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From The Nation, December 20, 2003
RECOGNITION DENIED
Ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia face similar cultural and economic insecurity, as they demand recognition of their rights and identities in a changing world
By Mukdawan Sakboon
The fate of Komsan Saetoen and his fellow villagers, who have been living in Lampang’s Wangnua district for several decades, took a tragic turn in 1990 when authorities declared their ancestral lands a national park. Left with no compensation, and given only arid lands, many villagers had no option other than to turn to drug trafficking. Others left to work in the city, and many suffered from physical diseases, including HIV/Aids.
“I am afraid if similar [environmental] conservation policies continue, a hundred more highland communities will face the same fate as us,” said Komsan, an ethnic Mien villager. More than five decades of highland development and other policies from the state have resulted in only two improvements in the lives of most hill-tribe villagers, in the areas of health and education, he said. “We need a guarantee from policy makers that ethnic minority people’s lives will get better, that they must have legal status and enjoy basic rights,” said Komsan. “We want a clear policy that acknowledges us as equal Thai citizens.”
Komsan’s suffering is familiar to Mongkol Rakyingprasert, a Karen villager in Chiang Mai’s Mae Wang district. He and other villagers were expelled from their land, and forbidden to farm or even to enter their land again.
“We don’t have a salary. If we can’t cultivate crops, how can we feed our families?” said Komsan.
Five decades have passed since the implementation of several highland development programmes. For several ethnic hilltribes, life in the highlands has changed for the worse. Hill-tribe communities have been condemned as destroyers of forests and cultivators of opium. The blame continues despite existing evidence to the contrary.An elderly ethnic Lua inaugurates the conferences to bless the course of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia.
“If the accusation is true, why are there still so many vast forested areas in the North of Thailand?” said researcher Chupinit Kesmanee. Citing the most recent available satellite information taken in 1996 by the Royal Forestry Department, he said the forested areas in the upper-North accounted for 44 per cent of the Kingdom’s overall forested land.
This, he said, was the result of the hill-tribe villager’s agricultural system, which involves a short period of cultivation and a long period of leaving the land fallow. This technique helps preserve the area’s forests, he added.
Hmong leader Yua Thanomrunruang of Chiang Mai’s Mae Sa Mai village said that the state-sponsored cash-crop cultivation programmes, aimed at accelerating crop yield, had also deteriorated the fertility of the land. Health risks have also now afflicted many highland farmers, and food security has become a concern, he added.
In earlier times, farmers would store their seeds. Now almost all varieties of indigenous seeds have vanished. Farmers have to buy seeds all the time, he said.
Society has yet to truly acknowledge ethnic diversity, said Charnchao Chaiyanukij, director-general of the Justice Ministry’s Rights and Liberty Protection Department.
“We accept ethnic diversity superficially as long as it means tourists’ dollars and having subjects for entertainment,” he said. “Yet, the fundamental mindset of law officers is still discriminatory against ethnic minority people.”Lecturer Anan Kanchanaphan of Chiang Mai University said that before 1960, the Thai state recognised the existence of the ethnic minorities in the highlands. After the 1960s, the integration of highland communities has also meant a rise in the insecurity of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, ethnic minority communities also struggled to negotiate with the state in areas of resource management and conservation, said Anan.
Regionally, non-recognition of ethnic minority groups is the norm and not the exception, according to several scholars, ethnic minority organisations and activists at the recent ethnic minority conference in Chiang Mai.
Organised by Chiang Mai University’s Social Research Institute and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, Trent University in Canada and the Canadian Embassy, the conference presented the results of a research project studying the impact of globalisation on 10 ethnic minority villages in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China’s Yunnan province.
Researchers have found that in most cases, globalisation, regionalism and nationalism had aggravated rather than facilitated the accommodation of ethnic diversity.
In some ethnic minority communities in Indonesia and Cambodia, decentralisation and regionalism have further complicated the conflicts between ethnic minority communities on the one hand, and the state and private local and international companies on the other, participants learned.
There are some exceptions, however. When it comes to sharing experiences of what it is like to be Hmong, modern technology does help to link several Hmong communities in different parts of the world, said researcher Prasit Leepreecha of the Social Research Institute – himself an ethnic Hmong.
Jamie Lasimbang, secretary-general of the Asia Indigenous People Pact Foundation, said that in many countries in the region, indigenous knowledge was not recognised and was considered as a hindrance to development.
Urban migration, meanwhile, has resulted in the rise in the detachment of youth from traditional social systems. Meanwhile, some provisions included in new global environmental conservation pacts do not bode well for the protection of indigenous knowledge and culture, she said.
Participants at the conference found that they had some common concerns, namely that their livelihoods and personal security were under threat and that they were unable to control changes taking place in their communities. External development policies and practices that seek to find simple answers to complex issues in the ethnic minority communities need definite reform, according to participants.
Representatives of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia denied that their farming systems destroy the environment. They also raised concerns over the impact of the global market economy on their livelihood, and the erosion of traditional knowledge. They demanded equal rights in resource management, and the recognition of their right to preserve indigenous education, traditional treatments, and other social organisations.
The regional ethnic communities agreed to share their experience in seed banks and the collection and distribution of seeds among communities. They agreed to establish regional networks on herbal medicine, whose first task would be to create herbal gardens in their communities.
While ethnic minority groups in the Philippines’ Luzon islands have experienced the adverse impacts of tourism, the ethnic minority communities in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam shared similar experiences of the adverse impacts of land reform programmes.
In Laos, researchers found that modernisation policies that include the elimination of shifting cultivation schemes and the eradication of opium production and which have led to the resettlement of Akha people in some areas, had caused radical changes in the way of life of these people.
Short-term epidemics have occurred, and competition for land and labour has intensified in the Akha community.
One of the studies presented at the conference raised the issue of the irrelevance of the schooling system for the ethnic Karen minority living in refugee camps. This educational model – seen as eurocentric – has failed to valorise traditional Karen knowledge and the Karen struggle for self-determination, according to researcher Scot O’Brien.
Despite the wide range of studies being presented, none examined the violence in Thailand’s South, the roles of ethnic women, and the problem of the lack of citizenship among the hill tribes in Thailand. This showed the failure on the part of researchers to come up with adequate explanations regarding the situation ethnic minorities now face, said Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, director of the Regional Centre for Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University.
