for receiving and investigating human rights violations may be inevitable, and it follows the Buddhist critique of social stratification, that is, the idea that nobody is above investigation, and nobody may, by virtue of status, abuse another’s human rights any more than anyone’s position is so lowly as to disqualify a claim on them. I did, however, see another expression of the presumption of human equality in Thai human rights promotion.
During a July 2005 trip to the Andaman coast in southern Thailand, the group of lawyers I accompanied worked to help Burmese migrants affected by the destruction of the recent tsunami. This population already felt vulnerable to abuses by Thai police and business owners, and the devastation many experienced as a result of the tsunami—including not only property, work permits, and visas but also wrenching losses of family and friends—haunted their lives with the threat of human trafficking. Their specific fear was that, if arrested, they would wind up sold to trafficking rings at the Thai-Burmese border. Two scenes will illustrate how the egalitarianism I mentioned above showed itself in the lawyers’ work.
Scene 1: The Military as Human Rights Defender
The threat of trafficking to Burmese communities in Phang-nga, Ranong, and Phuket had become a pressing concern for the lawyers. Early in July, they held a meeting at World Vision in Ranong, in a new, sparsely furnished but spacious building at the end of a muddy road, next to a Thai health center. Pinyo, who had joined the lawyers for this trip, explained that it had been built with a $500,000 donation from the Japanese government, primarily to address the health care of Burmese migrants. It served around 100 people per day and was heavily used by pregnant women. Having such a high level of contact with the Burmese in Ranong, it was inevitable that the staff would learn of cases of human trafficking and had recently interviewed a Burmese man who had worked several months without remuneration. World Vision had passed the information on to the lawyers, who were now strategizing how to address trafficking. They had started to discuss whether it was better to have a team come to Ranong or have migrants travel to Bangkok to conduct interviews when an army general entered. He was stationed near the border, and he and his soldiers witnessed human smuggling and trafficking of Burmese, a problem he attributed to mafia working in the area. That it was both illegal and a human rights problem was exacerbated, he said, by border police collusion with mafias.
“The police have the power of the law,” he said, “the army has only force to use with the mafia,” the problem being that the army has no standing authority to deploy its force as a law enforcement agency. They have, further, little power with respect to the police, he added, and so nothing they can use against police officers with mafia connections. Still, his soldiers witnessed trafficking, and he wanted, on his own account, to help confront it. Alip, heading the lawyers’ team, summarized the meeting and the team’s tasks on a poster, which I reproduce in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Alip’s poster.
The perpetrator-victim model is not absent here, but the interesting thing is the placement of soldiers as witnesses alongside the injured party, foreign workers. An abiding concern for Alip was that witnesses feel secure in coming forward. The implication of this meeting was that collaboration with the military was an important aspect of responding to human trafficking, both in receiving soldiers as witnesses, as allies of foreign labor, and in being able to ensure the soldiers, as witnesses, adequate protection. Collaboration with agents of the state arose again the following day, in Takua Pa, Phang-nga.
Scene 2: The Prison Warden as Human Rights Promoter
The lawyers had arranged with Phiphat Samphaonoi, the warden of Takua Pa Prison, to talk to foreign migrants held there. Departing from our mini-van, we entered the prison after depositing all of our cameras and cell phones in a secure room inside the gates. We walked along a stone path on the edge of a large clearing, sparsely shaded by trees, that was surrounded by low, mostly single-story buildings occupied by the inmates. Many inmates chatted in groups in or on the edges of the clearing. We entered one of the bungalows, which was packed tight with inmates (mostly young men) sitting on the concrete floor. Besides the lawyers and Madawi, the translator, the warden, and several officers, there were forty-nine inmates, of whom forty-three were Burmese. There was a small space at the front of the room with a microphone and an easel with large sheets of foolscap. Phiphat took the microphone and introduced the lawyers, telling the inmates that the lawyers were there to explain their rights under Thai law and to answer any questions they might have.
Chokchai, a prominent lawyer who had joined the group for this project, spoke first, briefly explaining that the constitution guaranteed certain rights to all of them, regardless of their nationality. Making conspicuous use of the language of human rights, he said, “You are human, and so you have rights. The police must explain them clearly and offer translation.” He emphasized the problem of acting under conditions of lack of understanding, like signing forms the police present to them when they are unsure if they must sign or what the forms mean. Chokchai continued, saying that they may be held a maximum of two days without charge and are entitled to lawyers who speak their language. In response, a Burmese man stood to ask whether, when a man is arrested, the police can then go and arrest his wife and children. At this point, Madawi leaned to me and said, “Some people stay in here for years but do not know they have rights … do not know their own rights.” In part, she blamed this on the Burmese government, as it was very sensitive on the subject of labor migration and on human trafficking in particular. It was, therefore, unsupportive of Burmese imprisoned in Thailand and uninterested in pursuing or even informing them of their rights.
After Pinyo’s brief presentation on HIV/AIDS prevention, the inmates, who had remained attentive but said little, filed out, and the rest of us went to have lunch with the officers and the warden. After ensuring that Phiphat, the warden, was sitting between Alip and Chokchai (the senior lawyers), the rest of us took our seats and engaged in small talk over our meal. An atmosphere that could easily have been testy—human rights lawyers sitting with prison officers—was light and congenial, underlining the spirit of cooperation among the lawyers and officers. This seemed to epitomize the model of human rights protection that Dr. Chuchai had described, but there is an ethics underlying it that reflects, implicitly, Buddhadasa’s teachings. That is, this approach seems to wish for circumstances that facilitate Burmese migrants’ movement toward nibbana but more directly guides agents of the state away from demeritorious acts—human rights abuses—by acting in the world. The ethical model, then, is not the renunciate monk but an engaged Buddhist who promotes social welfare.
These examples, echoing Dr. Chuchai, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn, show how Buddhism and human rights lent one another force. As an ordinary event in Thai political and social history, human rights’ emergent character imbued them with an indeterminacy that resisted reduction to a settled body of principles and practices. Receiving them as if overheard, Thai human rights advocates were then able at this moment to conceive of human rights through egalitarian views of Buddhism, finding their voices in human rights by way of everyday moral understandings. Buddhism allowed human rights an especially potent anchorage in Thai morality, but securing the moral and cultural salience of human rights in this way has allowed experimentation in the politics of Thai Buddhism. Human rights here did not transcend the Buddhist morality that supported authoritarian rule and social stratification but became a way of turning that morality and reoccupying its moral space. Taking the ordinary as the ground of events (Dumm 1999, 21–23), human rights partake of the eventedness of the everyday in that, inviting a turn within Thai morality to an egalitarian vision of Buddhism, they allow an alternative not as revolution but transfiguration, the ordinary invaded by another ordinary (Mulhall 1994, 166; Cavell 1989, 44). To be sure, human rights discourses can appear as language on holiday, disconnected from ordinary life (Das 2007, 6). What I have tried to show, however, is how finding human rights a home in everyday ethics—a struggle within the everyday for persuasiveness—in fact opened Buddhist morality to experimentation, to transfiguration, to new opportunities for the discovery or recovery of an ethical voice.