Stuffed Into Trucks, 78 Thai Protesters Died. Their Killers Are Still Free.

Maliki Dorok was crammed into a sweltering truck in the middle of a stack of men, piled up five high like logs.

Three rows were on top of him, pressed so close together that he inhaled the air they breathed out. Below him was another layer of prone men, their panting lapsing over the hours into a terrible quietude.

Mr. Maliki’s arms were bound behind his back. A bullet was lodged in his leg. It was Ramadan 20 years ago this week, and Mr. Maliki had not eaten or drunk anything since daybreak. He licked the sweat oozing down his face, the briny liquid, he says now, the only thing that kept him alive when so many others died.

On Oct. 25, 2004, at least 78 men from Thailand’s deep south died of suffocation, heat stroke and organ failure after security forces breaking up a protest stacked them onto trucks, Mr. Maliki among them. Seven others were shot to death by security forces outside the police station in the district of Tak Bai. Seven more remain missing.

The deaths occurred amid a security crackdown ordered by then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand’s deep south, which is home to a Malay Muslim minority in a majority Thai Buddhist nation. The Tak Bai massacre helped catalyze more violence: For the past 20 years, Thailand’s three southernmost provinces — roughly 200 miles from the popular, white-sand beaches of Phuket — have been terrorized by an insurgency that has claimed more than 7,600 lives, both Buddhist and Muslim.