San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Families seek answers as dissidents disappear
BANGKOK — Three Thai dissidents went missing in Laos for months. Then, last year, two of their bodies turned up on the banks of the Mekong River, their limbs bound and bellies filled with concrete.
Another three Thai activists who fled to Vietnam have not been seen for more than a year, ever since they were delivered into the hands of Thai authorities by the Vietnamese government, according to their political allies.
This month, Wanchalerm Satsaksit, a Thai prodemocracy campaigner in Cambodia, was bundled into a black sedan by armed men, according to witnesses. His last words, caught by his sister, with whom he was on a call: “Can’t breathe.”
All these Thais living in exile since a military coup in Thailand in 2014 have two things in common: They had criticized Thailand’s most influential institutions, the monarchy and the military. Then they disappeared.
At least nine prominent critics of the Thai government have vanished over the past two years, according to human rights groups. It is a pattern of disappearances that the Thai public is having a hard time ignoring, despite legislation that criminalizes some dissent and a state of emergency that has been extended because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The people are more aware that there are abnormalities in this country,” said Nuttaa Mahattana, a democracy activist in Bangkok. “This should be the point where people start questioning the authorities about what’s going on: Why have the nice people been abducted?”
As facemaskwearing crowds gathered across Thailand on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of the 1932 revolution that ended absolute monarchy, some people held up pictures of Wanchalerm.
Earlier this month, a Thai former beauty queen expressed solidarity with those who wanted to know his fate.
“I am standing together with the Thai people in saying that what is happening is wrong and we want answers,” Maria Poonlertlarp, a former Miss Universe Thailand, wrote on Instagram.
Even as it has cultivated a reputation as a tropical wonderland for tourists, Thailand has been roiled by a long history of military coups, upended elections and violently crushed street protests. The spate of forcible disappearances, which evoke the tactics of military rulers in places like Argentina and Chile, are a more recent phenomenon, rights groups say.
“Since the May 2014 coup, Thai authorities have aggressively pursued the apprehension of prodemocracy activists who took refuge in neighboring countries,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
But without clarity in most of the cases — neither the activists’ whereabouts nor the plotters of the disappearances are certain — their relatives are suspended in a terrible limbo.
“We don’t know if he is dead or still alive,” said Sitanan Satsaksit, Wanchalerm’s sister. “We know nothing at all.”
Wanchalerm, 37, grew up in the rural northeast of Thailand, where opposition to the country’s entrenched elites is strongest. He was the head of his high school student council and after college worked for grassroots civil society groups.
For much of the 21st century, most Thais have voted for populist parties, only for those governments to be unseated either by coups or judicial means. The 2014 putsch scattered some of the most forceful critics of the political establishment, many of whom sought refuge in other Southeast Asian nations.
Wanchalerm fled Thailand six years ago after he was ordered to attend indoctrination sessions at army bases for those who publicly opposed the coup. Thousands of Thais were forced into such camps, some for weeks at a time.
The day before his disappearance June 4, Wanchalerm wrote a post on Facebook criticizing Prime Minister Prayuth Chanocha of Thailand, who was the architect of the last coup.
Hannah Beech is a New York Times writer.