Injustice in Non-Transitional Regimes: The Eighth Anniversary of the Massacre of the Thai ‘Red Shirts’

Abstract

The concept of transitional justice has been widely discussed in
Thailand following the massacre of the Red Shirt protesters in 2010, which
resulted in the highest death toll resulting from a military action against
political protestors in Thai history. The eighth anniversary of that tragedy
offers an opportunity to analyse Thailand’s response to the use of military
violence against these political activists. This analysis is performed through
the application of the seven conceptual components of transitional justice:
regime change, finding truth, prosecution, security sector reform, victimscenteredness,
reparation, and memorialization. The current study is based on
an analysis of various textual sources, such as books, journal articles, news
articles, online sources, and other documents. The evidence shows that in the
case of Thailand, as in other countries, if the first component, regime change, is
not realised such that the authoritarian regime is replaced by one that is civilian
and democratic, then justice for past violence can never be established. As a
result, the remaining six components of transitional justice in Thailand have
been applied in a distorted and incorrect manner in the past eight years.