By Max Constant
BANGKOK
Thailand has indicted 72 people for human trafficking, the attorney general’s office announced Friday, nearly three months after authorities launched a crackdown after dozens of bodies were found in abandoned camps near the southern border.
“Among the suspects indicted, there are four police officers, numerous local administration officials and a military general,” Wanchai Rujonwong, attorney general’s office spokesperson, told the Matichon news website.
“Bail was refused to all persons indicted given the seriousness of the charges and because the cases caused a lot of damage to the country,” he added.
The suspects face charges including human trafficking, human smuggling and malfeasance.
All are accused of either direct or indirect involvement in human smuggling networks that brought Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims from western Myanmar on rickety boats to Thai shores, en route to Malaysia -- the main final destination of the illegal migrants.
On May 1, dozens of bodies were found in graves in an abandoned human trafficking camp in a forest bordering Malaysia -- triggering an official campaign to wipe out human smuggling networks from Thai territory.
Numerous camps have been discovered and 120 people arrested, including General Manas Kongpan, after documents showing money transfers to his bank accounts were recovered at an alleged human trafficker’s house.
The senior army official is charged with being a major smuggling kingpin. No other military officers have been arrested, despite suspicions among right groups that Kongpan could not have acted without the knowledge or the help of some of his subordinates.
The attorney general’s office is considering whether to file charges against 32 other suspects -- including five Myanmar nationals and three Bangladeshis -- who remain on the run, according to Rujunwong.
The Thai crackdown had scared traffickers into abandoning up to 4,500 migrants on boats in the Andaman Sea.
While Malaysia and Indonesia decided at a May 20 tri-nation conference to allow the boats to come ashore, Thailand persisted in pushing them back after providing them with water and food.
A regional summit held in Bangkok on May 29 -- with the participation of Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Myanmar and Bangladeshi officials as well as United Nations, U.S. and European Union representatives -- had resolved to “intensify search and rescue operations” for migrants stranded at sea.
By the beginning of June, all the vessels had reportedly landed on Malaysian or Indonesian shores, or had to turn back to Bangladesh and Myanmar.
Rohingya have been fleeing persecution in Buddhist majority Myanmar in the tens of thousands since sectarian violence erupted in 2012, while Bangladeshis -- who represent an increasing share of the migrants -- are mostly escaping extreme poverty in hopes of employment in Malaysia.
Thailand’s junta has defended its anti-human trafficking efforts, with junta leader-cum-Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-ocha expressing hope Wednesday that the country would be upgraded from the lowest level in the new U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report, set to be released Monday.
In 2014, Thailand was downgraded to Tier 3 -- a rating that would normally trigger a range of sanctions from the U.S., which President Barack Obama waived in Thailand’s case.
The efforts undertaken by Thailand in the last three months will, however, not be taken into account by the new report, which covers the period from March 2014 to March 2015.
