A tale of two newspapers: Black May 13 years later

BLACK MAY REMEMBERED: One woman's plea for justice - The Nation, May 17, 2005
...A 71-year-old woman yesterday pleaded with authorities to determine the fate of her son, who disappeared after the Black May incident in 1992.
Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the incident.
"I am an old woman and I want to perform a funeral for my son before I die," Sangwian Phomuang said.
Sangwian said she and scores of her son's surviving relatives could not bring the incident to a close, because authorities had still not concluded their reports on what had happened to the hundreds of people who disappeared following the pro-democracy uprising...
State Enterprise Labour Association general secretary Somsak Kosaisuk said a dictatorship still existed in this country, but had transformed itself into a "capitalist dictatorship".
In this system, he said, capitalists had taken absolute control over the country.
"But money is used as a weapon instead of guns,'' he said...

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Mum still hopes to see missing son - Bangkok Post, May 18, 2005
...As a mother in her late 60s, Sangwian Phomuang says her only hope is to find her son who disappeared in the 1992 Black May uprising, either dead or alive...
According to the Interior Ministry, a total of 38 people went missing on that day on top of the 44 killed on the streets of Bangkok. However, civic groups said the number of the missing could be as high as 50. They believed the authorities at the time had disposed of the bodies of some slain protesters to hide the real casualty figures...
" Although the number of missing people here is not large compared to in other countries, the severity of the problem is that none of them has ever been found.'' In other countries some of the missing were found dead, he said, but that was "better'' than not finding them at all, Mr Jaran said...
Mr Jaran said in some other countries there was a law that encouraged kidnappers to surrender in exchange for reduced penalties. If Thailand had a law like that, it would be easier to trace missing people.
Pibhop Thongchai, adviser to the Campaign for Popular Democracy, said disappearance cases here remained largely unsolved because state officials were either the culprits or their accomplices in most cases.