Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared victory in his 10-month war against drugs at a closing ceremony yesterday, but pledged to carry on with the campaign despite criticism of suspected extrajudicial killings by police.
"Today we triumph in the drug war," Thaksin told a crowd of about 10,000 people gathered at Bangkok's Royal Plaza. "Today thousands of those bad people have already been arrested and locked up, and many of them are dead."
In February, Thailand launched a crackdown on the illicit drug trade with an intensive three-month campaign in which nearly 2,300 people were killed, most of them described by officials as suspected drug traffickers.
The government said just 42 of the victims were shot by police, mostly in self-defense, while the rest were killed by gang infighting.
But international human rights groups and some UN officials expressed concern that police were carrying out summary executions.
Thaksin launched the drug campaign after King Bhumibol Adulyadej made a plea to tackle the problem in his Dec. 5 birthday speech last year. The prime minister set a deadline of yesterday for illegal drug use to be wiped out.
During the ceremony, Thaksin dedicated the anti-drug campaign to the king, saying he would report the success of the crackdown to the monarch during a mass audience scheduled for today, the day before the king's birthday.
Thaksin, who raised a Thai flag in front of a portrait of the king in a symbolic gesture of victory, added that "those who are involved with drugs are enemies of the state and we will eliminate those enemies."
He said the country was largely free of drugs, but that traces of the illicit trade may have lingered like a disease.
"We have to continue the campaign against drugs, to make ourselves strong, to eliminate the disease and not allow it to re-emerge," he said.
Senator Jermsak Phinthong compared Thaksin's campaign to a theatrical production, calling it "a simple plot told in an exaggerated way," and said it had failed to catch drug kingpins with connections to officials and politicians.
"The small drug traders have had trouble, but I haven't seen the big ones have any problem ... I don't see them get caught or killed," he said in an interview.
Somchai Homla-or, a lawyer and human rights activist, said earlier this month that he is investigating 18 drug-related killings in which no murder suspects have been arrested.
"In many cases, we have found evidence that the police or government officials were involved in those killings," he said. "Unofficially, even police will admit that [suspects] were killed by government officials."
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