By Hannah Beech and Ryn Jirenuwat

TAK BAI, Thailand — Maliki Dorok was crammed into a sweltering truck in the middle of a stack of men, piled up five high like logs.

Three rows were on top of him, pressed so close together that he inhaled the air they breathed out. Below him was another layer of prone men, their panting lapsing over the hours into a terrible quietude.

Maliki’s arms were bound behind his back. A bullet was lodged in his leg. It was Ramadan 20 years ago this week, and Maliki had not eaten or drunk anything since daybreak. He licked the sweat oozing down his face, the briny liquid, he says now, the only thing that kept him alive when so many others died.

On Oct. 25, 2004, at least 78 men from Thailand’s deep south died of suffocation, heat stroke and organ failure after security forces breaking up a protest stacked them onto trucks, Maliki among them. Seven others were shot to death by security forces outside the police station in the district of Tak Bai. Seven more remain missing.

The deaths occurred amid a security crackdown ordered by then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand’s deep south, which is home to a Malay Muslim minority in a majority Thai Buddhist nation. The Tak Bai massacre helped catalyze more violence: For the past 20 years, Thailand’s three southernmost provinces — roughly 200 miles from the popular, white-sand beaches of Phuket — have been terrorized by an insurgency that has claimed more than 7,600 lives, both Buddhist and Muslim.

Yet to this day, not a single person has been held accountable for the Tak Bai deaths, even though a government inquiry found serious lapses in the Thai security forces’ conduct. In August and September, two cases finally resulted in murder charges against 14 men, from top military commanders to drivers of the trucks.

It is almost certain, though, that no one will be found guilty. The statute of limitations for such cases in Thailand is 20 years. If the defendants continue to evade the arrest warrants until Oct. 25 — police have not carried out a single one, and none of the accused showed up at a court hearing last week — the charges will disappear overnight. No new charges related to Tak Bai will be able to be filed.

“If the government wants the insurgency to stop, it has to show that the rule of law applies in Tak Bai, too,” said Abdulloh Hayee-Abu, a lawyer who is representing some Tak Bai victims’ families. “Otherwise, this cycle of violence in the deep south will never stop because the root causes have not been addressed.”

Ants Fighting an Elephant

A massacre from 20 years ago might seem like bygone history, but Thai politics runs in reruns, the same names cycling through positions of power. The country is now governed by Thaksin’s 38-year-old daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra.

One of the 14 defendants charged with murder has decamped to Japan. Another, retired Gen. Pisarn Wattanawongkeeree, was until last week a lawmaker with the ruling Pheu Thai party. On Oct. 14, Pisarn, who was the regional military commander during Tak Bai, said in a statement that he was seeking medical treatment abroad and had resigned from the party.

“It has been 20 years, and the same guys who did this are back in charge of Thailand again,” said Maliki, the protester who was thrown into the truck. “I ask myself if I will ever get justice, but I have zero per cent hope.”

Last week, Paetongtarn said that her government was obliged to “let the legal process run its course.” Her Pheu Thai party, she said, “had done everything” to try to persuade Pisarn to return.

“We informed Interpol,” Paetongtarn said, referring to the outstanding arrest warrant. “Then it’s the police’s duty to look.”

Pisarn did not respond to requests for comment. A Pheu Thai representative said that since Pisarn had resigned, the Tak Bai matter no longer concerned the party.

When appearing before parliament last December, Thai regional police officials said they could not locate the Tak Bai case file. It was a long time ago, and the police station had changed buildings, they said. Later, a police spokesperson said that they were searching for the file. In April, a police working group determined there was no reason to indict anyone for the Tak Bai deaths. The two criminal cases, one filed in a court in the deep south and another at the behest of the attorney general, proceeded nonetheless.

“We are like ants fighting an elephant,” said Lateepah Mudor, whose 61-year-old father died in a truck from a lack of air, according to his autopsy report.

There are no easy lines separating political cliques in Thailand. Alliances shift. Coups impose military rule, followed by elections after which parties sometimes align with the forces they once assailed. Throughout it all, spasms of political violence tend to go unpunished. No official or officer, for instance, has been prosecuted in the 2010 deaths of at least 90 people who had gathered in Bangkok to support Thaksin, himself deposed in a coup four years earlier.

But the bloodletting in the deep south, once a Malay sultanate before Thai annexation, has unfolded behind a fog of amnesia that is thick even by Thai standards. The Tak Bai deaths receded from memory.

Even the toll of an intensified insurgency — bombings, shootings, knifings, grenade attacks — rarely penetrated the collective consciousness.

For the past 20 years, Muslim militants in the deep south — in the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala — have killed, on average, more than a person a day. Late last month, a car bomb exploded near the home of the Tak Bai district chief, seriously injuring two off-duty soldiers. Extrajudicial killings, such as that of a rights defender in June, have added to the death toll.

Here, the landscape feels like that of a war zone. Security outposts are wrapped in razor wire and swaddled in sandbags. At roadblocks, drafted soldiers search for men wearing Muslim prayer caps. Insurgents regularly attack symbols of the state, like soldiers, teachers and soldiers. Under the lasting declaration of emergency rule, violence committed in the line of duty is protected from prosecution.

“The military has created a security state in the deep south,” said Romadon Panjor, an opposition lawmaker who is from southern Thailand.

Like We Weren’t Human Beings 

The protests at the Tak Bai police station, perched above a wide, muddy river, began 20 years ago after the police arrested Malay Muslim village chiefs. By midmorning, nearly 1,300 people from nearby villages had rallied in front of the station, angrily demanding their release.

Mueyae Soh was among them. Her 19-year-old son came, too. When bullets burst out from the police station, she ran into the river, even though she could not swim, the water dragging on her hijab. She lost track of her son. He suffocated to death in one of the 25 trucks that drove from Tak Bai to a distant army base.

Hayiding Maiseng was shot in the back. He played dead, he said, a pool of blood forming around him. A soldier kicked him anyway, cracking his ribs, and then slammed his head with the butt of a rifle. After 16 days in the hospital, Hayiding was discharged to an army camp, where he endured an extensive interrogation, he said.

Maliki, who had subsisted on his own sweat, hadn’t even noticed the bullet in his leg, the fear numbing his pain. He did what the soldiers ordered: He took off his shirt and lay on the ground as his wrists were trussed behind his back. When they demanded he crawl toward the waiting trucks, he slithered through the dirt for about 300 feet.

Already, men lay facedown in the truck. He was tossed onto a second stratum; three more stacks were thrown on top of him. There was no space to move even a finger, he said, not that he could feel his hands because of the tight binding. The truck drove for hours. The men vomited, urinated, prayed and screamed. Then they lapsed into silence.

Most of the men who died were in the bottom rows of the trucks. Maliki’s leg was amputated. His hands were crippled from the prolonged binding.

“We were treated like we weren’t human beings,” he said. “They did this to us because we are Malay, and they don’t think we are Thai. But I am Thai.”

When a Tak Bai village administrator went to pick up the bodies of two 19-year-old protesters three days later, he saw piles of swollen, blackened bodies. One boy’s neck was broken, and he had two bullet holes in him, an autopsy report showed.

“It wasn’t enough that they killed my brother,” said Muhammasawawee Anseng, his younger sibling. “They didn’t respect him in life, and they didn’t respect him in death.”

A Culture of Fear

On that day 20 years ago, Thaksin was playing golf, he said. Two years ago, he apologized for the deaths but did not take any responsibility. Thaksin intimated that military commanders, the same ones who two years later staged a coup against him, might have acted stupidly in Tak Bai to make him look bad.

But Thaksin was close to Pisarn, who was then regional army commander, and remained so as he became a lawmaker for his Pheu Thai party. No military officer has admitted to giving orders to shoot or to load the men in the trucks in such a dangerous way.

Even today, a culture of fear pervades Tak Bai. It remains a sleepy district with sarongs drying in the sun and chickens scratching in the dirt. But the play area across the street from the police station is deserted, despite the gazebo that was built recently. Who wants children cavorting in the realm of ghosts, said Pattara Pakdi, a local resident.

As they recalled the bloodletting 20 years ago, most people from the community nearest the Tak Bai police station declined to be identified. A woman described looking out from a crack in the wall of her home to see a protester buck and collapse from a bullet. Others saw protesters wriggling across the ground to the trucks, their arms bound behind them. After the protesters were driven away, all that was left, the villagers said, were puddles of blood and so many scattered shoes, orphaned sandals and torn flip-flops.

The Tak Bai villagers gathered the shoes and waited. No one came to claim them. Eventually, they threw them away.

-New York Times