The massacre at a Thai nursery is reviving the dread and sorrow Chanathip has tried to bury for more than two years.
The 36-year-old teacher survived Thailand’s last mass killing by barricading a washroom in a shopping centre to keep out a rampaging soldier and save his toddler – and a dozen others – from harm.
The February 2020 attack in the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima was committed by Jakrapanth Thomma, a 32-year-old army sergeant-major who killed 29 and wounded scores more with automatic weapons after becoming provoked by an apparent business dispute with a senior officer.
Last week, Panya Kamrab, a 34-year-old former police sergeant fired earlier this year for drug offences, killed 36 people – among them 24 young children sleeping at a nursery school in the rural northeast village of Uthai Sawan – in a violent spree using a gun and a knife.
Separated by two years, hundreds of kilometres and the specifics of their targets and motivations, the two mass killings are still linked by the profile of attackers with years in uniform, targeting the very civilians they were trained to protect.
“Nothing has changed,” said Chanathip, who spent several harrowing hours with his family hidden in the toilet of the Terminal 21 mall on Feb 9, 2020, as Jakrapanth stalked the concourses, killing indiscriminately as he went.
“When I learned it was an ex-policeman who carried out the nursery attack, I thought, ‘When will they ever have stricter gun laws for these men in uniform? When will these men ever get support for their mental health?'”.
In death, Jakrapanth, shot dead by security forces, and Panya, who took his own life after killing his wife and stepson, took with them any hope of justice or explanation of why they chose to slaughter innocents.
Both left bereft families and a shocked country to wrestle with questions over gun control, drugs, mental health and why it is men in uniform who have carried out the worst atrocities in Thailand’s recent history.
The Royal Thai Police (RTP) on Sunday (Oct 9) issued a statement saying Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha had ordered them “to urgently suppress crimes related to drugs and guns” to build public trust.
Addiction issues
Thailand is awash with guns, both legally held and illegal, with war weapons moving through porous borders with Cambodia and Myanmar.
The country is also a major market and transit point for methamphetamine, with millions hooked to the caffeine-laced pills known as “yaba”, as well as the more addictive crystallised “ice” version.
Health experts say both are devastating to the mental health of long-term users.
Among the police measures include a crackdown on people with gun licences but with “bad track records”, the statement posted on the RTP official Facebook page said, adding that youth gangs, neighbourhood mafias and loan sharks would be targeted.
Drug checkpoints and border controls would be increased, the statement said, while random urine tests for every police officer would help to find drug users with the threat of “serious consequences” for those who tested positive.
Thailand has around 220,000 police and 450,000 soldiers marshalling its 70 million population.
The army has refused to let power settle for long in the hands of civilians, leading 13 successful coups in less than a century and embedding military culture in all aspects of state security.
“The police structure is strongly hierarchical, with a military-style chain-of-command that puts a lot of pressure on frontline officers,” said Krisanaphong Poothakool, a criminologist at Bangkok’s Rangsit University who became a lieutenant-colonel during more than two decades in the police force.
“They work without full support of their superiors, they regularly buy their own pistols, radios and gas which gives them cause for corruption and bribery and other minor crimes … but minor crimes can lead to major ones .”
Away from mass killings – which are rare – rights groups allege serious abuse by security forces, ranging from torture and murder in custody by policemen, to the extrajudicial killings by army personnel of drug suspects or suspected rebels in Thailand’s Deep South, bordering Malaysia.
Shootings by officers, enraged by jealousy, business conflict or perceived slights, including by foreigners, are not uncommon.
Meanwhile, experts say bribery causes authorities to turn a blind eye to everything from a speeding ticket to a migrant smuggling racket or drug offence, all daily realities involved in policing the kingdom.
That has shredded the relationship between the police and the public, analysts say.
“Frontline police officers are concerned about their bosses, managers, not the local population … crimes that happen at a local level [robberies, assaults] are not solved,” Krisanaphong said.
“That’s a model that puts pressure on police officers as the public does not trust the police and that is damaging to the idea of policing by consent.”
Public outcry has mounted over nursery killer Panya’s police career despite numerous run-ins with superiors and previous complaints of discharging his weapon unlawfully.
Examples of other alleged abuses of power by security services have also surfaced in a country where men in uniform are rarely prosecuted for crimes, and often given multiple chances to rehabilitate while in service.
In a country run by former general Prayuth – whose tenure since leading a 2014 coup has seen the army deepen its hold on power – optimism for a course correction is hard to find.
“The power of social media and ordinary people might be the only effective solution right now to hold these powerful people accountable,” said activist lawyer Sittra Biebangkerd, especially when “we don’t know if the structure will ever change … we all know this patronage system is dominant in Thai society”.
As grief-stricken parents mourned over the tiny coffins of Panya’s victims in Uthai Sawan, Chanathip’s memories of the horrors of the 2020 massacre in Nakhon Ratchasima came flooding back.
But so did his anger at a culture that he says gifts impunity and power from the moment a uniform is taken.
“It’s like they’re putting on one of those Ramayana masks,” he said, referring to a famous Hindu epic; Thailand has been strongly influenced by the religion.
“They’re automatically different people, they think they’re privileged, invisible and can’t be touched.”
This article was first published in Asia One . All contents and images are copyright to their respective owners and sources.
