Recently our article “Northern Thailand’s Specter of Eviction” was published by Critical Asian Studies (40:3, 373-398). In that piece we discussed the evidence of village evictions in northern Thailand. This is, as we point out, an enduring theme in academic and activist writings across the region. However we found that the strong emphasis on evictions is not supported by the evidence.
In the Critical Asian Studies article we outline the available evidence for recent evictions in northern Thailand. Here is a brief extract:
Our search of primary and secondary sources uncovers only a very small number of cases of eviction in the uplands of northern Thailand over the past twenty years:
Akha and Lahu villages in Chiang Rai Province: A number of Akha and Lahu villages in Chiang Rai Province were burned and their inhabitants deported to Burma, according to press reports. Some of these incidents appear to have been linked to a major watershed rehabilitation and rural development project closely associated with the Thai queen. Later expansion of the project led to the seizure of land from three Akha villages in the same area. …
Doi Luang in Lampang Province: Another famous, and much discussed, case took place in 1994 when four upland villages in Lampang Province were moved out of the newly declared Doi Luang National Park, despite claims that they had lived there for forty years prior to the declaration. … National park officials started putting pressure on them to move from about 1990. Development and welfare budgets to the village were cut; new house construction was forbidden; agricultural expansion was curtailed; farmers leaving the village to sell produce were harassed and maintenance work on the road to the village was halted. Considerable funds were spent on establishing a relocation site but farmers found that the agricultural land was poor quality and incapable of supporting their expectations of a reasonable livelihood. …
Tungpaka village: In 1999, journalist Julian Gearing wrote about the destruction of the Lahu village of Tungpaka in Chiang Mai Province by forestry department officials. In this “unreported raid” on a small Lahu village “thirteen houses, as well as crops were destroyed…leaving 60 people homeless.” Gearing quotes one Tungpaka resident as saying that the village was evicted so that the area could be cleared and a resort built. Gearing goes on to state that the villagers “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 village.” Plodprasop Suraswadi of the RFD (mentioned above) publicly denied that forestry officials had played any part in the destruction of Tungpaka.
Hmong villages in Nan: Some of the most potent symbols for the vulnerability of upland residents have come from incidents in Pua district in Nan Province. In mid 2000 lowland villagers complaining about downstream water contamination, destroyed the orchards, field huts, and sprinkler systems of Hmong farmers who were accused of having established their orchards within the boundary of a national park. Forestry officials reportedly played a part in the raids: “Witnesses reported that the demonstrators were also guarded by over 200 border patrol policeman, who were fully armed with machine guns. All of the demonstrators were provided with machine saws, fuel and food.”
Lahu in Lampang Province: In 2003, three hundred Lahu were forcibly evicted from four villages in Pha Thai Cave National Park in Lampang Province. Local authorities justified the eviction on the basis the villages had served as staging points for drug smugglers.
Harassment and arrest: There have also been reports of the arrest and legal harassment of villagers farming in conservation forest zones. Pinkaew quotes a Northern Development Foundation statistic that “in the year 1998 alone, there were more than 20 cases of people being charged as ‘illegal encroachers’ by forestry officials in Chiang Mai.” The village of Pang Daeng in Chiang Mai Province is a prominent case of legal harassment. Pang Daeng residents have been arrested and charged with conservation forest encroachment on a number of occasions since the late 1980s. According to one account, up to twenty villagers were detained for three years in the early 1990s. A later case brought in 1998 was dismissed when the villagers satisfied the court that they had not destroyed the forest. In 2004 almost fifty villagers were arrested and faced similar forest destruction charges. There are similar cases of Lawa arrested, reportedly for taking firewood from the forest.
…
Overall our conclusion is that upland residents in northern Thailand currently face a very low risk of actual eviction. The cases we summarize above probably account for fewer than five thousand people over a twenty-year period (or about 0.5 percent of the estimated upland population living in forest reserve areas).
We acknowledge that this list may be incomplete. To continue the conversation about this issue we would like to ask New Mandala readers if they have evidence of other village evictions from northern Thailand (upper and lower north). We are hoping to put together a consolidated list of cases where villages in the north have been forced to relocate. We recognise that this is also an issue in other parts of the country and if our current data collection proves productive we will be expanding our efforts to other regions. In order to keep the task manageable we are interested, at this stage, in cases from 1980 onwards.
If you want to contribute some data it would be good to include information on the following:
- Province, district and village (where known);
- Date or dates of eviction;
- Number of people, or number of households, evicted;
- Reason for the eviction;
- Government (or non-government) agency or agencies involved;
- Background to the case; and
- Any sources (online or otherwise) that provide further details.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Matthew McDaniel // Sep 24, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The list that you mention in regards to the Akha up above is WAY underestimated.
In 13 years I documented massive village forced relocations. Many many villages. The cases you mentioned about villages being burned are around Mae Chan I believe in the early 90’s or late 80’s. There was video made of the events. But the forced relocations and compromised land rights are massive and effect nearly every village out there. Even villages that now are in the same place lost massive amounts of land that was then put into mono crop farms of one kind or another by Royal Thai forestry.
In the case of Hooh Yoh the Queen of Thailand took 5,000 acres in one swoop, almost the entire land base of three villages and 1500 people.
But the land around Doi Tung was a massive land grab as well, in the early 90’s it was Akha and Lisu and Lahu and it has all been taken, heavy penalties levied for using forest products and villagers reduce to small labor people on what now is a massive royal estate.
Joh Hoh Akha.
Huai Kaew Akha
Hooh Yoh Akha
Pah Nmm Akha
Soi Ah Kah Akha
Pai a Pai Akha
Bpah Mah Hahn Akha and Lahu
Hua Mae Kom Akha
Hooh Mah Akha
Hooh Yoh Lisa Akha
Mae Chan Luang
These are just a few who lost all of their land or a large portion of it or were forcibly relocated, there have to be at least 100 villages affected in this method. Anywhere you see pine now, that land was taken from the hill tribe and hill tribe were forced to plant pine on their own land and then leave the area.
The list goes on and on and on. The Thais depend on no one being back on these dusty tracks with a GPS marking the old village lands, where the villagers are not at, and what reductions and poverty happened. We are talking tens of thousands of acres of rice and farm lands.
Matthew McDaniel
The Akha Heritage Foundation
Ride for Freedom
2 Nicholas Farrelly // Sep 24, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Thanks Matthew,
We understand that you have been following these Akha cases for a long time, and we certainly appreciate your input. What we are really interested in is the specifics of these cases you mention. How many people were relocated? When? Do you have a map that plots out the relevant areas? What reasons were given for the evictions (counter-narcotics, environmental, etc, etc)?
Where villages have not been relocated, but where land has been confiscated, we would also be keen to see more data. How much land in each case? Which specific villages (or even land-holders within the villages)? How was this justified?
Best wishes to all,
Nich
3 Jean-Philippe Leblond // Sep 25, 2008 at 9:24 am
As I said previously, it’s a great idea, especially if dams are included. RID and EGAT can displaced much more people per intervention than RFD and DNP (35 000 people for the Pasak Cholasit Dam alone)
I’m completing a similar review of literature. I define a “case” by the year and area affected (so there are 2 cases for Thung Yai Naresuan). For the period 1986-2008, I’ve got so far 22 cases where relocation/eviction/rapatriation occurred (excluding RID, EGAT, etc. projects) and 9 where plans were drawn but (a) were later abandoned or (b) I couldn’t confirm they were actually implemented.
Total displaced people is at least 27 000 people (assuming 4 pers by hh).
There are two clear leaders among Thailand’s PM. Out of the 22 relocation/eviction cases I am aware of, Prem was the PM in 9 cases ( 41%), Chuan in 8 cases (36%), Thaksin, Banharn and Chatichai each in 1 case (5%). In 4 cases, there was no clear dates and I couldn’t determine under whose PM the decision was taken. These results nicely illustrate the fact that “pressure of conservation” was reduced during the Thaksin era.
The compilation and analysis is not perfect yet. By Oct 10 I’ll have my excel table translated and all sources well listed.
4 Johpa Deumlaokeng // Sep 29, 2008 at 4:03 am
My own observations over the past 25 years is in agreement that eviction is not a high risk for highland folks, but that the hill folks probably have the same risk as other rural inhabitants when the intersection of local politics and greed conspire to create economic opportunity for specific individuals who are far higher up the food chain.
I remember one case of an Akha village being emptied and the inhabitants being trucked to the Burmese border back in the mid 1980s. The village was inside Chiang Rai province, north of the Kok River. I was living in the nearby Amphoe Thaton, Chiang Mai Province at the time. I apologize I do not remember the name of the settlement, the names of the Akha settlements often being the name of the titular village headman.
What was notable was that the eviction occurred around October, the harvest season. The Akha inhabitants were simply loaded into trucks and taken to the border and ordered to walk into Burma. The evictors, enabled by Chiang Rai’s provincial governor, were not military per se, but members of local village defense forces, in other words Thai villagers, who had been well fortified with lao khao (cheap Thai whiskey) and were the ones who made off with the fruits of the harvest and the few household goods as payments for their efforts, along with the free drinks.
On the other hand, similar Akha villages at that time did not get evicted. I do not know what motivated the governor of Chiang Rai to evict that specific village. And, at about the same period of time, the Thai government established an Akha refugee village at the small Forestry Camp of Huai Sala, along the main road from Thaton to Mae Salong, not far from the well studied Shan village of Mok Cham along the Kok River.
Look around the highway outside of Thaton going towards Mok Cham and you see many citrus orchards where there once were but small farmers who were similarly evicted from their admittedly poorly documented lands. I have no proof, but I believe the brutal murder of my friend, the former Thaton district head, Kamnaan Seng, was connected to these land issues.
Where there are land issues, where there is local politics and greed intersecting, then evictions, the Thai version of eminent domain, seem to occur, but I have not seen this happen systematically.
5 Leif Jonsson // Sep 29, 2008 at 2:39 pm
There were a number of settlements in the higher forest areas of Kamphengphet in the late 1970s. These appear to have been facilitated by some section of the Thai armed forces, in an effort to conquer the forest (and thus preclude insurgent camps from the CPT). Mien and Hmong people were there well into the 1980s but were evicted or at least seriously harassed during the 1980s and at least until 1990. Villages were not “official” and it is hard sometimes to get village names. The reasons for eviction were a combination of the political (after CPT surrenders, there was no need for this human shield or whatever to call it), the geopolitical (a good number of the Mien at least were from Laos and had come over in 1973, people who arrived in 1973 were in many cases not accepted in refugee camps, “nothing was happening in Laos at the time”), ecological (you people are destroying trees with your farming methods), and border-work (some Hmong had shot at the Thai military, some people got killed, and road-work stalled. The settlement at the end of the road was known as Thang-Sut, those still further were considered in the forest — so, both extension of national control and an attempt to weed out people from Laos). The closest I have come to identifying villages is that many were considered part of Khlong-Lan, which is now a municipality (Khlong-Lan-Phatthana) and I think also the name of a district. So, somewhere around ten to twenty villages (for sure, perhaps a lot more), that had been officially accommodated and then through the 1980s were largely erased. Many of the inhabitants are in the US (as refugees). Evidence in the public domain: interview p.91 in Prasit Leepreecha, Yanyong Trakanthamrong, and Wisut Leksombun (2547) Mien: Lak-lai Chiwit Jak Khun-khao Su Muang. Chiangmai: Social Research Institute. That interview says there was a mass migration from all over Thailand to this area in 2524-25 (1981-82) when the gov’t coulde guarantee people’s safety after CPT surrenders, and evictions in ‘27 (1984). From what I have learned, people started moving in much sooner, and it was officially encouraged.
6 Jean-Philippe Leblond // Oct 7, 2008 at 6:58 am
Could the displacement of population out of legal forest lands be more frequent in the future? Since sept 2006, there have been several eviction/relocation plans (some voluntary) and at least 47 new protected areas. It would be very interesting to know if state officials were able (or will be able) to implement the plans for relocation and if the newly demarcated areas involved eviction or relocation.
Some recent relocation plans
1) Sept 06 [before the coup]: DNP announced the relocation of 88 hh people out of Ta Phraya NP. The population is strongly opposed. Late September 2006: officials announced that there’s nothing they can do at the moment to force them to move out.
sources: Anon (2006) and Paengnoy (2006)
2) Expansion of the Tenasserim Corridor (an Asian Development Bank project)
2004: Project to expand PA made public. It has already been approved by Natural Resources and Environment Minister Suvit Khunkitti, who ordered a survey of the region.
Dec 2006: Director of DNP announced that no evictions will occur as part of this expansion.
Aug 2007: The expansion of Sai Yok and Chalerm Rattanakosin NP is announced. This will enclose 34 villages. Contrary to the previous statement, it is said that people residing in watershed areas will be evicted (but not other villagers).
[According to the DNP website, the expansion has not occurred yet]
Sources: Wipatayotin (2006), Chongcharoen (2004 & 2007), on the villages involved see the ADB project document.
3) June 2007: The Queen expresses her wish that the residents of 8 villages in Mae Hong Son and Tak agree to move to “borderwatch villages”. Justification: fight against drug traffic; protect forests. The project under the motto of “people and forest can live together ”
4) Omkoi voluntary relocation
More than 200 karen individuals from Omkoi district have reportedly accepted to be relocated in the lowlands (5 rai of agricultural land per househod). Official Justification: villagers reside in watershed area as well as the need to fight against encroachment and drug production.
source: Meesubkwang (2008)
New PAs (NP + WS only)
There was only 1 new PA between 2001 and 2006 ( it occurred at the beginning of Thaksin’s premiership). Since his departure: 7 new PAs were demarcated in 2007 and at least 18 so far in 2008 (but perhaps as many as 40). Did land confiscation and population displacement occurred in those newly demarcated areas? Anyone?
The number 40 comes from: total number of NP in 2008 according to Anon (2008) – total number of NP in 2007.
Source: Anon (2008) and Chiangmai Mail reporters (2008). See Anon (2008) for the name of 17 new PA. To those add Phu Sooi Dao NP .
References:
Anon (2006) Families to be moved away from parklands. The Nation, (September 14).
Anon (2008) Services at National Parks to Be Upgraded. Tivarati News, (Sept 4).
Chiangmai Mail Reporters (2008) Chiang Mai national parks to host private businesses. Chiangmai Mail, 7 (37 (sept 9-setp 15)).
Chongcharoen P (2004) 300,000 rai of forest reserves to be declared national parks. Bangkok Post (27 septembre).
Chongcharoen P (2007) Big addition to national parks. Bangkok Post, (August 29).
Meesubkwang S (2008) Concern expressed about forced relocation of Karen villagers. Chiangmai Mail, 7 (40).
Nanuam W & Charoenpo A (2007) Queen urges voluntary hilltribe resettlement. Bangkok Post (June 30).
Paengnoy A (2006) We’re staying put, residents proclaim. The Nation (October 4, 2006). ;
Wipatayotin A (2006) Asian experts in bid to link fragmented forest Bangkok Post (12 décembre).
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