The non-battle of Dong Larn

17 February 1999

The Interior Minister. The Chief of Police. The Director General of the Royal Forestry Department. A Deputy Minister of Agriculture. The Provincial Governor. This is an awful lot of official barami to concentrate on one makeshift forest settlement. But all of these luminaries paraded in Khon Kaen’s Dong Larn forest last weekend. The presence of such official weight indicates that much more was at stake than one illegal encroachment, one recalcitrant village, one forest tract destroyed. In its own way, the non-battle of Dong Larn is one of the milestones of this crisis.

Over 600 families had settled in the Dong Larn forest. But this was no furtive encroachment. The settlers deliberately chopped and burnt trees for the benefit of the TV cameras. This was a petition.

The splendid show of rank, rather than a show of force, worked very well. The battle never happened. The incident was defused without violence. This was a surprise. Over the previous two weeks, the portrayal of Dong Larn by the Bangkok media had emphasised images of impending violence. The TV cameras picked out villagers carrying large machetes. They lingered on people wearing shades, flak jackets and bandanas, like extras from a south American revolution. A Thai Rath cartoonist drew NGO workers as axe-heads. The Nation showed a village "guard" with catapult at full stretch. The message of all these images was clear: bad and unruly people are trying to take over the forest.

But the images from the weekend told a different story. The village leaders surrendered to the police with sheepish grins. The activist leader was praised by the authorities for his cooperative attitude. The "encroachers" went like lambs. They agreed to dismantle their houses and move down the road to a site which had almost nothing to recommend it.

This move provided the real drama. The houses were dismantled in minutes. Most could gather up their possessions in a couple of sacks. At the new site, a new house went up almost as quickly, with a few new posts, and the thatch from the old home. These are people without place. Here or six kilometres down the road is much the same. They can move to Bangkok and live in shacks of corrugated zinc on a construction site. Or go down to Kanchanaburi and live in the makeshift encampments during the cane-cutting. Or go to work in Taiwan. Or wherever. Most are people without fixity, without land, without house registration, without basics.

On interview many said they just wanted land. Some are angry about past eviction. Some are frustrated about promises of land which have never come true. Many others just heard about Dong Larn and hoped this might be their chance to get land. A few said they have a plot elsewhere but it is too small, and they hope Dong Larn might be a chance to better themselves. Now they will just go back to the old place. Some would rather be on the construction site or the sugar plantation, if only such work was available.

The Dong Larn stand-off was a clash between two eras, two cultures, two visions of what Thailand means. The settlers are the product of Thailand’s land-abundant past, heirs of a long tradition of frontier settlement. They might have been detoured into the city over the last decade. But their first thought in hard times is to look for land. The authorities represent a vision of modern Thailand, where resources are no longer abundant but scarce, and where law must prevail over the freewheeling customs of the old frontier.

These two cultures are a long way apart. As one forestry official noted about a similar incident brewing in Mukdahan: "The people have been very far away from government for a long time. They are used to being in the forest. If they have to go somewhere else, they are not sure they will be okay. They already have their community. We are trying to persuade them to move but it is difficult."

The government has taken a firm line on Dong Larn to set a precedent, to forestall a larger movement of land invasions by the poor and disemployed. It managed it well by deploying status not force, big people not big guns. But what next? The resettlement for the 643 families moved out of Dong Larn is only temporary. As soon as the rains start, the site will be flooded out. There are many similar groups looking for land who may not be totally deterred by this incident. There are many, many others who are already settled in protected areas. Even if the economy does pick up soon, it will be a long time before there is any significant impact on employment. For the near future, the numbers out of work, out of school, and out of money are going to be getting larger not smaller. The social safety nets now being hastily woven together probably won’t catch those at the social fringe.

The Chuan government has been consistent on this issue. It has torn up the Chavalit government’s resolutions on people living in forests, sandbagged the community forestry bill, and stiffened the forestry department’s resolve to defend key forest zones. Modern Thailand, Chuan has said several times, cannot rely on the land frontier to absorb the social pressure generated by the crisis But now government has to manage the social issues which this policy implies. The market is not going to draw the flotsam of the frontier off to the city. The old culture of pioneer land settlement is not dead. And the government cannot mobilise the police chief, forest chief, minister of interior, deputy agriculture minister and provincial governor on every weekend.