Fleeing Thailand, Top Investigator of Human Trafficking Says He Fears for His Safety

International New York Times | 10 December 2015

Rescue workers and forensic experts at the site of a mass grave in Thailand's southern Songkhla Province in May. More than 90 defendants were charged after an investigation. Credit Madaree Tohlala/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

HONG KONG — When a senior police officer’s investigation produced more than 150 arrest warrants this year, it was seen as a tentative success in Thailand’s pledge to crack down on human trafficking.

But last month, that officer, Maj. Gen. Paween Pongsirin, resigned, and on Thursday said he had fled to Australia out of fear for his safety, raising questions about the extent of collusion between crime syndicates and the authorities in Thailand.

“I’m not afraid of the good officials,” he said by telephone from Australia. “But there are bad police and bad military officers, and I know they are trying to get me.”

Mr. Paween had led an investigation into a mass grave containing at least 36 bodies that was discovered in May near the border with Malaysia. That inquiry resulted in charges against more than 90 people from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand, including a lieutenant general in the Thai Army, Manas Kongpan, who is accused of being a trafficking kingpin.

Mr. Paween was expected to be a witness at the trials of the defendants. But he quit his post after refusing a transfer to Thailand’s deep south, where he said he would be under threat of retaliation from traffickers and corrupt local authorities. He flew to Singapore in mid-November and on Dec. 5 traveled to Australia, where he hopes to be granted asylum. Mr. Paween’s plans to seek asylum were first reported on Thursday by The Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Mr. Paween said he had faced growing demands from powerful people that he end his investigation, which featured people in the Thai establishment, including the army, the navy, the police, and local and national politicians.

“Our work was transparent and open to the public,” he said. “There is no politics in it. It’s an evidence-based investigation.”

But, he added, “We encountered many influential people.”

Thailand, which is ruled by a military junta, has seldom had inquiries examining the behavior of officers, a fact that may have set off the resistance Mr. Paween said he faced.

“In the history of arrests in the country, there are not many times we’ll see the arrest of a military general,” he said. “They are upset. They lose face. They are angry.”

Mr. Paween said he believed his work was fulfilling a national agenda that included aggressively investigating and prosecuting those involved in human trafficking, which has received widespread international attention.

“This is to help people who are suffering,” he said. “What I have done is righteous. We give justice.”

The investigation, and the indication that Thailand was sincere about thwarting trafficking across its borders, may have contributed to the appearance of boats carrying thousands of migrants in the Andaman Sea in May. Rights groups say traffickers began to hold people at sea while awaiting payments, or even abandoned the boats out of fear of arrest, instead of holding them in camps in southern Thailand, as they had before.

Mr. Paween said that he was under pressure to scale back his investigation and that he had received calls from angry superiors and people who warned him he was facing great risk. Soon after he submitted the case to prosecutors, he said, he was ordered to relocate to Thailand’s deep south.

Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia is a hotbed of human trafficking. Rohingya — a predominantly Muslim group fleeing oppression in Myanmar — and migrants from Bangladesh are held in camps or offshore until their families can pay ransom for passage to Malaysia.

Conditions in the camps can be brutal, and mass graves have been found on both sides of the Thailand-Malaysia border this year.

Mr. Paween said on Thursday that he feared being sent to the area because of connections between traffickers and corrupt authorities. “There are many human traffickers there,” he said. “These influential people are rich. If I were to be sent there, I would be in the dangerous position.”

Thailand is facing a long-running insurgency in the south, and Mr. Paween noted that the violence could easily provide cover for an attack on him. When he asked for another posting, he said, it was refused.

His resignation prompted criticism in Thailand that an officer had little chance of success in tackling corruption among the police and armed forces. “A good person has no place in this country,” a columnist in the newspaper Thai Rath wrote after Mr. Paween’s resignation.

Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said that Mr. Paween’s flight and the transfer of other investigators in the trafficking inquiry raised questions about the protection of witnesses and what would now happen to the case.

“It is clear his investigation was truncated,” Mr. Robertson said. “He was pursuing leads, and he felt there was a lot more information to be gotten, particularly from financial documents to see where the money has gone. Obviously that got to be too much for some people. Who those people are is a big question.”

Amy Smith, the executive director of the human rights group Fortify Rights, said in a written statement: “This trial is a test of Thailand’s commitment to end human trafficking, and the prognosis isn’t looking good.”

“Paween and other investigators should be supported to combat human trafficking in Thailand,” the statement continued, “not be forced into hiding.”