Battle over land rights law far from over
After calling the landless protesters freeloaders, Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-ocha suddenly made a U-turn by sending a close aide to promise the moon and the stars to the forest poor who were demonstrating in Bangkok. Why?
And the forest dwellers — despite experiencing too many lies before from state authorities — simply packed up and returned home. Why?
For the regime, it’s a simple political tactic. Next week marks the fourth anniversary of the 2014 coup d’etat. State authorities will have their hands full with anti-coup activists who keep reminding the junta of its lack of political legitimacy and false election promises. The last thing the regime wants is to see poor protesters on the streets to manifest its utter failure to keep reform promises after its four-year rule.
For P-Move, a grassroots network of forest communities, the retreat is a matter of practicality.
The regime’s offer may be but an old time-buying ploy, but when your house is on fire — and we’re talking about over 400 forest communities here — the first thing you must do is to extinguish the blaze. Building new houses with land security comes next.
So if the junta’s top-down command can immediately freeze violent crackdowns and force forest authorities to implement previous agreements to give land security to forest communities, it’s only reasonable for the forest poor to accept the carrot, especially when the regime is clearly holding a stick behind its back.
The message from the regime is clear: We will give you what you want on one condition: Go home now. Or else.
That the protest escaped the regime’s usual wrath against public demonstrations to last nearly two weeks surprised even the protesters themselves.
Time is on their side. As an election looms, the military government does not want to create violent scenes or be seen as anti-poor. The mandarins, despite their disdain for the poor, were then obliged to talk to the protesters. But they continued to protect their turf by insisting that they could do little without policy orders from the top.
This is the crux of the problem. Not only about forest evictions and landlessness, but most of the major problems in our country.
Decades of the forest dwellers’ struggles to protect their land and livelihoods have come to naught because of fierce resistance from the autocratic, centralised bureaucracy.
With very few exceptions, centralised state agencies are allowed to write restrictive laws to empower themselves without input from stakeholders. When people demand change, the mandarins simply say it is against the law.
When push comes to shove, they will
only respond to orders from the top to save their positions. But only temporarily. When power changes hands, they fall back to their old autocratic ways, with zero respect for people, public accountability and what is right and wrong.
The Doi Suthep housing scheme should be an eye-opener. That’s how the bureaucracy works, how the mandarins are out of touch with reality and modern values.
The public is angry not only because the judiciary encroaches on the sacred forest, but also because the supposed bearers of justice are blind to their own legal double standards and the environmental destruction at their own hands. Great disillusionment ensued when the judiciary bowed to the junta’s orders, not public demands, nor a sense of justice.
Injustice and double standards in the legal system are old news to the forest poor. In fact, they are the root cause of their suffering.
For starters, the forest laws are written by forest and national park agencies to make them sole legal owners of not only forests but also all farmland without land titles. They are then the biggest landowners in the country.
That’s not all. The draconian laws outlaw all forest dwellers although many have been living there for generations with strong forest conservation records. While the forest dwellers are subjected to crackdowns and imprisonment, forest authorities can allow other state agencies to destroy pristine nature for megaprojects and rent out the forests to mining and tree farm companies at pitifully low prices. More often than not, they also turn a blind eye to encroachers with deep pockets.
When forest dwellers are sent to court, this is the standard ruling: You are guilty and must serve jail terms because the forest laws say you are illegal forest encroachers. In short, facts and justice do not matter, the written law — no matter how narrow and unjust it is — prevails.
More than 10 million people living in national forests are now suffering from this systematic injustice. Should we continue to uphold it?
Does it say anything about our society when we are engulfed in fury to save nature and wildlife — as shown in the Doi Suthep housing and black leopard killing — yet remain largely aloof to the misery of millions of forest people?
At the height of the Doi Suthep campaign, questions were raised on social media why the campaigners did not go all out to evict people who are living illegally in forests too. If anything, this shows the state’s success in brainwashing mainstream society into believing that the forest dwellers are forest destroyers.
Are they? Why did state logging concessions — until it stopped in the 80s — escape the blame? And the military for supporting forest frontiers during the Cold
War to destroy the strongholds of communist insurgents? Or the construction of roads and highways through pristine forests that brought more forest destruction in the name of national development?
Why make the forest dwellers the scapegoats?
Sad to say, the main brainwashing machine is the centralised education system itself. In the rote-learning system designed by Bangkok, the students are taught to see the highlanders as forest destroyers and drug dealers. So they never get to learn the truth or appreciate the forest dwellers’ knowledge about biodiversity, ecological farming systems and sustainable forest management.
The forest dwellers’ knowledge is crucial to the country’s forest conservation and economic prosperity from biodiversity. Yet, the centralised education system continues to make new generations look down on the poor and ethnic minorities in a mission to turn the young into new submissive members of an authoritarian, racist society in order to safeguard the status quo.
In the process, we lost not only economic opportunities from creativity and
biodiversity, but also our kindness — and peace.
Change is difficult unless the city people realise the forest dwellers’ suffering is also theirs. That their lives will be better too if the structural causes of landlessness are fixed.
For the forest dwellers’ movement is not about land security for an individual landless farmer. It’s about sustainable, bottom-up forest management. It’s about communal land ownership and community rights to manage local resources. It’s about fixing land ownership disparity. It’s about peace on the ground, forest health, transparency and justice.
The landless people’s movement is therefore integral to political decentralisation and bureaucratic and educational reform. It is also inseparable from electoral democracy.
Now that structural change remains far-fetched, the forest poor know their struggles are far from over.
Will the government keep its promise this time around? The signs are not good. Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon sternly said after the protesters had vacated the streets that efforts to answer P-Move’s demands must strictly follow the laws concerned.
Yes, those laws that oppressed the forest poor in the first place.
What will happen next? The protesters have made it clear that the truce will be over once the government breaks its word. Given the unbroken track record of state resistance, it’s just a matter of time until the forest poor return to Bangkok’s streets once again.
Sad to say, the main brainwashing machine is the centralised education system itself.