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OCTOBER 29, 1999 VOL. 25 NO. 43
The Struggle for the Highlands
Accused of endangering the environment, Thailand's tribespeople face eviction and an uncertain future
By JULIAN GEARING Northern Thailand
 An Akha woman stands by as officials prepare to set in motion another tree-planting exercise on cultivated land Yvan Cohen for Asiaweek |
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Things are not as they might appear in the highlands of Thailand. Forget the tourist-brochure images of smiling tribespeople bargaining with visitors over the sale of ethnic artifacts and baubles. Where the tour buses and trekkers seldom venture, a form of highland cleansing is beginning to take shape - and it is happening by stealth.
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Why? The Thai authorities claim the mountain people are wrecking the ecological balance of the region. They are accused of using slash-and-burn agricultural practices, cutting down trees on public land to plant cash crops such as lychees and cabbages. As the number of highlanders grows and as the plots they cultivate increase in size, they are draining the watershed and depriving lowland farmers of vital irrigation. Plodprasop Suraswasdi, director-general of the Royal Forestry Department, says no one should underestimate the severity of the risk posed by the tribespeople's activities. "This is a case of do or die for the country," he maintains.
Plodprasop was at the head of a column of 10,000 forestry rangers, soldiers and lowlanders who on Aug. 21 marched through the hills and onto Paklang village land in Nan province. Trampling through the lychee and rice plantations of the 3,000 Hmong people, they planted tree saplings - the first of a series of reforestation exercises designed to return the area to its original state. "Five years from now, we will have closed this land," says Plodprasop. He insists he will not bar access to the highlands, but it is clear there will be no more cultivation.
At face value, the environmental concerns seem sound. Damage is clearly being done and farmers downstream are suffering as a result. But support groups and academics say what is going on has as much to do with commercial greed as it does with reforestation. They claim the highlands are targeted by timber companies, mining and quarrying interests, the tourist industry and land-hungry lowlanders. "Paklang is the first domino," warns a member of a non-government organization working with the hill people. "Once that domino falls, smaller villages will be easier to clear."
Says one of the villagers forced out of Tungpaka: "The reason the forestry officials and lowlanders burned our village was to clear the area so that a tourist resort can be built at a waterfall nearby." Whether this is true or not, it is clear the evicted families live in fear they may now be ousted from their refuge at the foot of the hills, an hour-and-a-half's walk from the remains of their 60-year-old settlement. They don't trust a pact signed with local officials allowing them to stay in their new location if they don't push for criminal charges against the people they know burned their homes and crops.
Half of Thailand's estimated 800,000 highlanders live in limbo, colorful curiosities represented in tourist brochures but deprived of the rights promised them under Thailand's constitution. Thirteen hilltribe minorities are officially recognized - notably the Akha, Karen, Hmong, Lahu, Lisu and Mien people. Most of their members have been in Thailand for generations or have immigrated principally from Myanmar and Laos over the past 50 years. However, willful neglect or corruption means hundreds of thousands of them have either been denied registration for an ID card or have been given a blue "alien" card, restricting the holder either to a province or just a district, and making him or her an easy target for police extortion. "It's like being in jail," says one hilltribe activist.
The key to that "jail" may lie in the hands of Deputy Prime Minister Bhichai Rattakul, who stresses the need to register the hilltribes. "It is a problem we have ignored for too long," he says. "We should have registered people for citizenship a long time ago." Earlier this year, Bhichai began pushing governors in the 22 relevant provinces to send out teams to register members of minority ethnic groups - a necessary first step on the road to Thai citizenship. He says: "We want the hilltribe people to be able to fully participate in the running of the country."
Registration of hilltribes is logical in that it will make it easier for the authorities to clamp down on the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants slipping over the borders from Myanmar and Laos. Hilltribe activists accept this, but express fears that those already holding ID cards may be deprived of their Thai citizenship if the registration program produces evidence their parents were not born in the country.
Frustration spilled over in May when 3,000 members of hilltribes rallied in an unprecedented three-week protest in front of the Chiang Mai governor's office, calling for citizenship, land rights and an end to the evictions. Their militancy was an eye-opener for Meeju Morleaku, 31, an Akha hilltribe woman, who not too long before had been helping the Tourism Authority of Thailand promote hilltribes as a tourist attraction. She says: "One moment, I am dancing in Bangkok for a tourist presentation on hilltribes; the next, I find myself having to stand up for my relatives who have been forced out of their homes."
The rally unnerved the local authorities, particularly Chiang Mai governor Pravit Sisophon, who had to endure endless heckling and at one point a threat to storm his office. The demonstration was finally broken up after nightfall on May 19 by a contingent of police and about 1,000 flare-throwing forestry rangers. The evictions continued.
Rasamee, a 20-year-old Karen woman, tells how soldiers arrived in her village in Prachuab Khiri Khan province at dawn on July 15. She says she and 350 others were forced out of their homes and made to trek 40 km over dense, forested mountains and swollen rivers to a refuge near the border with Myanmar. Even though she was nine months pregnant, she fled into the forest after the soldiers said that those without ID cards would be expelled across the frontier. Alone and frightened, with no medical care, she gave birth to a baby boy. The infant died. The villagers were later allowed to return to their homes - only to be evicted again last month.
A Paklang villager gestures at the houses of the forestry rangers next to his lychee plantation. "The authorities gave us these lychee trees a decade ago," he says. "The forest rangers have watched us tend them for years. Now, suddenly, they are planting trees on our land and saying we can't use it anymore. Our fathers helped the government fight the communists in these hills. This is how we are now being repaid." Activist Naruemol Paiboonsithikul, who has been assisting the villagers, says the authorities mistakenly believe all forest dwellers destroy the environment. "They don't care to do research into how the forest people live and how many of them have managed their natural resources."
The treatment of highlanders has received only muted coverage in the Thai press, but it attracted international attention at the Seventh International Conference on Thai studies in Amsterdam July 6. Dressed in her Akha costume, Meeju told the 100 foreign delegates: "All we ask is equal rights with Thai citizens. We have long suffered discrimination because we lack citizenship." Speaking at the conference and also on a BBC World Service Thai-language program, Thai academic Chayan Vaddhanaphuti criticized official attitudes toward hilltribe people: "The authorities are using citizenship as a weapon to deny forest land to people, saying they cannot give land to 'non-Thais.' This has become nationalistic in nature, highly politicized. Influential business people want the land, so hilltribe people have to move out." Just days after the academic symposium, Chayan and another delegate received blood-spattered letters and phone calls threatening them with death. Two other academics have subsequently received death threats.
Governor Pravit said he was outraged by Chayan's "barking outside Thailand" and accused him and the other delegates of trying to "sell the country" to foreigners. Pravit called the hilltribes a "problem" and urged (real) Thais to close ranks to fight the threat from "aliens" who "take our jobs and destroy our watersheds, our resources." (The governor declined to be interviewed for this report.)
In Chiang Mai, hilltribe people are often looked down upon, particularly the Akha women selling trinkets to tourists - as Meeju used to do - or those crammed into a growing slum on the outskirts of the city. With no national ID card, youngsters from minority groups have poor employment opportunities. Some slip into the illicit economy, selling drugs or, in the case of girls, being forced by circumstances or their parents into prostitution in seedy brothels. Meeju says that for hilltribe children lucky enough to make it as far as high school or university, the taunts can be crushing. She explains: "They get called names - 'meo,' for example, which can mean Hmong but can also mean cat. The suggestion is that they are dirty and stupid, and this represses pride in their culture. A lot of students ask themselves, 'Why did I have to be born a hilltribe person?'"
This discrimination seems at odds with Thailand's reputation for tolerance. Though the country has had its fair share of problems, it has largely done well in its assimilation of its many ethnic groups - in contrast, for example, to the racist attacks against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia during and after the overthrow last year of president Suharto, or the institutionalized inferior status afforded Chinese in Brunei, Muslims in Myanmar and Hmong in Laos and Vietnam.
Take the case of Wang Kay, 70, an ethnic Chinese and a respected figure in the hill trading town of Mae Salong on the Myanmar border. Formerly a member of the Kuomintang Army, he fled to Thailand in the 1960s from China and helped the Thais in their war against communism. "The Thai authorities allowed me to obtain an ID card and to settle in Thailand," he says. "Now my children are unable to speak Chinese and my son works in the capital as an accountant for Bangkok Bank." Asks Meeju: "Why are we not treated the same way? Why are we considered second class?"
Although hilltribe evictions are not new - incidents have pockmarked the past three decades, throwing thousands out of their villages - the current campaign is unprecedented in that it is part of an established political and environmental agenda. So far the numbers affected are low. But for those who have lost their homes and livelihood - without compensation, consultation or alternative offers - things could hardly be bleaker. Forbidden to work the land, they will probably be forced to join the swelling ranks of the underprivileged seeking work in the cities.
For those left behind and fearing the same fate, waiting for the sound of feet marching up through the valley can be a very special form of terror.
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