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Abstract
Opium poppy cultivation in Thailand fell from 12,112 hectares in 1961 to 281 hectares in 2015. One outlier exists: Chiang Mai Province’s remote southwestern district, Omkoi. Ninety percent of the district is a national forest reserve where human habitation is illegal. However, an ethnic Karen population has lived there since long before the law that outlawed them was created, unconnected to the state by road, with limited or no access to health, education and other services. Omkoi’s Karen increasingly rely on cash-based markets. Their lack of citizenship precludes them from land tenure that might incentivize them to grow alternative crops, and their statelessness precludes them from services and protections. Nor is the Thai state the singular Leviathan that states are often assumed to be; it is a collection of agencies and networks with divergent interests, of whom one of the most powerful, the Royal Forestry Department, has purposely made Omkoi’s population illegible, and has consistently blocked the attempts of other state actors to complexify Omkoi beyond the simplicity of its forest environment. These factors make the state illegitimate to Omkoi’s Karen just as Omkoi’s Karen are illegitimate to the state, and make the cultivation of short-term, high-yield, high-value, imperishable opium a logical economic choice for poor Karen farmers, especially given the historical lack of law enforcement presence. However, that presence is growing, as Omkoi becomes one of the last areas of Thailand to experience the historical extension of lowland Padi state power into an ungoverned, untallied highland.
Acknowledgements
The author extends his greatest thanks to Professor Patamawadee ‘Jan’ Jongruck at Chiang Mai University’s School of Political Science and Public Administration, for her collaboration, guidance and friendship. The author also thanks Tian Yeow Tan and Samuel Francis Woodcock, who participated in earlier research at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, conducting research with the author in Omkoi and further afield. Micah Fisher at the University of Hawaii also provided valuable commentary. The author wishes to thank the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) Region 5, especially Jerrapan Mugura, former ONCB Director of Strategy and Administration, and Karn Thaiyapirom. Thanks are also due to: ONCB Region 5 representatives Director Watin Damronglaohapan, Director Pipop Chamnivikaipong, Thippamet Sangawanna, Kraivudh Maneeratana and Varisara Yasamuth; 3rd Army representatives including Colonel Suraput Numlong, 7th Infantry Division; Professor Ora-orn Poocharoen, Dean of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Chiang Mai University, and Professor Panom; Raks Thai Foundation Program Coordinator Sarinthip Promrit; Pattana, Royal Project extension director; Khun Tuen Noi village inhabitants including village leader Pamoti; Bi Po village Tambon Administrative Officer Som Chai; Musa Bat Tam Village inhabitants including the treatment camp interviewees; Mimi Saeju Win of the Chiang Mai Lisu Cultural Heritage Center; Nong Tao Village Leader Phaw Luang Jorni Odochao, and Jowalu Oshi Chindanai. The author also thanks the faculty and staff at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Any errors of fact or interpretation are the fault of the author.
Notes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1. For the sake of continuity, this article uses the country names Myanmar and Thailand throughout, including in pre-1989 instances when Myanmar’s official name was Burma, and pre-1939 instances when Thailand’s official name was Siam.
2. Interviews with villagers, CRSPO, ONCB, Mae Tuen/Omkoi town, Omkoi, March 2016.
3. Interviews with ONCB, Chiang Mai, December 2015.
4. Interviews with project participants, Nong Tao, 24 June 2016; with ONCB, 21 June 2016; and with Phaw Luang Jorni Odochao, Nong Tao, Chiang Mai, 24 June 2016.
5. Thailand expelled the Shan–Chinese heroin trafficker Khun Sa from the country at this time. For a description of KMT veterans and their descendants in contemporary Thailand refer to CitationQin (2015).
6. By the late 1980s, Myanmar was the world’s largest supplier of heroin, which was also used as a currency because of a collapse in the value of the Kyat. Following US government pressure on Myanmar’s State Law and Order Restoration Council to crack down on heroin-manufacturing insurgents, most notably Khun Sa’s Mong Tai Army, the world epicentre of poppy cultivation and heroin manufacture shifted to Afghanistan, where the Mujahideen group Hizb e Islami began synthesizing heroin in Helmand after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The Taliban’s declaration of heroin manufacture as haram or forbidden in the late 1990s caused cultivation to shift back to Myanmar.
7. Interview with public health official, Omkoi, March 2016.
8. Interviews with former cultivators, Mae Tuen, February 2016; and with ONCB officials, Chiang Mai, December 2015 to June 2016.
9. Interview with HRDI, Chiang Mai, March 2016.
10. Many contemporary Karen interviewees are adamant about their right to swidden and yet they no longer move homes as their fields change locations; they are also cultivating stationery crops such as Arabica, peaches and nuts, investing in fixed assets, driving pickup trucks and sending their children to school, first to Buddhist monasteries and then to universities, in Chiang Mai and further afield. Swiddening serves as a marker of identity, but it is not, for contemporary Karen, an enviable lifestyle. Across the Myanmar border in Kyaukkyi, Karen forced into flight by the Tatmadaw switched from rice cultivation back to swiddening to survive; due in part to the knowledge lost by a few generations of living in fixed positions and depending upon markets, they went hungry, and swiddening, far from being a cultural more, was only illustrative of their precarious state. A fixed abode is now considered to be stability over the oft-times parlous freedom to roam.
11. While select interviewees state that the border is well-patrolled, the majority of them assert otherwise.
12. Interview with CMU professors and ONCB, Chiang Mai, December 2015.
13. Interviews with ONCB, Chiang Mai, December 2015.
14. Interview with Karen leader Phaw Luang Jorni Odochao, 23 June 2016.
15. In Myanmar, lowland Karen populations are found in delta areas that were once malarial forests and swamps prior to the British relocation of the capital from Mandalay to Yangon. Delta Karen allied with the British and against the Bamar, who were their oppressors; against the historical norm, they did not flee, and Karen communities remain in the Ayeyarwady region, although many no longer speak Karen.
16. Interview with Karen leader Phaw Luang Jorni Odochao, 23 June 2016.
17. The DKBA later changed its name to the Democratic Kayin Benevolent Army. The DKBA later fragmented, with a splinter group reverting to the original name.
18. Interviews with village heads and extension agents, Mae Tuen, Omkoi, March 2016.
19. This dichotomy was most obvious in the Chom Thong upland–lowland dispute (CitationPuginier, 2003).
20. Interviews with villagers, CRSPO, ONCB, Mae Tuen/Omkoi town, Omkoi, March 2016.
21. Interview with KNU representative U Mam Char, Taung Galay, Kayin State, Myanmar, December 2016. The KNU has recently declared a moratorium on forestry in its areas, and signed an MoU with the World Wildlife Foundation (Citation Irrawaddy, 2016).
22. RFD agents continually encroach upon rights recognized by Thai authorities, such as gathering fallen wood to use in cooking fires. Whilst ad hoc actions to defend such rights occur regularly, according to interviewees, a broader movement to guarantee hill tribe rights to engage in traditional practices has not yet emerged. In the mid-1990s, the Northern Farmer’s Alliance, comprised of both highlanders and Thais, had promise, and the alliance organized a march from Nong Tao to Bangkok to protest the expulsion of Karen from Gampong Kit, assert their rights over the forest and decry RFD abuses; in Bangkok, they were able to meet the RFD minister ‘for five minutes’. According to interviewees in Nong Tao, this was the pinnacle of Karen participation in civil society, and was followed by a fall in alliance members. Protests, interviewees note, are not easy to sustain over time, especially when ‘people have families and need to work’ (interview with Jowalu ‘Oshi’ Chindanai, Nong Tao, 23 June 2016). The last Karen community rights activist of note, Porlajee ‘Billy’ Rakchongcharoen, was illegally detained by RFD officers in Kaeng Krachan National Park, Phetchaburi, on 17 April 2014, on the orders of then-park superintendent Chaiwat Limlikitaksorn, who had ordered a Karen village to be burned in 2011. Billy was never seen again. In May 2015, Chaiwat was appointed by the DNP to head the Tiger Corps Operation Unit, a forest and wildlife protection unit. He remains the only suspect in Billy’s disappearance. The RFD continues to blame highlanders for lowland disasters, including the 2011 floods and a 2015 epidemic of lowland haze.
23. Various forest management initiatives also occur in C-Zone designated areas, including the establishment of protected areas such as watershed areas, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries (Omkoi contains Thailand’s last populations of wild elephant and mountain goat), non-hunting areas, forest parks, biosphere reserves, botanical gardens and arboreta.
24. The sudden end of surveillance in Omkoi in 2000/2001 makes little sense when one considers that 185.92 ha of opium poppy was identified there in the 1999/2000 season.
25. The inverse can also be found. Indonesia’s annexation of Dutch New Guinea (later renamed Irian Jaya, followed by Papua) was initially contested by an insurgency that fragmented across decades. Vast tracts of the territory are not contested and in those areas the state concentrates on resource extraction; when people pose no threat, they are provided with no services, and in many areas they aren’t even counted (CitationAnderson, 2015).
26. Interviews with ONCB, Chiang Mai, December 2015.
27. Interviews with ONCB, Chiang Mai, December 2015.
28. Interview with 7th Infantry Colonel and CRSPO Secretary, Chiang Mai, 21 June 2016. While Mae Sot is the primary entry point into Thailand for smuggled persons and illicit/untaxed/illegal goods including gemstones, logs and drugs (Citation BBC News, 2007), due to its less rugged geography, state pressures on the illicit traffic crossing the Salween River result in places like Omkoi acting as secondary conduits.
29. This can theoretically include non-agricultural alternates such as vocational and technical trainings.
30. An interviewee noted that cabbages and tomatoes that her village cultivated were purchased by Thai intermediaries for as low as 1 baht per kilo; the introduction of Arabica caused a wholesale abandonment of other alternative crops, even though Arabica is also a buyer’s market, with prices fixed of 20–25 baht per kilo.
31. Interview with ONCB and 3rd Army representatives, Omkoi, February 2016.
32. However, cultivation may decrease as cultivators gain an understanding of the technology being deployed against them. In Baan Mae Long Luang village (an area so afflicted by opium use that ‘even the monks needed treatment’, according to the ONCB) during a CRSPO meeting in February 2016, each village head denied opium was cultivated in their area; the CRSPO representatives then demonstrated satellite technology, showing on a laptop computer the opium poppy plots in several areas surrounding the villages of the attendees. It was the first time they had seen such a demonstration; some appeared shaken.
33. Tilly expanded Weber’s minimalist definition, defining states as ‘coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories’ (CitationTilly, 1985). CitationTilly’s initial research (1985, Citation1990) focused on Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire, when state organization was mostly informal and the work of a profusion of local lords who controlled relatively small areas; consolidation and growth served as an evolutionary process which created monoliths over centuries.
34. These claims are backed by select historical precedent: the political thought of Hobbes was entirely shaped by the 30 Year’s War, when the war of ‘all against all’ killed one-third of the population of the German-speaking lands of Central Europe. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended that war in 1648, was the beginning of the primacy of the state system.
35. Contemporary Thailand varies from a key attribute of the contemporary northern European state, namely a military that solely serves as the implementer of civilian-driven policy related to external defense.