Shrugging off accusations that police had been encouraged to act outside the law, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra yesterday declared a bloody 10-month war on drugs a success, saying it had crippled the business.
Thaksin told reporters that the campaign -- in which more than 2,000 suspected traffickers and peddlers were killed -- had rid the country of a decades-old threat to its social fabric.
"We have done quite a good job in less than a year on a problem left to fester for 20 years," he said. "Narcotics are now not a grave social and national menace as in the past.
"But we will not stop here. It will be a relentless, continuing campaign," he said.
Thai and foreign human rights groups have accused police of killing suspected dealers, a charge the government denies. It says most of the deaths resulted from dealers fighting each other.
"We have received several hundred complaints from people related to those affected by the extrajudicial killings and by summary seizure of assets of drugs suspects," said Charun Ditha-appichai of the National Human Rights Committee.
Charun said the independent body had no objection to a war on drugs, but objected to the way it had been carried out.
So did Amnesty International. The London-based rights group said last month the Thai government appeared to have condoned the killings of suspected drug dealers as a way to win its war on drugs.
It said in a report that Thaksin's government had failed to bring anyone to justice for the killings, despite promises to investigate the deaths of 2,245 people, most of them killed by unknown assailants during the campaign.
"The government has failed to initiate independent, impartial, effective and prompt investigations into these killings," the group said in a 30-page report on alleged rights abuses.
Thaksin has denied consistently that police killed suspected dealers in the country -- long a route for drug smuggling, especially heroin, from the opium-growing Golden Triangle.
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