Ko ‘Big Brother’ Tong fights allegations of illegal trafficking

While Pajjuban Angchotipan, or Ko ‘Big Brother’ Tong, fights allegations of human trafficking, graves continue to be found.

If Pajjuban Angchotipan is what Thai investigators say — the ugliest link in an odious transnational business — the appearance of a starving, reeking boatload of misery off Koh Lipe on May 14 was for him a horrid coincidence.

There is no evidence the boat was connected directly to Pajjuban, or Ko (Big Brother) Tong as he is known throughout Satun province and its off-lying islands.

But Lipe certainly is; the exclusive resort island in the shimmering Andaman Sea is the face of his legitimate businesses.

And the juxtaposition last week, before the Thai navy pushed 430-odd Rohingyas and Bengalis back out to international waters, is all too striking.

The two worlds of Satun’s godfather, already running from an arrest warrant issued three days before, have come together and Ko Tong is suddenly friendless in both.

By the start of this week he was in contact with police; on Wednesday he appeared at national police headquarters in Bangkok.

Pajjuban declares his innocence to deputy national police chief Ake Angsananon. He is legitimate, a pioneer developer of Koh Lipe, and for seven years Satun’s most senior elected official as president of the Provincial Administrative Organisation.

He has given himself up to fight those allegations that he trafficked illegal migrant workers across the border into Malaysia. But first, it is alleged, migrants were held in jungle camps to extort more money from their families back in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Migrants who could not or would not pay were threatened with torture, death, or instead of arriving at a Malaysian building site to work for wages, however paltry, they would be delivered into slavery with a Thai commercial fishing company.

There are 26 graves found early this month near abandoned camps in hills running to the Malaysian border.

Police refuse to specify allegations against Pajjuban because, they say, briefs of evidence are in the hands of state prosecutors.

By Thursday 54-year-old Pajjuban is back in the south, but at Natawee jail in neighbouring Songkhla province.

A woman police think is his second wife, Tatsanee Suwanarat, is also in custody though her relatives claim she doesn’t know the man. His cousin, Posia Angchotipan, who runs a Koh Lipe resort and leads the island tourism association, gives himself up on Wednesday.

By yesterday morning there were 44 suspects in custody and 33 people still evading warrants. Those arrested include four policemen, a former policeman and local government officials.

Bangkok acknowledges a serious corruption problem has taken hold in Satun and Songkhla. It is one reason General Ake is supervising the investigation from Bangkok, rather than the local police command.

Before all this hit the fan, Satun’s police chief was posted back to Bangkok, following an unsatisfactory investigation last year of a smuggling allegation against Ko Tong.

In the current investigation, police and the Thai anti-money laundering authority have seized or frozen interesting assets: property including a new 28-room resort hotel in Satun; four speedboats and a 40m launch; motor vehicles including Mercedes; firearms and ammunition.

Pajjuban now faces 11 charges, three of people trafficking and extortion, the others alleging encroachment on Ko Lipe’s national park by eight resort projects in which he has ownership interests.

The encroachment allegations have been around a while but this week national parks service officials sought police charges. Again, Ko Tong’s above-ground and underground activities converge in an unfortunate way.

Satun, tucked quietly into Thailand’s southwest corner, is not used to such attention. Even other Thais sometimes forget Satun is there.

In Satun there is none of the jumpiness of the Southern Border Provinces militarised zones, watchfulness for strangers, army trucks roaring through towns, the endless nasty little bombings.

The province has a strong ethnic-Malay Muslim underlay but community relations are easy.

The first call to prayer sounds out pleasantly across Satun town at 4.40am, hijabs frame smiles, the army is absent, police are generally relaxed and locals say there is hardly any street crime at all. But, says a Satun businessman this week, “everybody does a little illegal business”, by which he means cross-border smuggling: fuel, cigarettes, liquor and, less playfully, migrant workers into Malaysia.

That trade has developed in the wake of — and is now thoroughly mixed up with — the boat-borne drift of Rohingya asylum-seekers from Myanmar, persecuted and desperate, unwelcome in Thailand.

But Rohingyas and a growing stream of young male Bengalis from Bangladesh do have a value, albeit dirt cheap, as illegal migrant workers in Malaysia’s black labour market, as industrial slaves for factory fishing companies and commercial plantations.

The luckier ones end up on Mal­aysia’s main Langkawi island, in construction or serving the $2.5 billion-a-year tourism industry there. Langkawi is only an hour by fast boat from Thai waters and Pajjuban has been a frequent and recognised visitor.

And well-liked, although this week people preferred to talk anonymously. “He has a reputation for being kind and generous,” says a Satun office lady whose brother is a police officer.

Says the businessman: “To me, he is a nice man, very easy to talk to. I know that he’s involving in a ‘grey business’ but I have no opinion on that.

“On Koh Lipe, if anyone wants to do business, the first person to approach would probably be him.”

For years there have been suspicions and rumours, reaching official ears in Bangkok, about Pajjuban’s smuggling activities but under the previous Yingluck Shinawatra government nothing happened.

But international allegations of shocking Thai abuses in the illegal labour trade have grown stronger and last June, a month after the military overthrew Yingluck’s government, Thailand earned the lowest grading in the US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons report.

The following week Ko Tong was called in by the military. No official action seems to have followed, although for some time he disappeared to Malaysia.

On May 1, however, Prayuth Chan-Ocha’s regime unleashed a full-scale assault on the trade, rupturing the Bay of Bengal migrant pipeline into Thailand and triggering the humanitarian emergency at sea we are now watching.

That was that for Ko Tong, it appears, although the wretched boat drifting off his island last week was a spectacular crowning effect.

Peter Alford is The Australian’s Jakarta correspondent. Additional reporting by Pailin Chitprasertsuk.