Thailand's Bloody Monday

• Share

Amdan Senne didn't know any of the dead, but last Thursday the 23-year-old civil servant from the district of Tak Bai in Thailand's southern Narathiwat province volunteered to act as a coffin-bearer at a funeral for 22 men. They were among 85 killed when what started as a peaceful protest outside the local police station went horribly wrong. Now, three days later, as rifle-toting soldiers stood watch, the shrouded bodies were first laid out under the hot sun on a field next to the 380-year-old ironwood Wadi al-Hussein mosque. Prayers were said. Then, amid the pervasive stink of decay, the bodies were buried in a deep hole. As he watched the diggers fill in the mass grave, Amdan shook his head. "I just can't believe it," he said. Then he threw up.

The story of those who died in Tak Bai began on Monday, Oct. 25, a sultry day with the promise of rain in the air. That morning, about 2,000 Muslim villagers—men, women and children—gathered in a small park across the road from the police station. They had come to demand freedom for six men arrested for allegedly providing arms to Islamic separatist fighters. But the authorities were in no mood to oblige. In the station courtyard stood hundreds of heavily armed police and soldiers brought in to deal with the protest, their weapons drawn. At either end of the road were parked tanks and military trucks. Behind was the Tak Bai river. "It was frightening," recalls one of the protesters, Ai (not her real name), the 38-year-old wife of a rice farmer. "Even if we did want to leave—as the army were telling us to—we felt trapped."

As the day wore on, the police tried repeatedly to negotiate with the demonstrators. They told them the men had been moved to another station and were in good health, and that their case would be decided by the courts. The protesters were not appeased, so at 2:15 p.m. the south's military commander, General Pisarn Wattanawongkeeree, emerged from the station and ordered the crowd to disperse. Shortly after—in what proved to be the military's last attempt at a peaceful solution before taking action—one of Narathiwat's most senior Islamic figures, Abdulrazak Ali, arrived to mediate. "They wouldn't listen to me," says Abdulrazak, a cleric. "There were a few radicals among the protesters, controlling the minds of everyone else." Deputy police commander Vuttichai Hanhaboon, a Buddhist who has spent 10 years in the south, watched the events unfold from his perch on the second-floor balcony of the station. "I looked down on the crowd and thought, 'How many years will it take before these Muslims grow up?' I knew people would die. Why did they not know it and leave, like we asked them to, many times?"

At 3 p.m. an order was given for the military to fire at the crowd with water hoses and tear gas. Many of the men in the group started throwing rocks and bricks at the soldiers. The shooting started soon after. Eyewitnesses TIME talked to say that though most soldiers were shooting into the air, some were aiming at the crowd. A chest-high bullet hole in a concrete post in the park seems to indicate that this might have been the case. The Nation newspaper in Bangkok printed a photograph of a soldier aiming at the crowd with his automatic weapon horizontal to the ground, shell casings spurting out from the magazine. Ai says she saw two men killed in front of her and immediately began to run, like the rest of the crowd, to the river, where they took shelter behind the embankment. Some began swimming out to boats, which had come close to the banks, says Ai, to rescue the demonstrators. Traikwan Kraireuk, Narathiwat's military chief, told TIME the boats were manned by heavily armed insurgents. "It's not true," says Ai, as do other protesters TIME spoke to. "They were just trying to pull people out of the water. And the soldiers shot at them to keep the boats away."

When the shooting stopped around 4 p.m., six protesters were dead and 17 injured. The women and children were led away, and the men—some 1,300 in all—ordered to strip off their shirts. Then they were handcuffed behind their backs and told to lie flat on the ground. Thai TV footage of the event shows soldiers kicking and beating the men. Several of the women told TIME that the men were forced to lie on the ground for more than an hour. No one offered them water. "It's [the Muslim fasting month of] Ramadan," says Vuttichai. "They wouldn't have accepted it anyway." The TV coverage did not show what happened next. Soldiers began loading the men into trucks. Many of the men could not climb up themselves, so they were tossed in, and instructed to lie flat. Then soldiers started stacking the mostly inert bodies one on top of the other, four and five deep. Those who lifted their heads were hit with rifle butts.

Narathiwat military chief Traikwan was inside the station and claims not to have known what was unfolding outside. "I was not aware," he says. "I did not know my soldiers piled up those captured. This may have been a mistake, but you must understand we had limited trucks and there were a lot of men arrested. Also, if they were normal people—and not fasting or on drugs, as I suspect many of them were—they would probably not have died." The men were taken to the military base at Pattani 150 km away. By the time the convoy arrived about six hours later, 78 of the men in the trucks had suffocated to death.