Often, members of the hill tribes are arrested and held in police custody for over 20 days. During this period, hardly any of them receive legal assistance, a reflection of how Thai society perceives these ethnic minorities.
According to rights activist Sunai Phasuk, even those who helped draft Thailand’s 1997 Constitution, dubbed by many as the “People’s Constitution” for guaranteeing and protecting many individual rights, dismissed the concerns of the hill tribes.
“The tribal people made representations about their rights, their need for citizenship during the public hearings for the current constitution, but their views were not incorporated” says Sunai, a political analyst at Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog.
Little wonder why what little support there is for the hill tribes comes up against public silence or ambivalence. Groups like the Assembly of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Thailand (AITT) attribute this to the way Thai governments have been projecting the hill tribes to the average person.
“The work and practise of the governments in the past has displayed a constant view of indigenous and tribal people as the source of problems for the government,” AITT states in a petition this month to the government.
During the Cold War, for instance, the hill tribes were welcomed by the Thai government during its battle with communist rebels. But since the early 1990s, the hill tribes have been marginalised. The reasons ranged from arguments that the customs and traditions of the hill tribes make them “non-Thais”, to the push by some green activists to rid the forests of hill tribes that they said damaged the environment.
When it comes to deciding who among the hill tribes could stay or should leave, the current Thai government is no different from its predecessors. “If they come illegally, we ask them to go back to their homes,” says an official from the ministry of the interior. “If they come legally there is a process to follow.”
Moving across borders from northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia to even southern China is common for hill tribe people, given their nomadic origins and their movement in the region even before political boundaries were put in place.
Among the one million hill tribe people in northern Thailand are some 300,000 who have legal papers, enabling them to stay in the country. The rest live in a state of limbo, even though they have been born here.
Ayo is doing his bit to increase that number by securing legal residency for his community of 76 families. “I have been reading about our rights and helping families fill the papers, but it is not easy,” he says.
But despite the odds he faces, he is determined to make a case for his people. “If I don’t do this no one will. I want to fight for my village, for us to be Thais.”