Arithmetical Justice, Selective Justice

Last Friday, August 1st, the Bangkok Post boldly headlined “GUILTY” Khunying Potjaman Shinawatra in the share tax evasion case. The criminal court sentenced her to three years in jail in what is called “a precedent-setting ruling in the first of a series of court cases looming over the Shinawatra family” (Bangkok Post, 2008a).

While I have little grasp of the finer legal aspects of this case not being a lawyer, my attention was piqued by the particulars of the case. According to the news: “the court found Khunying Potjaman and Bannapot had deliberately avoided paying 546 million Baht in tax for the transfer of 4.5 million shares in the Shinawatra Computer and Communications, now Shin Corp, worth 738 million baht” (Bangkok Post, 2008a). The verdict of guilty for evading 546 million Baht in taxes resulted in a three year sentence! If justice were purely a matter of arithmetical ratio and proportion, my mind deviously set out to calculate a “what if” scenario – what if by next March 2009 I won’t pay the taxes off my meager salary as an Acharn? I came up with 0.28 days (maximum) in the slammer! That translates to 6.72 hours in the crowded and mosquito infested Thai jail, much less time than checking the tortuously incomprehensible mid-term exams of my students. I consider myself a law abiding person however and regained my senses after briefly indulging in the gleeful fantasy of tax dodging with almost negligible punishment. I will contribute what is due to “Prathet Thai”.

Did the Thai criminal court go easy on Khunying Potjaman knowing that a more serious and just sentence of 10 to 20 years plus hefty fines, (as they do in South Korea) could provoke backlash in the form of a much dreaded worsening of present day instability? Or as my Thai colleague opined the (light) sentence caused the Shinawatra family to lose face (naa tek), suggesting that in the Thai order of things losing face is already enough punishment?

I don’t know. But when I recall the many injustices in the recent and not too recent past, of the countless big fishes that flouted the law with great impunity, I wonder if we will ever have real justice in this world. This is when perpetrators will not only have the certainty of being caught and punished but also punished in direct proportion to the severity of the crime committed.

Those for example who were responsible for “Hok Tulaa” and the “exceptional cruelty” of the massacre in Thammasat where many living witnesses can confirm that more than “one person died”? If caught, what punishment will the court mete out? Or should we not dig up the past and stir things up for the sake of “harmony”? Why not? Isn’t the insistence in outward harmony really just a disguise for oppression?

Have we already forgotten the “buffet cabinet” serving in the late 80s (Murray,1996)? Surely, they stole more than 546 million Baht from the country. And those who fired at the peaceful “mob mu tue” of the Black May incident in 1992? How about those who gained handsomely from insider information when the Thai Baht was devalued as a result of the financial crisis of 1997? And thereafter, the leaders of the post-1997 bust that eagerly sold the country’s (failed) assets at the behest of the IMF and WB to foreigners - precisely one of the rationale for the reactive formation of the “Thai Rak Thai” party? And those responsible for the drug war where an average of 45 people were killed each day for three months just because their names appeared in the black list? The deaths in the Tak Bai protests falsely attributed to the weakened state of the victims due to Ramadan fasting (FACT, 2008)? More recently, last June 18, 2008, the Nation reported that the Assets Examination Committee found corruption that may have cost the state up to Bt110 billion (with a “b” as in boy, unless the Nation was sloppy in its editing) through the privatisation of state enterprises (Nation, 2008). Using Potjaman’s court ruling as reference, 110 billion Baht would amount to approximately 600 years in combined jail sentences. How many of the responsible for this alleged massive corruption will be brought to trial and convicted? And lest we forget, how about every conceivable report of “irregularities” (in the last two decades alone) in the Ministries of Commerce, Transport and Communications, Health, Education, and by the way, the Military (& Air Force & Navy)? The grossly overpriced Suvannabhumi Airport?

If we examine the international arena, the situation is even worse. If for a moment we forget the “excesses” of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, we discover even more recent instances of grave injustices. The international press reported triumphantly the case of ex-Bosnia leader Karadzic who was finally caught after nearly 13 years on the run and charged for his role on the 44 month siege of Sarajevo that left 10,000 dead and the July 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica (Bangkok Post, 2008b). Is it also not the time to arrest Kissinger and put him on trial for his crimes against humanity - the carpet bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam? As Noam Chomsky said “if the Nuremberg laws were applied then every post-war (WWII) American president would’ve been hanged.”

The West has imposed its notions of progress and civilization on the rest of the world. We now know from this brief existence of ours in an increasingly fragile and dangerous world the concept of justice is imperfect and is biased in favor of the wealthy and powerful, especially those whose actions supported and benefitted the imperial capitalist system. If we haven’t yet, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion of Western moral superiority. How much farther in terms of human decency can development and progress in this age of globalization take us on this issue of justice? How is it that we seem to be much farther now from the possibility that a group of persons can “decide once and for all what is to count among them as just and unjust”? (Rawls, 1999:12).


References:
Bangkok Post (2008a), “Guilty”, August 1.

Bangkok Post (2008b), “Karadzic goes before court for first time”, August 1.

Chomsky, Noam interview with BBC's Francine Stock at London's St Paul's Cathedral, Dec 2002. Quote from video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=676452061991429040&q=chomsky&ei=5l6WSJ7VOYq0wgPLman1BA

FACT (2008), "Samak rewrites Tak Bai massacre" published by Bangkok Post, 26 February. http://facthai.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/samak-rewrites-tak-bai-massacre-bangkok-post/

Murray, David (1996), Angels and Devils: Thai Politics from February 1991 to September 1992 - A Struggle for Democracy? Bangkok: White Orchid Press.

Nation (2008), “State Enterprise workers join PAD protest”, June 18.

Rawls, John (1999), A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition, Harvard University Press.

The Trials of Kissinger
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2815881561030958784&q=trial+of+kissinger&ei=aV-WSOGkLYOGwgOg-Pz2BA