Pavement politics for the poor

14 February 1997

The protest by the Assembly of the Poor is a lot more than a group of disgruntled peasants camped on the city pavements. The current negotiations between the Assembly and the government are a subtle and crucial development in Thai politics.

This is not a sudden flash protest. The route to today’s "pavement parliament" has taken over a decade.

The first stirrings came in the mid 1980s. Before then, any sign of rural protest was seen as communist, dangerous, forbidden. As this heavy hand lifted, a network of organisations gradually spread through the villages, especially in the poor northeast. The first campaigns were local affairs about dams, land rights and access to forests. Gradually leaders emerged who could knot local groups into wider alliances. The organisation thickened through meetings at fairs, funerals and festivals. The tracks of battered NGO pick-ups criss-crossing the provinces mapped out a new network of rural politics.

Since the early 90s, the tactics of protest have become steadily more sophisticated. The early campaigns focused on winning the ear of local officials. Then in 1992, the protest against the army’s Khor Jor Kor land scheme went a step further. The protesters decided to march on the capital. Government stopped the march half-way by conceding to their demands. Shortly after, the Assembly of Small-scale Farmers of the Northeast was formed as a central forum for a wide range of rural complaints - over debts, dams, land rights, forests, eucalyptus, and the fallout from failed development schemes. Four times the Assembly used this same strategy of threatening to march on Bangkok to gain government’s attention.

In February 1994, the march was sidetracked into a camp at the Lamtakong reservoir some 160 kms from Bangkok. The leaders presented nine demands. Government promised to act. The march dispersed. Nothing happened. Promises were buried by bureaucratic inertia. In February 1995, the camp reconvened at Lamtakong for 12 days with much the same result. Promises. No action. In February 1996, the leaders met in Korat to plan a new march. Prime Minister Banharn helicoptered up and asked them to delay until after his Asem summit. The leaders agreed, but also decided to use tougher tactics. Two months later, they dispensed with the march altogether and brought some 10-12,000 villagers into the heart of Bangkok. They were fed up with talking to officials who did nothing. They wanted to deal directly with ministers.

This move broadened the alliance. Slum groups, worker groups, and environmental protesters from Rayong also joined in. The Assembly of the Poor was formed to act as an umbrella organisation. The list of demands grew to 47 items. For three weeks, the leaders negotiated with ministers and senior officials, ending with an 18-page cabinet resolution. Then the summer rains began. Camping on the Bangkok pavement became a lot less comfortable. Work in the fields beckoned. The protest dispersed.

Again almost nothing happened. Out of 28 local land disputes listed in the cabinet resolution, only two reached some form of resolution. Out of 12 issues over dams, one was settled. Others were buried in committees, or smothered by bureaucratic resistance. Three months after the protest dispersed, the leaders met with Banharn to register impatience. Another three months later in October, groups invaded the Science and Agriculture Ministries to publicise their growing anger. Still nothing happened.

The current protest has learnt from this history. In December after the new government had been formed, the leaders immediately started drawing up a new list of demands. In January, they met in Buriram to map out strategy. They informed Chavalit’s government of their intention to repeat the Bangkok protest. They arrived and set up camp quickly, before the government could try any strategy of obstruction. The camp is well organised, with its own commissary system, brigade of guards, sanitation department, fund-raising committee, entertainment council, and internal system of political organisation.

The protest started with a precise agenda of 123 demands presented in written form. NGO advisers have added suggestions for legislation, amendments to the Eighth Plan, and comments on international treaties. The leaders insist on getting firm Cabinet decisions, not just promises and sub-committees. Meetings with ministers and officials are minuted and signed off by both sides. The villagers say they will not go home until they have evidence that resolutions are really being implemented.

This is protest at a very high level of sophistication.

Chavalit’s government is responding likewise. Previous governments made a mess of this. Chuan tried to wear the protesters down by the standoffs at Lamtakong. He claimed the protests were funded by the parliamentary opposition, and tried to use intelligence services to prove it. He never met with the leaders personally. In contrast, Banharn rushed to show that he took the protest seriously. But once the streets of Dusit were clear, he allowed the negotiations to fester in meaningless committees. His deputy prime minister, Montri Pongpanich, publicly stated that dealing with these protests was one of the worst experiences of his political life.

Many of Chavalit’s Cabinet probably have similar attitudes, but they are being quietly stifled. Snoh Tienthong came out with the usual line about the protesters being professional trouble-makers paid by a "third hand" for ulterior motives. But he seems to have been silenced. Chucheep Harnsawat showed he had no knowledge and no patience for negotiating agrarian issues. But he was immediately pulled out of the front line. Instead Chavalit has put the negotiations under the care of Chingchai Mongkoltham, a northeasterner with a rural background and a nice line in amiable diplomacy. Chingchai says he will not let the negotiations fail because of legal-bureaucratic rigidity. He is even ready to deflect the usual criticism of such protests. Even if there are "politics" inside the Assembly, even if "urban" NGO workers are helping, even if there is a third or fourth "hand" in the background, Chingchai insists the protest still has to be taken seriously.

Compared to the usual handling of such protests, this is very sophisticated indeed.

But behind this reasonable, decorous behaviour on both sides, there is still an essential madness about the whole event. How come some of the nation’s poorest farmers are camped on the city streets to negotiate about a bunch of scattered grievances which in some cases are almost three decades old?

Trying to answer this question, you run up against the great failure at the heart of Thailand’s political system: half of the population has no proper representation.

The villagers have tried to solve their problems locally. But it doesn’t work because the Thai state is so centralized. The control of local resources is administered by Bangkok. Politicians have been talking about decentralisation for a long time. But when it comes to a decision, they always back off. Recently Chavalit was asked if he would allow the provincial governors to be elected. No, impossible, he said, the governors are the eyes and ears of the central administration in Bangkok. But because they are just that, they cannot tackle the problems which now bring the protesters to Dusit.

Over the last two decades, parliament has emerged as a counter-weight to the centralized state. But the farmers have been locked out of parliamentary politics. Farmers still form around half of the population. Yet there is not a single MP who could be called their representative. Partly this exclusion is the result of a long history of repression. Partly it has simply been built into the political culture. Parliamentary politics are part of modern, urban Thailand. Peasants need not apply. Hardly a single farmer stands for election. And his fellow farmers probably would not vote for him anyway.

This lack of representation means farmers’ needs are systematically ignored. Everywhere in the world, farmers want much the same things: secure access to land, and minimum interference from government. But many Thai farmers still have no firm land rights and no defence against state intrusion. Most of the complaints on the Assembly’s 123-point agenda are about just these issues. Farmers have been kicked off land which has been flooded for a dam, used as the site for a government road or jail, or seized by businessmen for factories and eucalyptus plantations. Attempts to retain the land or to demand compensation fail because the farmers have not got all the right bits of paper, and because the bureaucrats are not sympathetic.

This is what makes the current Assembly protest such a delicate, subtle and momentous event. In the past, farmers have been carefully suppressed. Now as the heavy hand has lifted, they are finding a voice. They are still excluded from the mainstream development of Thailand’s new democracy. In response, they have gradually developed a separate strategy of protest and negotiation. Thish has now reached a high level of refinement.

Chavalit has to respond. Partly because he can see the evidence of his predecessors’ failure. Even more because he fought the election as the favourite son of the northeast. If he fails to manage this protest, the Assembly will return later with even more concerted tactics, and his re-election prospects will be dim.

But if he hopes to win a quick, reputation-boosting victory, he faces disappointment. The problem is much larger than the 123-point agenda of the Assembly of the Poor. Several other rural groups are waiting ready with their own grievances. The Assembly of Small-scale Farmers of the Northeast has a separate agenda about debt and development schemes. The cassava planters claim to have collected 150,000 signatures on a petition about prices. A Kanchanaburi group has lodged its own protests over land rights. Both sides over the Kaeng Sua Ten dam dispute are waiting in the wings. Will all these groups have to come to Dusit and set up their own pavement parliaments?

Even if Chavalit can clean up all these specific grievances, the basic problems that lie behind them will remain. The land system will still be a mess. The bureaucracy will still be unsympathetic to farmers’ demands. The farmers will still lack simple political rights.

In the end, Chavalit (or someone) will have to address the bigger issues - admitting the farmers to full membership in the Thai body politic, taking seriously their fundamental needs over land and livelihood, and reorienting the bureaucracy to serve this half of the population properly. Now that would really be political reform.