Surviving the Tak Bai Massacre: Maliki Dorok’s Story

Surviving the Tak Bai Massacre: The Story of Maliki Dorok

Surviving the Tak Bai Massacre: The Story of Maliki Dorok

Maliki Dorok found himself crammed into a sweltering truck, surrounded by the suffocating presence of men packed tightly together like logs. The men were stacked up five high, a harrowing scene of desperation. Above him, three rows of bodies pressed down, their collective breath mingling in the stifling air. Below him lay another layer of men, sprawled on the floor of the truck—exhausted, their labored panting eventually giving way to an eerie silence.

With his arms bound tightly behind him and a bullet lodged painfully in his leg, Maliki’s plight was dire. It was Ramadan, twenty years ago this week, and since sunrise, he had neither eaten nor drunk anything. The only sustenance he found was the sweat trickling down his face, a briny liquid that, he reflects now, was the only thing that kept him alive when so many others succumbed to their fates.

On October 25, 2004, the Tak Bai massacre claimed the lives of at least 78 men from Thailand’s deep south. These men perished from suffocation, heat stroke, and organ failure after security forces, tasked with dispersing a protest, forcibly loaded them onto trucks. Maliki was one of the few fortunate enough to survive this horrific ordeal. Outside a police station in the district of Tak Bai, seven other individuals were shot dead by security forces, while seven more remain unaccounted for to this day.

Now 47 years old, Maliki Dorok reflects on his experience with a heavy heart. “I often ask myself if I will ever see justice for what happened that day,” he lamented, “but I have zero percent hope.”

The tragic events of that day unfolded amid a brutal security crackdown ordered by then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand’s deep south, a region predominantly home to a Malay Muslim minority in a country where the majority practice Buddhism. The Tak Bai massacre served as a catalyst for further violence, igniting an insurgency that has plagued Thailand’s three southernmost provinces for the past two decades. This region, located roughly 200 miles from the popular, white-sand beaches of Phuket, has witnessed relentless terror, with more than 7,600 lives lost—both Buddhist and Muslim—as a result of this ongoing conflict.

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