‘I went out after dark to help my friend. Luckily, his phone still worked when he called. On the way from my house, there were corpses floating in the water, face down, shot dead. I’m sure there were more deaths than what they reported. The sound of gunfire kept going late into the night. I remember earlier that day, when the soldiers opened fire, I’d seen people’s heads blown to bits as I was running home. I’d never forget what I saw.”
The man quoted above is the community leader of Koh Yao, a seaside village next to Tak Bai in Narathiwat province. I met him two months ago on a palm-fringed beach — so pleasant, so Conde Nast-balmy in the 5pm sunshine — to talk about death. This Oct 25 marks the 21st anniversary of the Tak Bai incident, one of the worst instances of violence committed by the Thai state against civilians, resulting in 85 fatalities. Seventy-eight protesters died of asphyxiation after being stacked on the back of military trucks that trudged, like heartless beasts whistling their way towards the apocalypse, for seven hours on the road to a military barracks, the route that normally takes just over one hour to cover (I retraced that route too in August).
Seven other victims, according to official reports, were shot dead at the protest site on the bank of the Tak Bai river, though, as the man who talked to me believes, there must have been more.
“Do people care? I don’t know. Do young people around here know what happened? Yes. But memory fades, and now they have other things to think about. I was there, and I remember what I saw.”
If we insist on remembering Oct 6, 1976, with the Thammasat University massacre, it’s also important to remember Tak Bai and what happened on Oct 25, 2004. If textbooks don’t, we must do. If our prime-time news continues to fixate on the Thai-Cambodian border to the point of absurdity, forgetting what else is worth memorialising, then historians, politicians, and teachers must ensure that the blood of October and the tears of injustice are remembered all the way from Thammasat to Tak Bai.
Gen Surayud Chulanont apologised for the events of 2006. In 2007 and 2012, compensation was offered to the families of the victims. But what ties the two October tragedies together is the failure of successive governments to bring responsible officials to justice: Impunity, that chronic Thai disease uncured by court or constitution.
In August 2024, the Criminal Court indicted seven officers involved in the Tak Bai crackdown, including Gen Pisal Wattanawongkiri, the Fourth Army Region Commander in 2004. Gen Pisal, who was also a member of parliament, fled the arrest warrant. How valiant, how predictable! His name was briefly in the news last October, featured in headlines and anniversary panels, before fading away. His current whereabouts remain unknown.
As the violence in the deep South continues, and as the civilian government seems content to allow the military to take the lead — to solely execute all strategic moves towards a resolution — the prospect of peace remains elusive. It appears that the political authorities are either too lazy, too weak, too cynical, or too preoccupied with the complex realignment of national politics to take notice. Allowing the military to monopolise the narrative of peacebuilding is tantamount to surrendering the political will to address long-term problems — much like the situation at the Thai-Cambodian border, where politicians appear to have lost interest and have allowed military hawks and chauvinistic influencers to engage in various showboating and farcical stunts.
The Tak Bai I recently visited was calm and even had a touch of hip: Young southerners are coffee nerds, and cool cafés dot street corners. The riverbank where, 21 years ago, hundreds of protesters were stripped, their hands tied behind their backs and forced to lie face down has been paved over and re-landscaped. Now it’s a recreation area where children play. Teenagers hung about, engrossed in a YouTube channel featuring a Malay-speaking food influencer. Many of them hadn’t been born in 2004, but over the years, they’ve grown up in a place perpetually under emergency decree, the only region in Thailand where checkpoints are as ubiquitous as 7-Elevens.
What happened in Tak Bai is a scar, and like most scars, you cannot see it unless you rip open the flimsy cloth that covers it. For a few years after the incident, the number of young men seeking to join the insurgency spiked, local journalists told me. That may not be the case today, but it shows how the response to militarised control and state violence — plus, now, a blatant case of impunity — can drive some people to anger and desperation. Scars fade, but can they really heal?