Many celebrated the death last week of a former Thai army general who nauseated the world last year. He was responsible for mass killings of Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees at Wang Kelian in Perlis, a village less than a kilometre from Malaysia’s porous border with Thailand.
Brutal obituaries flowed for Manas Kongpan who ruled a transnational human trafficking gang that imprisoned, tortured, starved and murdered hundreds of migrants at jungle camps.
The refugees, who escaped persecution and poverty back home, were caged for months in enclosures made of crude wooden fencing and covered with a tarpaulin.
They were killed when their impoverished families back home could not pay the ransom of around RM10,000.
Police discovered 139 shallow graves with skeletal remains at 28 secret jungle prisons strewn across the range of hills that rise from Malaysia into Thailand.
The human trafficking trail carved through Thailand’s southern neck from coastal Ranong, where boatloads of migrants arrived from Myanmar and Bangladesh and were trucked to disease-infested camps in dense jungles.
Exposes by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and Malaysia’s now defunct Malay Mail newspaper in 2009 and 2015 respectively brought the heat on Manas.
An investigation by SCMP linked Manas to the death of hundreds of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh, who were cast adrift in rickety boats on the Andaman Sea by Thai military.
The Malay Mail expose connected the discovery of about two dozen bodies of foreigners dumped in rivers, oil palm plantations and graveyards in mainland Penang since 2014 to an army hardliner with a passion for bullfighting.
Following Manas’s death on Wednesday at the age of 65 in a Bangkok prison hospital, social media broke out in denigration, reminding many of his gruesome crimes.
Ian Young, foreign editor of SCMP when the story broke, was among those who filed harsh tweets:
“It gives me great pleasure to announce the death of Lt General Manas Kongpan, disgraced and bereft in a Thai prison, the most evil man I have encountered in 30 years of journalism.
“He got off lightly. In 2009, reporters Alan Morison and Chutima Sidasathian came with a tale so hideous, it seemed impossible: The Thai military was secretly towing Rohingya refugees out to sea on wrecks and casting them adrift.
“Hundreds were dying under the most nightmarish circumstances. Skeletal men, baked to death by the tropical sun in excrement-filled hulks, as they drifted. Dying of thirst, starvation. Drowning. How many? We’ll never know.
“Eventually, the Thai government was shamed enough to halt this illegal policy. But Manas? Initially he got promoted! And Alan and Chutima got sued by the military for defamation but they won, thank God.
“But fate caught up with this monster. In 2015, he was arrested and later jailed for new atrocities: Rohingya were held in secret jungle prisons and ransomed back to their impoverished families. Those whose families couldn’t pay ended up in a mass grave.”
“So farewell Gen Manas, you oxygen thief, you killer, you profiteering piece of filth,” wrote Young, now the Vancouver correspondent for SCMP.
In 2017, Manas was condemned to 27 years in jail for profiting from people smuggling, corruption and organised crime. Two years later, a Thai court of appeal increased his prison time to 82 years.
The trials exposed a matrix of collusion between state officials and businessmen who profited from trafficking; more than 60 people, including a mayor in Songkhla, got jail sentences between 75 and 80 years.
Since 2015, Malaysian courts have only convicted four people of trafficking-related offences in relation to the mass graves at Wang Kelian. None of them is a Malaysian national.
Some unfinished business still remains even as Wang Kelian continues as a blot on Malaysia’s credibility; the government has yet to release the January 2020 final report and recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the grisly episode.