Chaiyaphum owed more than lost data

Chaiyaphum owed more than lost data

In the age of video clips, one video clip is absent. At a time when we're inundated by cat clips, dog clips, accident clips, slap clips, brawl clips, grope clips, chase clips, murder clips -- when we even have clips recorded from the depths of a dark cave where light hardly reaches -- it's amazing that one crucial clip, shot in broad daylight, is missing, lost or made to be lost forever, along with transparency and maybe justice.

This week the army confirmed that the CCTV footage that supposedly recorded what happened on the day activist Chaiyaphum Pasae was shot dead by a soldier is lost. "Data not found" and "no data recorded", said a letter sent to a human rights lawyer working on the high-profile case. The letter, written in the tortuous prose of a bureaucrat, says simply: "Case closed, we're right, you're wrong."

No image, no proof. No evidence, no argument. The real story regarding Chaiyaphum's death will remain an unsolvable mystery, just like many extrajudicial killings in this country.

At 11am on March 17 last year, Chaiyaphum, a Lahu activist who campaigned for the rights of stateless youths in the North, was gunned down by a soldier near a checkpoint in rural Chiang Mai. Authorities claimed that he was found with 2,800 methamphetamine pills, and upon being inspected the young man threw a hand grenade at the soldiers as he made a run for it. The killing was in self-defence, said the soldier, who was staunchly backed by top military officers.

But suspicion has been rife since day one: Chaiyaphum with drugs? A hand grenade thrown in broad daylight? Counter-reports from eyewitnesses (a few said the unarmed Chaiyaphum was beaten up before being shot) and the fact that the victim was a well-known activist working with ethnic minorities and likely seen as a thorn to the officials have further aroused mistrust.

The key evidence -- in our age of visual incrimination or exculpation -- is CCTV footage from cameras placed near the checkpoint. Now that's gone up in smoke, as dead as the activist himself. What makes the army's letter released this week so preposterous is the fact that the authorities themselves said before that there was footage of the incident. A week after the shooting, 3rd Region Army commander Vijak Siribunsop said he had seen the CCTV footage and that it confirmed the officials' account of what happened (Lt Gen Vijak also said something more shocking: "If it were me I would have put the machine gun on automatic firing" -- he later said sorry). Army chief Chalermchai Sitthisad, too, said last year that he had seen the footage but what it contained "didn't answer all the questions". That's deep, as if he was talking about the film of the assassination of President Kennedy.

So, does this phantom footage even exist? We wonder what these generals have seen now that it has turned out to be an incident of "data not found". The rich imagination of people with power is limitless, we know that, and yet when they've seen something that didn't exist in the first place it's pretty astonishing.

Over the past year, rights activists, lawyers and the media kept pressuring the authorities to release the CCTV clip, and the state's reluctance to do so -- taking an indefinite rain check on making public information known to the public -- has only fueled deep distrust in a case already strewn with holes. And now that the army has drawn the "data not found" card, Human Rights Watch called the whole episode "a cover-up". From what has happened, it'll be hard to convince anyone otherwise.

What also makes Chaiyaphum's death even more bitter is that this was a week when the issue of stateless people was brought back into the news. Chaiyaphum was a stateless person who had campaigned for the rights of young stateless people and minority groups for years. It's ironic that the story of the lost CCTV footage came out at the same time when, on Wednesday, four members of the cave-surviving Wild Boars football team were granted Thai citizenship. Going back a little, in late July forest dweller Ko-ee Mimeen of Kaeng Krachan also received his Thai identity card -- finally, after having lived for 107 years as a stateless person. He's now a complete Thai person after over a century of being, what? A non-person, a shadow, a man who had no rights, just like 486,000 other stateless persons in Thailand.

Born stateless, Chaiyaphum Pasae also died stateless. The circumstances of his death beg an investigation, but now that an important piece of evidence has been proclaimed lost, the young man was deprived of that right even in death. What's left is bloodstains on the soil and a dark spot on the regime's human rights records. As if they care.


Kong Rithdee is Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

Do you like the content of this article?
COMMENT (17)