It's about seven in the evening. My friend (I'll call him Lek) and his friend from a neighbouring house (I'll call him Neung) have just finished eating at a stall in the market place of their small town a couple of hours' drive out of Korat. They start the short motorbike journey back home along a narrow, secluded lane. Neung, on the back, asks Lek to pull over so that he can take a leak. No sooner has Lek done so than a gang of youths emerge from the gloom of some waste land and launch a vicious attack. Three of them punch and kick at Lek who, after the initial shock, tries to fight back. He feels a sharp pain at the back of his head, touches the warm blood pouring out and decides that this is no place to linger; he runs for it. As he does so, he has to push back into place a loose flap of scalp which has come down onto the back of his neck as if on a hinge. A few panic-stricken minutes later he is home, covered in blood. As frantic family members prepare to take him to hospital, he makes sure that the family next-door is alerted. A carload of people is soon at the scene of the attack, where Neung lies in a pool of blood, badly cut up and unconscious. At the hospital Lek lapses into unconsciousness himself.
Fast-forward a few days. Lek, having spent two nights in hospital, is back home, sore but recovering. His crescent-shaped knife wound required many stitches and is swollen and leaking blood and pus, but it is not deep. He is lucky. Not so Neung. Having only just emerged from a coma, he is still on the danger list. He has two horrific knife wounds to his head, one of which runs from the back of the head through an ear and to the corner of an eye. Worse, he has a deep gash in his left hand which will permanently impair movement of the fingers.
I was informed of what had happened the morning after the attack by a very low-sounding Lek phoning from his hospital bed. My first thought was to go straight to Korat, but I ended up waiting until the next day and by then it was clear that his condition was not too serious. I decided that I might just as well follow developments by means of regular updates on the phone.
There was good news almost immediately. A witness had gone to the police and named the seven youths who took part in the assault. He lives in a house opposite the waste land, next to which Lek had stopped, and was able to identify everyone because they all attend the same school. Lek had no more information about the matter; it sounded very fishy to me. I found myself wondering whether Lek and Neung had unwittingly ridden into the middle of some kind of vendetta involving the boy in the house and those outside and had been mistaken by the latter as reinforcements to be used against them. It would explain their otherwise unprovoked violence and also why the boy was prepared to report them. But I don't expect ever to know the full story behind that. Another piece of good news was that the seven boys had apparently readily admitted their guilt, as so often seems to be the case in Thailand.
And so began the convoluted, drawn-out process of the families of all the parties concerned getting together to discuss an out-of-court financial settlement, all done under the tender gaze of the police eagerly anticipating their own cut. I can see some merit in this system provided everyone is truly satisfied with the outcome; much valuable court time is no doubt freed up this way. But of course it is a system open to glaring miscarriages of justice, as will be seen in this case.
Lek was very hopeful at first, saying that the police had told him he could expect 100,000B in compensation and Neung 300,000B, in addition to the likelihood of the seven youths going to jail for a long time. He has never been too fussy about where truth ends and fantasy begins, however, so I treated the remark accordingly. His description of the first meeting of the families was not one likely to appeal to people with a rosy view of human nature. Six of the boys and most of their parents were present, as well as Lek and his mother. While his mother gave vent to her anger at the senseless violence of the boys, they sat there in frowning silence throughout. At no point did anyone offer an apology or other expression of remorse. People were there to discuss money. That was it, nothing else mattered. Lek had convinced himself that some of the families were quite well-off, but I suspect that they were all dirt-poor. One meeting stretched into another with little sign of agreement.
It was while these meetings were going on that Lek phoned one day, about two weeks after the incident, to say that he had been getting bad headaches for several days and had been re-admitted to his local hospital. This was worrying and I decided to go and visit him. I arrived at his home town late evening and he was there at the bus station to greet me after spending only one night in hospital. He looked a bit down but otherwise not in bad shape. His hair had already grown back over his scar, now just palely visible. His home, which I had visited previously, is on the outskirts of town in a semi-rural location. It's very ramshackle: leaky corrugated metal roof, alarmingly alfresco wiring, outside loo doubling as a nature reserve, scrawny chickens everywhere. I have become something of an expert chicken observer on my visits. When not staring at you, heads to one side, hopeful of offerings, they can be vicious little creatures among themselves. I now have a much better understanding of the origins of such terms as 'hen-pecked' and 'pecking order'.
I spent three nights there on this occasion. Every morning Lek woke with a splitting headache which would gradually ease during the course of the day. He was taking some heavy-duty tablets. His delightful younger sister went to and from school. His quiet father went quietly about his business. I discussed the crime and subsequent negotiations with Lek and his mother, a canny, soft-spoken woman. When it became clear that hopes were fading of a just settlement, I said that I would happily pay for the services of a lawyer if they decided that they would prefer to go to court. Lots of grateful wais from Lek's mother. Lek had said all along that he wanted the perpetrators to go to prison and a lawyer would probably get the case to court quicker than the police left to their own devices.
I left when it seemed as if Lek's headaches were becoming a bit less severe. The same day Neung finally came out of hospital and his mother тАУ an uncaring woman according to Lek тАУ returned home from Bangkok where she works. Things now moved quickly. I soon got a call from a disgusted Lek to say that the final offer was of 90,000B to Neung and a mere 10,000B to Lek; he thought the police were to be given 40,000B. I told him not to accept, which he had no intention of doing, but he wasn't sure about Neung and when another call followed a day or so later it was to say that Neung, heavily influenced by his mother, had accepted and already received payment. I was dumbfounded. How could he put so little value on himself and on what he had been through? He was scarred for life, permanently disabled, and yet prepared to accept this pittance and no prospect of jail time for his attackers. (Later, I was to worry about whether I had made it sufficiently clear that my offer to pay for a lawyer included Neung, but Lek assures me that his friend knew тАУ he thinks the mother just wanted to get things over with quickly so that she could take a cut and return to Bangkok). I told Lek, never mind, we could still pursue his case separately. I told him to go into Korat and get himself a lawyer. This he soon said he had done; he said he had provided a full account of what had happened and been told to wait while the lawyer contacted the local police and culprits' families. I was impressed, having frankly doubted poorly-educated, none-too-logical Lek's ability to handle the matter. I allowed myself to be cautiously optimistic that events were on an upturn now.
The next call was from a sobbing, agitated Lek. He is twenty-two years old, but immature for his age and prone to bursting into tears. He said his father had scolded him for going to see the lawyer and for wanting to go to court. Neung next-door had settled тАУ why couldn't he? He was just making trouble for everyone, that was all. The case would drift on for months now and how was he proposing to survive? (His boss at the electronics store where he works in Korat had apparently told him not to go back until everything was resolved). His mother was still on his side, sobbed Lek, but wasn't prepared to contradict his father. I listened to all this with a sinking heart. In my foolishness I had assumed that Lek's father would be proud of him for taking a stand. I had completely overlooked the centuries-old peasant attitude which says that only others have rights and entitlements; the peasant's duty is to accept his lot, however grim, with a high, respectful wai. I didn't really know what to say to Lek. I said he could come and stay with me in Pattaya for a few days if he was unhappy at home, but he said he would go to stay with an uncle in a nearby town. That worked out all right for a couple of days but then the rest of Lek's family came over for a holiday weekend and another argument with his father flared. Another tearful call to me. This time he said he would come to Pattaya.
We spent a happy few days together. Lek used to live with me for about a year and a half and it was quite like old times (except that I no longer have any interest in the sex part тАУ though he does). His headaches had disappeared completely. Then one morning, as I was getting ready to go to my Thai language class, Lek got a call from his lawyer. There was no prospect of any more money from the families and Lek was to attend a meeting in Korat the following week, at which Neung and the seven youths would also be present, in preparation for the court case. This message sent Lek into a nervous tailspin and he started firing off panicky phone calls in all directions. He said he felt a headache coming on. I realised in an instant that the previous bout of headaches had been stress-related due to all the family meetings at that time and nothing to do with his injury. I told him to calm down. I took the name and phone number of his lawyer and said I would get my Thai teacher to ask him some questions.
When my teacher phoned the number she was told that it was a police department and that the gentleman concerned was a senior police officer, not a lawyer at all. I put my head in my hands. So much for Lek's unexpected competence in finding himself a lawyer тАУ he had simply added another greedy cop to the queue waiting for a share of the pie. I was much less interested in working out how this confusion could have arisen (though it was bloody amazing!) than in considering its implications. Was there really any point in proceeding with the court case? Lek was getting no support from his fellow-victim, his own father or his boss. He would have to start again with me holding his hand to make sure that he got a proper lawyer this time and not, say, an army general. Lovable as Lek is in many ways, the stuff of heroes he is not. I simply doubted his ability to get through the many months of this business and all its pressures with his sanity intact.
Back at my condo, Lek expressed genuine amazement when I told him the identity of his 'lawyer'. 'Why he lie to me?' he said, close to tears again. He said that he had been in plain clothes, not uniform, when they met. Keen to move on, I put the options to Lek as neutrally as I could under the circumstances. I said that I would still support him financially if he wished to continue with his case but that he should seriously consider what that would entail. I said that I would make a donation to boost the meagre 10,000B if he decided to take it. I could see what little resolve he had left to go on with his struggle for justice fading from his face. With a little pout he said that he would take the money. I felt like a murderer. His swiftly-returning high spirits over the rest of the day told me that relief was his predominant emotion.
He returned home a couple of days later. The day after that (yesterday, in fact) he phoned to say that he had received the money from the police. A pause. Then, plaintively: 'Mm, but I want they go monkey house.' 'I know, me too,' I said. I reminded him that the bad karma of his attackers would catch up with them eventually and, like a good Buddhist, he readily agreed. Neither of us was much cheered by the thought, however. Like ordinary, unenlightened mortals everywhere, we preferred our justice to be instant and easily recognisable as such. I knew that the thought of those brutish, knife-wielding boys being free as the wind, with nothing more irksome to contend with than the anger of their cash-strapped parents, would pop into my mind at odd moments and haunt me for a long time to come. Anyway, Lek returns to work on Monday. He's excited about improving his break-dancing skills. Soon his life will be back almost to normal. Almost, but not quite.
This sorry saga of shocking violence, police corruption, unrepentant criminals, victims with little sense of their own worth and, worst of all, justice not done has been a dispiriting experience for me from beginning to end. I tried to be helpful and failed, which inevitably brings with it an uneasy feeling that more could have been done. Should I have urged Lek to continue his fight for justice, regardless of the difficulties? Another problem about doing that, which, shamefully, did not occur to me until after Lek had agreed to take the money, is that it could have endangered Neung. If, as seems likely, he had been called upon in court, I don't suppose that the families who thought they had paid him off would have been very happy about that тАУ they may have decided that his current injuries weren't quite bad enough. All in all, I find myself thinking: roll on the time when the Thai police have learned to do their job properly, ensuring that villains face justice, instead of being an opportunity to make money. It won't happen for many long years yet, unfortunately, in this crazy, wonderful, terrible country.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by PeterUK
