" drugs like marijuana - the most frequently consumed drug is the highly addictive stimulant, methamphetamine. This, Chartchai says, signifies the need to do "whatever it takes" to fight those who are bringing drugs into the country.
Rising prison population
And the results are clear. According to the ONCB, in 1992, Thailand had a total prison population of 54,955, of which just under one-fourth were incarcerated for drug crimes. In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, the prison population had risen to 115,079, 50 percent of whom were incarcerated for drug crimes.
While the executions met with approval from the general public, the government - and the prime minister in particular - received condemnation from international nongovernmental groups for both extending the death penalty to drug criminals and foreigners, and creating the spectacle to drive home the point.
"By using execution, you just take one life, and that doesn't mean that it's going to solve the problems of poverty and lack of education that contribute to the drug problem in the first place. People still won't understand how bad the problem is," says Saovanee Limmanont, executive director of Amnesty International Thailand.
"I agree with [Prime Minister] Thaksin when he said there must be some fight against the drug problem," adds Ms. Saovanee. "But not the death penalty - that's not the answer. The other thing is that using those executions, making a spectacle of it to the public, is not fair to the family of the inmates. They shouldn't use execution as a PR tool."
Whether it was international pressure, or Thai uneasiness over the media hype, something about the way in which the April 18 executions were carried out has led to a reversal on the media-coverage policy. When the next execution takes place, the media will not be there as witnesses. Some speculate that perhaps the identity of the next person on death row had something to do with it: What would public reaction be to the coverage of a woman's last hours?
According to Thammarak, the reasoning behind the reversal is that the point the government wished to make - that drug traffickers will be dealt with harshly - has been sufficiently made.
But while the point may have been made to the public, prisoners should not expect any show of mercy. "There are no exceptions to the law.... The judge can make a decision [on sentencing] and we must accept his decision once he does," Chartchai says. "Everyone is equal when you commit a crime in this country.... Otherwise, [criminals] will think Thailand is a haven for committing crime."
©2001 The Christian Science Monitor
By Rafael D. Frankel
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BANGKOK, THAILAND
When Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra swept to victory here in January, he said his government would focus on three main areas: rooting out corruption, saving the beleaguered economy, and combating drugs with increased vigor.
The public and pundits may dispute his intentions, let alone his success with the first two goals. But there is no arguing that he is fulfilling his promise to hit hard on drug criminals.
Thailand's escalation in its war on drugs was most evident on April 18, when it executed four convicted drug traffickers at the Bangkwang Maximum Security Prison in Bangkok. Two of those executed were foreigners - a Hong Kong national and a Taiwan national. One week before, the government went ahead with its first execution since it came to power, and the first of a drug offender in years.
But not only were the latest executions carried out by firing squad, one after the other, the news media was invited to cover the prisoners' last moments, after they were informed at 4 p.m. that they were to be executed just one hour later. Reporters were not present at the execution, but pictures of the convicts eating their last meals and kissing the earth filled television reports that evening and newspapers the next day.
"Right now, in China and Malaysia, they do the same thing," Deputy Prime Minister Gen. Thammarak Isurangura told the Monitor in a statement explaining why the media was invited. "We need to have the population be afraid of committing offenses such as these, and be submissive to the law."
Strong public support
Indeed, in contrast to weakening support in the United States for the death penalty, the latest poll taken by the Rajjapatra Institute in Bangkok showed that 88.4 percent of Thais support capital punishment. In a 2000 Harris poll, 64 percent of Americans approved, versus 75 percent in 1997.
Currently, seven drug traffickers are on death row at Bangkwang and 180 other convicted drug criminals have been sentenced to die, but have not yet exhausted their appeals. A total of 318 inmates, 288 men and 30 women, are on death row for various crimes.
According to Chartchai Suthiklom, the deputy secretary general of the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), capital punishment is a useful tool in their war, and is a punishment that fits the crime. "The punishment is quite high, but is meant for the big-timers, and it's not only Thailand that has execution," Mr. Chartchai says. "The method of punishment must actually punish the perpetrator, and if you look at drug criminals, they are worse than murderers. Murderers kill one person, a drug dealer kills 1,000, and kills the future of the country as well, so why not give them the highest punishment?"
Although cultivation of drugs such as opium and marijuana, and the production of heroin and methamphetamines, has decreased considerably here due to highly successful crop eradication programs, Thailand still finds itself a major transit hub of illicit narcotics.
As part of the "Golden Triangle," the flow of drugs into Thailand from neighboring Burma, and to a lesser extent, Laos and Cambodia, is still rampant, and is now the main target of Thailand's counter-narcotics operations. While figures on the quantity of narcotics being smuggled through Thailand are difficult to estimate, several seizures - each consisting of dozens of kilograms of heroin and millions of methamphetamine pills over the last year - indicate the drug trade here is alive and kicking.
While many of the drugs flowing through Thailand eventually find their way out of the country, drug use among Thais continues to rise, and is used by the government as further justification for the hard line on drug traffickers.
According to the ONCB, there are now 300,000 Thais addicted to drugs, and 2 million casual users, in a country of 66 million. Moreover, they are not using "softer" drugs like marijuana - the most frequently consumed drug is the highly addictive stimulant, methamphetamine. This, Chartchai says, signifies the need to do "whatever it takes" to fight those who are bringing drugs into the country.
Rising prison population
And the results are clear. According to the ONCB, in 1992, Thailand had a total prison population of 54,955, of which just under one-fourth were incarcerated for drug crimes. In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, the prison population had risen to 115,079, 50 percent of whom were incarcerated for drug crimes.
While the executions met with approval from the general public, the government - and the prime minister in particular - received condemnation from international nongovernmental groups for both extending the death penalty to drug criminals and foreigners, and creating the spectacle to drive home the point.
"By using execution, you just take one life, and that doesn't mean that it's going to solve the problems of poverty and lack of education that contribute to the drug problem in the first place. People still won't understand how bad the problem is," says Saovanee Limmanont, executive director of Amnesty International Thailand.
"I agree with [Prime Minister] Thaksin when he said there must be some fight against the drug problem," adds Ms. Saovanee. "But not the death penalty - that's not the answer. The other thing is that using those executions, making a spectacle of it to the public, is not fair to the family of the inmates. They shouldn't use execution as a PR tool."
Whether it was international pressure, or Thai uneasiness over the media hype, something about the way in which the April 18 executions were carried out has led to a reversal on the media-coverage policy. When the next execution takes place, the media will not be there as witnesses. Some speculate that perhaps the identity of the next person on death row had something to do with it: What would public reaction be to the coverage of a woman's last hours?
According to Thammarak, the reasoning behind the reversal is that the point the government wished to make - that drug traffickers will be dealt with harshly - has been sufficiently made.
But while the point may have been made to the public, prisoners should not expect any show of mercy. "There are no exceptions to the law.... The judge can make a decision [on sentencing] and we must accept his decision once he does," Chartchai says. "Everyone is equal when you commit a crime in this country.... Otherwise, [criminals] will think Thailand is a haven for committing crime."
©2001 The Christian Science Monitor