Informal Northern Thai Group Bulletin

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1 Informal Northern Thai Group Bulletin 12 June, MINUTES OF THE 404 TH INTG MEETING: 10 May, 2016, Citizenship among Ethnic Minorities in Northern Thailand. A Talk by Mukdawan Sakboon & Prasit Leepreecha 2. NEXT MEETING (405 TH ): Tuesday, 14 June, 2016, 7:30pm. Women Studies to Die or to Grow: Women and Gender Studies at Chiang Mai University. A Talk by Ariya Svetamra. 3. NEXT MEETING (406 TH ): Tuesday, 12 July, 2016, 7:30pm. Statue-mania in the North! Sculpting and Casting Historical Memory in Northern Thailand. A Talk by Taylor Easum. 4. INTG CONTACTS: CONVENOR - SECRETARY - WEBSITE 1. MINUTES OF THE 404 TH INTG MEETING: 10 May 2016 CITIZENSHIP AMONG ETHNIC MINORITIES IN NORTHERN THAILAND A Talk by Mukdawan Sakboon & Prasit Leepreecha 1.1. PRESENT : Mike Barraclough, Paul Chambers, Eric Eustache, Louis Gabaude, Haley Gray, Sara Gurule, Christina Hibbard, Peter Hoare, Reinhard Hohler, Katy Hopkinson, Rachael Jackson, Ken Kampe, Peter Kunstadter, Mrs. Prasit Leepreecha, Katie Lehman, Lucy McCray, Liz Meister, Walter Meyer, Madeline Monson, Patrick Morel, Ashley South, Aydan Stuart, Victoria Vorreiter, Susan B. Walker, Andrew Wasuwongse, Eric Yangseriphap. A total of 26 signed out of 29 attendants THE TALK : CITIZENSHIP AMONG ETHNIC MINORITIES IN NORTHERN THAILAND The presentation focused on the issues of legal citizenship among ethnic minority peoples in Northern Thailand. It exposed the historical backgrounds of ethnic groups and state s citizenship projects. What the two presenters have clarified includes: Why villagers didn t need citizenship in the past but eagerly want to obtain it now? Why do hundreds of thousands of them still lack of citizenship in the present? How do they struggle in order to get citizenship? And what is the current situation? Despite the diversity of ethnic groups throughout the country, Thai government has never had any policy and intention to classify them, as other neighboring countries do. Available studies, however, give some information about them. For example, the survey by Mahidol University s Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia reported over 60 dialect groups scattered throughout the country. In addition, according

2 to the self-identification of members of the ethnic groups that participate in the annual gathering of indigenous peoples in Thailand, there are about 57 ethnic groups, similar to the figure cited by state agencies like the Department of Social Development and Welfare (Ministry of Social Development and Human Security). Anthropologists, for example Charles F. Keyes (2008), have listed three categories of ethnic groups in Thailand: the true Thai, problematic Thai, and non-thai. Keyes explained the first as central Thai people and the regional Thai people. According to Keyes, the ten highland ethnic groups or hill tribes are under the category of problematic Thai, due to historical, cultural, and political contexts. Thai government uses the term hill tribes, as a common term, to refer to ten highland ethnic groups officially recognized. They are the Karen, Hmong, Mien, Lisu, Lahu, Lua, Akha, H tin, Khamu and Mlabri. Some ethnic groups such as the Lua, Karen, H tin, and Mlabri, are native groups, while the rest have migrated from Southwestern part of China into Thailand in the past 50 years or more. The total population of them, as of 2014, was 1.3 million as reported by the Department of Social Development and Welfare. Of these, about a hundred thousand has yet to get Thai citizenship. Prior to the state interest in the registration of highland villagers, authorities started with registration of livestock, opium and gun since the Second World War. The main reasons were for revenue and national security control. Later on, as part of the government s anti-communist policy, the Hill Tribe Welfare Committee was set up in The so-called development decades of the 1950s-1980s aimed to develop the highland villagers well-being with many programs and activities including the establishment of many selfhelp centers and the Hill Tribe Welfare and Development Centers in many provinces with large numbers of hill tribe populations. In addition, the Hill Tribe Research Center was also established to collect socioeconomic and cultural information and to conduct research about the hill tribes. Many schools were built in the highland areas and administered by the Border Patrol Police. As part of the highland development program, in order to prevent and control communism, the government also conducted a series of socioeconomic research with the support of the United Nations organizations, as well as several state surveys of the highland population during different periods ( ; ; ; 1999; ). The government issued personal identity cards and implemented household registration for the hill tribes in In Thailand, legal citizenship implies: 1) A Thai ID card; 2) The the registration of citizenship in the household registration document, and 3) A Thai passport. In addition, state authorities also supported the Dhammacharik Project, a Buddhist missionary program which began in From then on, hundreds of Buddhist monks have been sent to the highland villages in an effort to turn villagers into Thai people followers of Buddhism instead of adhering to their own traditional belief and practices. The project still continues today. State policy towards the legal citizenship for the hill tribes has always been changing depending on the evolution of socio-economic and political contexts. Before the State concern over the widespread of communism, the policy was one of tacit understanding (as de facto citizen). However, at the peak of state counterinsurgency programs in the 1970s, the state implemented the national integration policy in 1976 in 2

3 order to win the heart and mind of highland villagers by creating a sense of loyalty to the Thai nation. Scholars (for example Thak 1974) argued that development interventions in the highland areas were implemented along the lines of security and military considerations due to: 1) fears of the spreading communist insurgency; 2) efforts to control of narcotic drugs, and 3) prevention of forest destruction problems that state authorities have usually associated with the hill tribes. However, while the state s policy towards the hill tribes was one of integration, authorities fighting communism had made the access to citizenship much stricter for Vietnamese immigrants whom they considered to be national traitors for being communist sympathizers. Thus, the then military government issued the Revolutionary Decree 337 in 1972 which both revoked and denied citizenship rights for any person born in Thailand whose parents were temporary allowed to stay in the country or entered the kingdom illegally. Even though authorities had issued this policy as a punishment for Vietnamese immigrants and their children, this punishment policy affected all categories of ethnic minorities in the country, including those who resided in the highlands. Even when this questionable decree was dissolved later, its legacy actually continues in the current Nationality Act. Previously, highland ethnic groups didn t pay attention to citizenship or want to obtain one because they didn t need to get into contact with local state authorities. Moreover, for those who lived in remote areas, it was difficult for them to travel to district offices to ask for documents from district officials. However, now, they really need citizenship because wherever they travel or visit government officials they are required to show a Thai ID card. Importantly, elder people need the card to be eligible for the old-age pensions and for entitlement to the low-cost medical scheme when they visit the doctors at the state hospitals. Moreover, citizenship and Thai ID card are indispensable for their children schooling, for scholarships, for state education loans, as well as for the young to be able to travel to work in towns and in other provinces or abroad. Citizenship as a state apparatus for control of ethnic minorities Despite the implementation of the national integration policy and programs since the 1970s, many members of the ethnic minorities including the ten ethnic groups collectively called "the hill tribes" have been excluded from full membership of the national community. The problem of the lack of citizenship was due to many factors including but not limited to the complexity of the policy and of its implementation: complex citizenship registration procedures; long-standing stereotypical assumptions about hill tribe villagers, and the related ideas of ethnic differences. In the authorities perception, the status of the hill tribes in Thailand is neither that of "insiders" nor that of complete "outsiders" but rather something like what Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul has called the others within (Thongchai 1994). Unlike the ethnic "Thai", members of the "hill tribes" must provide evidence of eligibility. They have to lodge their applications to authorized officials with all the required documents (i.e. certification of their parents status, proof of residency, birth certificates, school records, etc.) and/or witnesses. 3

4 The prevailing negative attitude among local authorities is based on the stereotyped identity of the hill tribes as people who are involved with drug abuse, and illegal cross-border mobility. Their being a threat to national security means that local district authorities who are authorized to receive the hill tribes applications for Thai citizenship or other legal status have often redefined the criteria for citizenship eligibility. They have effectively used the complex procedures in citizenship registration as a practical tool in the social and political control of the hill tribes. In other words, citizenship consideration and approval has become a tool to require non-citizen highland ethnic people to behave like citizens. The discourse of the stereotyped ethnic identity as a threat to national security provides grounds for discrimination against the "hill tribes" and the denial of full Thai citizenship to them. In many northern provinces, a large number of hill tribe villagers remain without citizenship or any legal status, even children born in Thailand are not obtaining citizenship because their parents status remain alien or under verification. Hill tribe villagers or any ethnic minority groups without Thai citizenship have been faced with restrictions on residency, mobility, land ownership, limited access to state welfare and services, limited educational and job opportunities, and a myriad of human rights violations. They have no rights to vote, or to run in any elections. The struggle for the rights to belong Many affected highland villagers have brought their problem to the attention of the related authorizes, human rights advocates, and the public through the mass media. In a series of public protests in 1999 and 2002, members of the then Tribal Assembly joined the Northern Farmers Network (NFN) in demonstrations in front of the Chiang Mai Provincial Hall. They have also lodged their complaints with many national and international agencies. They also cooperate with civil society groups and NGOs at the national, regional, and international levels and have formed networks with their fellows in other countries in the region and the international networks. Of particular importance is the active role of the alliance of the NGOs known as the Legal Status Network Foundation (LSNF). 1 This alliance has in the past few years been working actively to push for an improvement in the citizenship policy and procedures including, to name a few of them: the acceleration of the consideration of citizenship applications; the training & sharing of information with local district authorities and central agencies; the conducting of research, as well as awareness raising campaign among the general public. Conclusion The lack of citizenship among the highland ethnic minorities is the result of state authorities concern over national security and of exploitation of stereotyped ethnic identity. This problem, if left unsolved for a long time, could lead to other also important problems of human insecurity and social immobility. In many border areas with widespread cross border trafficking of drugs and human beings, the border politics and the politics of ethnic difference have manipulated specific procedures of citizenship registration among local authorities

5 Therefore, the issue of national belonging has become a powerful apparatus for the surveillance and control of the hill villagers. Citizenship has increasingly become an instrument of control that has produced different categories of people and distinguished between "citizens" and "non-citizens". Paradoxically, the very same processes that were initially intended to integrate have been employed effectively as tools of exclusion and regulation. References cited Thak Chaloemtiarana The Sarit Regime, : The Formative Years of Modern Thai Politics. PhD diss., Cornell University. Thongchai Winichakul The others within, in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States. Andrew Turton (ed.) Richmond: Curzon Press. Keyes, Charles Ethnicity and the Nation-States of Thailand and Vietnam, in Challenging the Limits: Indigenous Peoples of the Mekong Region, Prasit Leepreecha, Don McCaskill, and Kwanchewan Buadaeng, eds. Chiang Mai: Mekong Press. Pp NEXT MEETING (405 TH ) - Tuesday, 14 June, 2016, 7:30pm WOMEN STUDIES TO DIE OR TO GROW: WOMEN AND GENDER STUDIES AT CHIANG MAI UNIVERSITY A Talk by Ariya Svetamra The Talk: Women s Studies programs in universities have been in crisis mode, deeply affected by the lack of official support. They are targeted as a problematic unit for being a financial burden, not as lucrative as trendy subjects that cater to demands from the business/industrial sector. This talk will reflect upon the question of sustainability of Thai Women s Studies programs and the work of academics and women activists. It will question the problems that have brought about this crisis as well as propose resolutions. The Speaker: Ariya Svetamra is currently lecturer at Department of Women s Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University. She received her Ph.D. in Social Science from Chiang Mai University. Her focus is women s studies research, i.e. women market vendors, women s perspectives on the underground lottery and ethnic minority women struggling for nationality. She has also participated in research on popular religions and spirit mediumship in contemporary northern Thailand. 2. NEXT MEETING (406 TH ) - Tuesday, 12 July, 2016, 7:30pm STATUE-MANIA IN THE NORTH! SCULPTING AND CASTING HISTORICAL MEMORY IN NORTHERN THAILAND A Talk by Taylor Easum The Talk: Memory has been a boom industry recently. Both in terms of academic work in the field, and in terms of more popular acts of memorialization, monument-building, commemoration, heritage preservation, and nostalgia, much ink has been spilled over the contested memories of the past. In Thailand, the late 20th 5

6 century saw a burst of memorialization in the form of statuary monuments, a boom described by Grant Evans as Statuemania. This near obsession with building statuary monuments reached northern Thailand as well, and produced a number of monuments in Chiang Mai alone, including statues of Kawila, Khruba Sriwichai, and the famous Three Kings in the city center. By examining both the histories told by these monuments, and the histories behind their creation, I hope to offer a glimpse into the erasure of memories and histories of resistance and local identity in the (internally-)colonial frontier of Northern Thailand. The Speaker: Taylor Easum is Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where he teaches classes on global history, colonialism and empire, and Southeast Asian history. This summer, he is leading a study abroad program in Chiang Mai focusing on global empire throughout Southeast Asia. His research focuses on the urban history of northern Thailand and neighboring regions, as well as comparative colonialism and regional identity in Southeast Asia. 5. List of FUTURE INTG MEETINGS Tuesday, 14 June, 2016, 7:30 pm at the Alliance Française, Chiang Mai : To die or to grow? Women Studies and Gender Studies at Chiang Mai University. A Talk by Ariya Svetamra. Tuesday, 12 July, 2016, 7:30 pm at the Alliance Française, Chiang Mai : Statue-mania in the North! Sculpting and Casting Historical Memory in Northern Thaïland. A Talk by Taylor Easum. 6. INTG CONTACTS : Convenor - Secretary - Website 1) Convenor : Rebecca Weldon : <rebecca.weldon@gmail.com>. Mobile : ) Secretary : Louis Gabaude : <gabaudel@yahoo.com>. Mobile : ) INTG Website : Clarence Shettlesworth: 6

7 Informal Northern Thai Group (INTG) 31 years of Talks! Women and Gender Studies at Chiang Mai University A Talk by Ariya Svetamra Tuesday, 14 June 2016, 7:30 pm At The Alliance Française - Chiang Mai 131, Charoen Prathet Road - Opposite EFEO

8 Informal Northern Thai Group (INTG) 31 years of Talks! SCULPTING AND CASTING HISTORICAL MEMORY IN NORTHERN THAILAND A Talk by Taylor EASUM Tuesday, 12 July 2016, 7:30 pm At The Alliance Française - Chiang Mai 131, Charoen Prathet Road, (Opposite EFEO) 2

THE HILL TRIBES OF NORTHERN THAILAND: DEVELOPMENT IN CONFLICT WITH HUMAN RIGHTS - REPORT OF A VISIT IN SEPTEMBER 1996

THE HILL TRIBES OF NORTHERN THAILAND: DEVELOPMENT IN CONFLICT WITH HUMAN RIGHTS - REPORT OF A VISIT IN SEPTEMBER 1996 Contents Summary A background Perceptions, prejudice and policy Cards and identity