Thai hilltribes battling discrimination

By Teena Amrit Gill
September 1, 2001

CHIANG MAI - An April report by a Thai newspaper accusing one of the country's hilltribe minorities of planning to break away and form their independent state came as no surprise to these ethnic groups.

For Thailand's ethnic minorities, the report by the Nakorn Chiang Rai newspaper in northern Chiang Rai province was a continuation of increasingly racist and unfounded attacks by the mainstream media. Looked down upon by mainstream society for years and stereotyped as opium cultivators, drug peddlers, forest destroyers, illiterate and "uncivilized", the 900,000 ethnic hilltribe people of Thailand have time and again had to deal with unprovoked racist attacks and accusations.

The newspaper article helped in further perpetuating these "myths" by claiming that the Hmong community, Thailand's second largest hilltribe community after the Karen, planned to declare autonomy in the north of the country within 20 years, say academics and social critics. Incensed, the Hmong decided to file charges against the paper at a local police station, and demanded that Chiang Rai Governor Samrerng Boonyoprakorn look into the matter.

Despite this, few expect that much will come out of the case, and it will, like so much that is controversial and too difficult to digest, quietly fade away from media attention. The growing use by the media of mainstream definitions and views about minority populations, especially since Thailand's economic meltdown in mid-'97, runs parallel to discriminatory policies by the state toward hilltribe populations, say critics.

Less than a third of the ethnic hilltribe people in this country of 70 million people have failed to receive Thai citizenship, despite having lived in the country for centuries. They are subject to continuous pressures to move out of their homelands in the mountains and forests, give up their traditional way of life and language, and adopt the Thai "way of life" and religion in this mainly Buddhist country. Without citizenship, they have no right to land, to vote, or to basic social services.

But this was not always the case, says Dr Chayan Vaddanaputti, a lecturer in political science at the University of Chiang Mai in this northern Thai city and a specialist in ethnic studies. "Earlier, they were seen by ordinary people in the lowlands as 'friends' and trading partners in a mutually symbiotic relationship between the hills and the valleys," he explains. But growing environmental problems after Thailand's national social and economic development plans took off in the late '60s and early '70s, and an influx of Vietnamese migrants during the Vietnam War changed this relationship forever, he adds.

Then they became the enemies, the "other", he explains. "The demonization and criminalization of ethnic minorities, and the perpetuation of the myth that they are non-Thai, has been embedded since then in Thai textbooks, in Thai history and in the mainstream media," says Chayan.

Indeed, activists who met in Bangkok last month ahead of the World Conference Against Racism listed Thailand's treatment of ethnic minorities and hilltribes as one of several examples showing how "racism, racial discrimination and intolerance continue to be practiced in various countries in Southeast Asia".

"The story that goes is that the hilltribe people are migrants and refugees," explains Paul Hsein Twa, an ethnic Karen student and activist who lives in the city of Chiang Mai. "This is written in the history textbooks. So they don't have the right to be citizens - especially because they are seen as being uncivilized and illiterate, destroying the natural environment because of shifting cultivation practices, and growing opium," he says.

Thailand's forest cover dwindled from more than 60 percent a few decades ago to less than 27 percent today. Although much of this is blamed on the highland hilltribes, it is convenient for ignoring the role of large timber companies and state-funded activities like road-building in environmental degradation, academics and social scientists say.

Up until the mid-'60s, opium was also an important cash crop in the uplands, especially for the Hmong community, a people with a long, rich history found today in southern China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. But an aggressive program of crop substitution by the government and the destruction of existing poppy fields has since then left almost no land under opium cultivation.

While it is true that most hilltribe people are "migrants", many of them moved across the Salween river from neighboring Myanmar into Thailand, or from southern China more than four centuries ago. Does this not give them right to citizenship, ask people from minority backgrounds and academics. After all, are not the Thais a mixture of various migrant groups like the Khmer, Laotian, Yunnanese and Mon, they ask.

"Of course this policy [of discrimination against hilltribe communities] is racist," exclaims Pornpen Ksongkaosonkiate of the human rights NGO Forum-Asia in Bangkok. "This is the policy of a dominant group toward the minorities. Although the law may not be literally discriminatory, the practice is. If you have no identification card you cannot even open a small shop, or go to school," Pornpen explains.

Though Thailand's track record on education, health and other social indicators is quite good on the whole, the statistics on hilltribe people give another side to the story. Not only have close to 60 percent of hilltribe people never attended school, according to the 1997 government Tribal Health Survey, but levels of malnutrition are almost twice as high as the average for the general population. More than 45 percent of hilltribe people's incomes are seen to be insufficient to satisfy even basic needs.

With little education and few income-earning opportunities, many hilltribe women have joined Thailand's sex industry. It is estimated that more than 10 percent of sex workers in Thailand are hilltribe women - and that 80 percent of them are HIV positive, said the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in a 1997 report.

While their form of swidden, or slash-and-burn, cultivation used to allow them to be food sufficient, pressures to move out of the forests by the forestry department and incentives to cultivate cash rather than subsistence crops have increased the hilltribes' vulnerability to the forces of the market and nature.

In August of last year, in the northern Thai province of Nan, these mainstream perceptions about the ethnic hilltribes turned violent when lowland farmers accused the upland Hmong of destroying the forests and sensitive watershed areas and causing a severe water shortage downstream. Some 3,000 farmers raided and burned down more than 60 hectares of fruit orchards belonging to the Hmong, the most economically successful of all the hilltribe groups.

"There is an immediate need for a mechanism whereby hilltribe people can appeal against racial discrimination in Thai society," explains Pornpen. "This issue is still not openly spoken about but itis time that it is brought out in to the open so all ethnic minority groups can have the same rights as Thais."

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