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.
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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.
“They should be offered the right to stay, move around freely and to work, particularly the
generations born in Thailand.” he argues. “As they are, they have little freedoms and are
vulnerable, with little protection.”
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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 commun