Originally posted by the Voice of America.
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Thailand's Prime Minister Orders Crackdown on Officials Abetting Human
Traffickers

Zsombor Peter

   KUALA LUMPUR - Thailand's Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha has ordered
   police to set up a special committee to find and probe government
   officials abetting the country's human trafficking rings, after a
   COVID-19 outbreak he has blamed on illegal migrants.

   But rights groups doubt the campaign will do much to break the links
   that smuggling networks have forged with corrupt local officials over
   many years and consider the effort more show than substance.

   Prayut called for the committee at a meeting of the government's
   Defense Council last week, said Lt. Gen. Kongcheep Tantrawanit, a
   spokesman for the Ministry of Defense who was there.

   "We believe that some officials [are] involved. We believe, and we will
   find out," he told VOA.

   The order came less than a week after the outbreak of the worst wave of
   COVID-19 infections Thailand has seen since the pandemic started. The
   flashpoint was a shrimp market teeming with migrant workers from
   neighboring Myanmar, which is wrestling with one of the heaviest
   coronavirus caseloads in Southeast Asia.

   'A drop in the bucket'

   Thailand had managed to contain the pandemic, with only 4,297 confirmed
   cases as of December 17, when health care workers detected the first
   COVID-19 case at the shrimp market, a few dozen kilometers west of the
   capital, Bangkok. Authorities have found another 2,143 cases since then
   across the country, most of them stemming from the market. Although a
   Thai woman was the first positive case confirmed there, Prayut has
   blamed illegal migrants from Myanmar for seeding the outbreak, without
   offering evidence.

   Government spokeswoman Ratchada Thanadirek said that working theory
   nonetheless sparked the prime minister's call to purge any officials
   complicit in smuggling migrants into Thailand.

   "We will go after the government officers, the police officers, whoever
   [is] involved in this violation of law," she said. "It's going to be a
   long-term effort. It has started, but since this incident happened,
   then more effort must have to be put into this."

   Authorities arrested a local politician earlier this month for
   allegedly trafficking migrants from Myanmar into Thailand's notoriously
   abusive long-haul fishing industry in the southern province of Nakhon
   Si Thammarat.

   The Thai government claims it convicted 14 officials on
   trafficking-related charges in 2019. But given the volume of that
   traffic, "it's really a drop in the bucket," said Phil Robertson, the
   Bangkok-based deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

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