News1: THAILAND: Hill Tribes Important as a Commodity, Not as People
CHIANG RAI, Thailand, Apr 10 2002 (IPS) - Ayo risks being arrested if he leaves his village, nestled in the gentle slopes along Thailand’s hilly northern border, for a visit south, say to the capital Bangkok.
His crime? Being a member of a hill tribe, the Akha.
The same predicament awaits other members of the Akha, even though many of them, like the fair, slender-built Ayo, were born in Thailand. “We live in fear of the police, so we have to be careful about our movements,” says Ayo, who only has one name, like some of the other Akha.
The Akha are one among the four major ethnic groups among up to 20 in northern Thailand, the others being the Lahu, Lisu and Karen. Together, they make up close to a million hill tribe people.
The 20-year-old Ayo is well aware that the predicament faced by his hill tribe – which lives close to the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai — stems from Bangkok’s policies toward the hill tribes.
Yet it is also in Chiang Rai that Thailand’s tourism authorities offer another face about the hill tribe people — that they are a welcome magnet to attract tourists who visit the northern reaches of this South-east Asian country.
Be it at the airport or in some shops huddled along Chiang Rai’s small streets, visitors come face to face with posters and post cards celebrating the colourful dress and culture of the hill tribes. The Akha, for instance, stand out for their headdress adorned with silver ornaments, while the Lahu women are known for their distinct black-and-red jackets.
Last year, the northern towns of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai attracted over 1.9 million tourists out of the record 10 million foreigners who visited Thailand. In 2000, the national tourism authority reports that 1.7 million tourists vacationed in the northern towns.
“The hill tribes are important for tourism in the north. They come second, after trekking and exploring nature, to draw visitors,” says Smithseth Chantusen of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
These twin realities do not sit well with Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, an anthropologist at Chiang Mai University, since they reveal a glaring duplicity about the Thai government’s attitude towards the hill tribe people.
Thailand comes out in poor light, he says, since the government’s policy toward the hill tribes translates to them being acceptable to the country as a commodity but having little value as peoples.
And there is a little shift away from government policies that treat the hill tribes as “aliens,” consequently denying them the rights guaranteed to Thais, he points out. “Many of them have no legal status and can be arrested for a number of reasons, including moving out of the restricted areas for them in the north.”
At the same time, he adds, the hill tribes are increasingly being presented as an essential selling point to lure tourists to Thailand. “For over two decades, the hill tribe people have been promoted by the tourism authorities and private travel agents as a colourful and exotic aspect of Thailand,” he explains.
Activists campaigning for the rights of the hill tribe people are equally troubled at the scale of discrimination these ethnic groups are subject to. “It is exploitation, because the governments are only interested in profiting from them,” says Sombat Boongamanong, director of the Mirror Art Group, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with hill tribe children here.