Karen leader faces fury of fined officials
The Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) is looking into legal avenues to sue 106-yearold Karen spiritual leader Ko-i Meemi and five other Karen living in Kaeng Krachan National Park in Petchaburi over forest encroachment.
The idea to pursue legal action came after the Supreme Administrative Court delivered a verdict recently in favour of the six Karen.
The court ruled that national park officials were guilty of malfeasance in 2011 by burning down over a hundred houses belonging to Karen villagers without giving them prior notice. The court also ordered the department to pay 45,000-50,000 baht in damages to each of the six Karen.
Thanya Nethithammakul, director-general of the department, said it will make an announcement on the matter soon.
“There are many dimensions that we need to carefully study. But we will not bow down to any social sentiment. Everything must be done in accordance with the law,” he said.
Mr Thanya said the court’s verdict suggested the DNP may have grounds for a case.
It ruled the six Karen cannot return to live in the protected forest, and that forest officials have full authority to carry out their duties even though, in this instance, they did not follow the correct protocol.
Another matter the department must counter is a claim that the Karen villagers or their forebears had been living in the forest before the cabinet designated it a national park in 1979.
In a related development, national human rights commissioner Tuenjai Deetes told local media there have been efforts to spread “fake news” that Mr Ko-i is not Thai but hails from Myanmar.
She said the media used her name to support the false claim that Mr Ko-i was born in the neighbouring country. The National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC) has been looking into the case of Mr Ko-i’s forced eviction since March.
Ms Tuenjai said the NHRC has already contacted various media outlets to warn them to check their facts and report the news in a more responsible manner in future.
“The truth is that the report made by [myself ] found he was born on Thai soil, in a forest area in Phetchaburi, which is unequivocally Thai,” she said.
The lengthy legal battle between Karen forest dwellers and Kaeng Krachan National Park officials, which ended bitterly for the former on Tuesday, shed light on the need to add a human rights dimension to our top-down lawmaking and oppressive law enforcement on forest protection. The Supreme Administrative Court ruled this week that the indigenous group cannot return to ancestral land where they have lived for generations, but which the state declared a national park in 1981, because they have no legal land ownership papers.
The disputed land is located within Kaeng Krachan National Park in Phetchaburi. To the knowledge of indigenous Karen people, the majority of whom cannot read Thai because they never had any formal education here, their ancestors lived in the remote forest for centuries without the need for land title deeds. Reports from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and other rights groups also suggest that the Karen people had lived in the forest before it became a national park.
As the state was unable to reach out to all remote areas to conduct land surveys for the purpose of issuing land ownership documents, forest dwellers had maintained their indigenous livelihoods.
But the 1961 National Park Act has brought about changes, allowing top bureaucrats to decide which areas should be demarcated as national parks. Then, cabinets approved their decisions and turned them into royal decrees.
When the cabinet made Kaeng Krachan forest a national park it simply wiped out the ancestral right to land of the Karen people. Tragic incidents took place in 2011 when Kaeng Krachan National Park officials carried out raids against the Karen, torching their homes and evicting them.
The court’s verdict on Tuesday brings an end to their quest to return home, even though they have been awarded damages of 50,000 baht each for the destroyed properties.
It is not just this group of Karen people who have been forced out of their ancestral land, however. The Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation in past decades has demarcated national parks in areas which overlapped with land that people had lived and used for generations. In the past decade the department has brought criminal and civil lawsuits against a number of these people whom it branded “illegal dwellers” in a bid to evict them.
Even though there was a nationwide forest survey in 2002 to document people who had used land in preserved forests before that year in order to allow them the “temporary right” to continue using it, the survey was not comprehensive.
The problem with this and other land disputes lies with the National Park Act, which gives officials ultimate authority to make decisions on the demarcation of preserved areas while excluding indigenous communities from the process.
The demarcation and declaration of national parks had been made by elite groups of people who were members of cabinets or high-ranking officials, ignoring the fact that the state had taken away land rights from its people who had also played their role in looking after forests.
The NHRC this week has made the right call in suggesting that the government should revise the National Park Act by engaging indigenous groups in the discussions prior to the demarcation, and by designating certain zones for indigenous groups to live and use the land. It also suggests the state should grant indigenous forest dwellers community rights to live in and use their ancestral land instead of awarding them temporary rights to this effect.
The laws giving Kaeng Krachan and other forests legal status as national parks were all approved by cabinets. Therefore, they should be able to be revised by the current or a new cabinet to acknowledge the ancestral rights of indigenous groups whose forest settlement precedes the laws. They should just not be legal tools to unfairly deprive indigenous people of these ancestral land rights.