Why the farmers come to Bangkok again and again

23 June 1998

In June 1992 in Khon Kaen, a farmer’s protest against a land resettlement scheme (Khor Jor Kor) resolved to march on Bangkok to present demands directly to government. Over previous years, farmers had tried many tactics to get their voice heard – with little result. But the prospect of a rural invasion brought immediate action. Ministers and officials rushed to the northeast. The land resettlement plan – one of the biggest projects of social engineering in modern Thailand – was cancelled in a huddled negotiation beside the Mitrapharp highway.

The farmers had stumbled on one of the vulnerabilities built into the age of globalisation. Bangkok is the centre of all power - economic, political and cultural – and Bangkok aspires to belong to the global network of the world’s cities. But Bangkok is also a fortress set in a rural hinterland. The central region serves as a moat. But beyond lie the north, northeast and south, where the accents and the perspectives are very different. A rural invasion is not just a challenge to Bangkok’s power. It also cuts through the city’s globalist pretensions. It threatens to bring the city back down to earth.

Moreover, the image of invasion is burned into the national mentality. The most graphic stories of Thai schoolbook history are the Burmese invasions to sack Ayutthaya. And the last (repulsed) military invasion of the central plain, by the Laotian king Anuvong in 1827, followed a route close to that chosen by the 1992 protesters.

The build-up of rural protest politics since 1992 has operated within this military metaphor. After the harvest in 1994 and 1995, the farmer protest groups massed on the northeastern plateau like banner armies readying for an annual campaign. They moved the assembly site to Lamtakong, only a short march from the Dongphrayayen, the escarpment which dramatically marks the boundary between the central plain and the northeast. Ministers now had to arrive quickly to head off the invasion. They came by helicopter, unconsciously deepening the military metaphor by echoing US tactics against insurgents some 20 years earlier.

In 1996, Banharn Silpa-archa persuaded the protesters to delay any invasion threat until after the Asia-Europe summit in Bangkok. But (switching the military metaphor) this agreement proved to be a Trojan horse. After the summit, the protesters dispensed with the march and came directly into Bangkok. Protesters camped along the canal beside government house. Press and TV cameras focused on scenes of bodies pressed against the railings of government house, or lined up opposite a phalanx of riot police. Invasion had succeeded to siege.

In 1997, siege succeeded to armistice. Ministers and protesters sat down to negotiate in the style of a peace treaty. The protesters worked from a numbered list of demands. Specific points were negotiated by working groups and then referred up to the Cabinet for ratification. The final signing mimicked the tableaux of Yalta and Versailles. The farmers left vowing that if the agreement was breached, "we will return".

It has been a war, but a war-less war. Not so much non-violent as anti-violent. The two sides are fighting for territory, not on some geographic battlefield, but in the nation’s mentality. The farmers have been excluded from formal political institutions. They are campaigning to win moral support for their right to have a political voice. Victories are measured not by body-counts, but by public sympathy points. Any display of violence instantly concedes territory to the opposing side

When the 1992 march set out from Khon Kaen, the vanguard was not formed by stout farmers wielding sticks, but toothless old women dancing and carrying pictures of the royal family and famous monks, symbols of peace and loyalty. During the sieges outside government house, the riot police have been kept at a safe distance and constrained to patience. The government side loses moral ground whenever a policeman raises a baton, Samak Sundaravej publicly loses his temper, a farmer’s leader is shot (four to date), or government is rumoured to be planning to drive trucks into a march. Similarly, the farmers lose ground whenever some hotheads scale the railings, initiate a scuffle, or hurl missiles into government house grounds.

Other conventions of warfare are similarly reversed. Armies usually gain strength from rigid organisation and from alliances. But to avoid any victimisation of leaders or any cult of personality, the organisation of the farmers is so diffuse it is almost invisible. Alliances are kept at a low profile to prevent accusations of political meddling and "third hands". Farmers leaders are obliged to give public explanations of how they come to possess such dangerous weaponry as mobile phones.

The annual "dry-season campaigns" of the past six years have seen a progression – from invasion, to siege, to treaty negotiation. The Chuan Leekpai government has seemed to want to roll this process back. Last November, farmers leaders met with Chuan to seek assurance that the treaty negotiated with the previous cabinet would still stand. They found the prime minister unbriefed, uninterested, and unresponsive.

As a result, the various farmers groups, which had fallen to bickering among themselves, forged a new unity. In February they again threatened invasion. Chuan hurried to the northeast (helicopters again) to head them off with promises. The march was called off.

But in April-May, the promises were revealed as empty. Government unilaterally revoked resolutions on land settlement and dam compensation. It ignored the processes set up to review controversial dam projects. It voted more money for the planning of one of them. It allowed the community forestry bill to slip down the parliamentary agenda. It made it clear that farmers would have to go back to negotiating with bureaucrats not ministers, thereby reversing out one of the key gains of the previous two years.

Maybe the government was gambling. May marks the end of the usual dry-season campaign. The protesters had lost some moral ground in some messy scuffles and throwing episodes. Maybe the government thought it could get away with it this year. But it was a bad gamble. In the moral accounting of this form of warfare, such high-handed tactics are not judged legitimate. The reaction on the mental battlefield came quickly. The sympathy swung to the farmers. The government faced the accusation that it was "against the poor". The protesters again began to plan an invasion

Government spokesmen reeled off statistics of loans proffered and title deeds conferred, in the belief this would prove that the current cabinet had done more for the farmers than its predecessor. But the process has gone way beyond such paternalist gestures. The government announced a new complaint centre in Khon Kaen. But the process has gone beyond such na๏ve strategies.

The farmers come to Bangkok because these invasions touch the Bangkok-based government’s most vulnerable side. The Democrats would like to return to a model where the villages stayed "out there" and were looked after by paternal officials. But that model is buried. The farmers know it doesn’t work. Now that agriculture is returning to the head of the national agenda, how come the government is still reluctant to consult regularly and seriously with farmers, in the same way it deals with bankers ad businessmen, Thai and foreign?

Of course the government will claim that these demonstrations are "not representative", that there are "political motives", that past agreements over land and dam compensation were flawed, and that such demonstrations damage Thailand’s image. But none of these claims change the fact that the farmers have found a dramatic way to escape the political silence imposed on them.