re: "Time for cops to come clean" (BP, Editorial, August 28, 2021)
When the fatally effective Royal Thai Police officer in his officially approved PR stunt "said he regretted the death, but justified his abhorrent treatment of suspects 'as a means to an end' in the war against the illicit drug trade in local communities," there is no reason to think he was not lying. But the reality he lets slip about the ethos of the Royal Thai Police is much worse: even if he were sincere, even if there were grounds for thinking the suspect had knowledge about a ton of heroin, the use of torture as a matter of course, which the proffered excuse implies is an accepted operating procedure in the Royal Thai Police, shows that traditional Thai institution to be morally abhorrent in its very principles.
Yet worse, that excuse that the ends justifies them, however truly vile those means be, sounds exactly like an equally Royal Thai Army general giving the usual excuses for committing a coup against the Thai people to overthrow a popular, democratic government. Worth noting here is that such repression of democracy by intimidation using threats of violence is the foundation on which stands the decades of corruption in the Royal Thai Police and other famously corrupt Thai institutions.
The best, the only credible, antidote to corruption is democracy. To reduce systemic corruption, democracy must be allowed to develop institutions that protect free speech rather than stifling it with brutish prison sentences, that ensure the people can protest perceived wrongs rather than using police violence to suppress them, and that create transparency rather than systemically enforcing ignorance of what is being done by whom by the use of unjust law.
It would have been naive in the extreme to ever have expected those who committed a coup against the evolution of functioning democracy to allow, let alone initiate, police or any other healthy reform. That is not how the world works.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on August 30, 2021, under the title "Pathetic justification" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2173175/pathetic-justification
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