The ‘Thai body’ and its Periphery

Burmese citizens, huddled together on a rubber inner tube, illegally crossing the Moei River that separates Thailand from Burma. Mai Sot, Thailand/Myawadi, Burma - 2005.

At 8 am and 6 pm the national anthem can be heard across Thailand.

In schools children sing it, television and radio stations dutifully broadcast it, loud speakers mounted upon telephone poles in cities and villages cackle with it, and everyone within the state – even at its very edges and whether citizen or not – are expected to stop what they are doing, stand-up, and wait respectfully until the song ends.

Thailand is the unity of Thai blood and body.
The whole country belongs to the Thai people, maintaining thus far for the Thai.
All Thais intend to unite together.
Thais love peace but do not fear to fight.
They will never let anyone threaten their independence.
They will sacrifice every drop of their blood to contribute to the nation.
They will sacrifice every drop of their blood to contribute to the nation.
CHAI YO. [Cheers].

The national anthem, like the border containing the state, is a work of political fiction.

If Thailand was indeed ‘the unity of Thai blood’ with the territorial body of the state then the space created – the political state of Thailand – would be an exclusive space for ethnic Thais.

While circumnavigate the Thai border, the territorial edge of the ‘Thai body’, it is not the lack of actual ethnic Thais that is most striking but the range of ethnic diversity that is most striking.

The periphery of the state is characterized by ethnic diversity that is manifest in contested territory, contested identities, and contested politics.

The circumference of the ‘Thai body’ has very little in common with the narrow nationalist identity espoused by the state.

Yet it is not that the Thai state is particularly at fault.

The ethnic nationalism that causes alienation in peripheral communities is a by-product of the global system of demarcated nation-states.

To understand how embedded the paradigm of the demarcated nation-state is one simply has to think of one global institution – the United Nations. The Thai state is simply exercising spatial governance, with nationalism as a tool of state-craft, in a reflection of the international system of 'nations'.

The real fault is, of course, the irrational concept of a border coupled with the fiction of a nation.

A border demands that a singular polity exercises absolute sovereignty over a specifically finite space.

At the sharp edge of sovereign space another polity becomes the absolute sovereign.

The concept may not seem irrational if the border was only to contain finite geographic space but the border contains heterogeneous humanity that becomes subject to the homogeneous identity projected by a ‘nation-state’.

Majority identity (in this case ‘Thai’) vs. minorities issues are implicit in the creation of a nation-state.

To have a demonstration of Thai nationalism stressing identity singularity we can again return to the border and the national anthem.

Physically crossing over the sharp division from Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, or Lao is to instantly be disciplined into Thai political space.

The flow of ethnic/religious/cultural/political diversity that flows over the border stops at 8am and 6pm to observe the political ritual of the national anthem.

For the average visitor the anthem might be an inconsequential event.

But for the residents of the periphery, those that are not Thai but live within the political ‘Thai body’ they are told twice daily that the land they occupy ‘belongs to the Thai people’ and not them.

A Trip to Tong Hong

From the village of Tong Hong the setting sun falls into Shan State. Tong Hong, Thailand - 2000.

The small village of Tong Hong is located on Thailand’s far northwestern frontier with Burma.

A scattering of thatched huts and a few cement buildings are shaded within a bamboo forest resting on the top of a small mountain.

In the evening, the day’s fading light filters through the haze of slash-and-burn agriculture and the sky glows in brilliant shades of golden red.

Looking west, towards the setting sun, a series of mountain ridges shimmer in the golden light and continue rolling west beyond the horizon.

Although it is a tranquil view, the sun is setting over more than a half century of armed rebellion, an ever changing mixture of ethnic/ideological armies, vast poppy fields, heroin and methamphetamine refineries, and a huge population of internally displaced people that have been forced from their homes and are surging against the Thai border.

The sun is setting upon Shan State, Burma and the village of Tong Hong has a front row view of the border's humanitarian crisis.

How small Thai towns and villages like Tong Hong experience border issues and conflict in Shan State might be best understood as either internal or external.

Issues inside the Thai border commonly revolve around the various ethnic minorities or ‘hill tribes’.

Although the majority of them were born and have lived their lives in Thailand they are not officially citizens of the state.

Under a staggered citizenship scheme most peripheral minorities are not classified as actual citizens but classified as residents whose rights and movements are severely curtailed.

The major challenge for residents without the same rights as regular citizens is the cycle of poverty linked to the absence of government provided education and health care.

Even though education or health care are not provided the state further discriminates against minorities by restricting their movement.

If minority groups wish to migrate for economic reasons or to access state funded education and health care they are prohibited from leaving either their districts or provinces.

The residents living along the borderlands have literally been locked out culturally and economically from Thai society.

Common external problems, emanating from Shan State, that border villages experience are refuges fleeing conflict, economic migrants fleeing poverty, and a steady flow of drugs – heroin for the international market and methamphetamines for the Thai market.

(please see previous post for description of conflict and drug production in Shan State: Between Armed Factions,Drug Production,and International Borders).

The combination of internal poverty stricken residents and the external forces of refugees, economic migrates, and drugs has resulted in both a humanitarian crisis and a heavy military/police presence.

Although there is an extremely limited effort to address humanitarian issues the frequency of police patrols and military road blocks gives the impression that the full might of Thai law enforcement agencies have been unleashed upon the borderlands.

In response to humanitarian issues revolving around the international border, the village of Tong Hong has opened a free medical clinic.

The clinic, a small building with a cement floor and a thatched bamboo roof, was opened and run by an ethnic Shan resident named Sai Sam.

Although he is not an official doctor his clinic is often the sole medical centre that minorities and migrants have access to.

Sai Sam’s clinic is operated with an extremely frugal budget supplied by international donors (one of those donors, the group that introduced me to Sai Sam, is a Canadian group called Medical Mercy Canada – http://www.medicalmercycanada.org/).

Both internal and external border issues are evident at the clinic.

Each morning a group of 20-30 patients can be seen mingling around waiting for medical assistance.

Migrant workers from Shan State make up the majority of clinic visitors.

Thai employers have a nasty reputation for exploiting migrant labour and, if labourers complain of low or withheld wages, employers are known to call immigration and have those complaining deported.

Due to the precarious legal and economic situation that migrant labourers exist in they have no access to state assistance and no resources to pay for medical assistance when they become ill.

The situation in the surrounding villages is similar to the economic migrants – a lack of medical access or the inability to afford it.

Sai Sam treats many of the ethnic minorities at his clinic but also makes ‘house calls’ to the surrounding villages.

Taking medical care to the various villages is a necessity due to the fact that there is no public transportation and patients often have to walk for an entire day to reach the clinic.

A common ailment for both migrant labourers and the region's minorities is malnutrition.

Although the hills are teeming with orchards and valley floors are partitioned into lush rice paddies basic sustenance is a constant challenge.

Migrant labourers often receive less then half of the legal minimum wage which barely affords them enough to eat.

The situation for minorities is more complicated but a combination of their remote locations, no access to fertilizers, and the 'bleaching' of the soil results in small crop production with limited nutritional value.

Although the bulk of Sai Sam's patients are economic migrants and minorities there are often refugees arriving from the frontline of conflict in Shan State.

The stories of why they have fled often revolve around gross human rights violations by the Burmese army - the Tatmadaw.

The residents of Shan State are often 'recruited' at gun point by the Tatmadaw to act as porters transporting military equipment and supplies.

While transporting supplies the porters are forced to walk in front of the armed columns to act as both human shields and mine sweepers.

Because the of the high likelihood of being killed either in conflict or from physical exhaustion/malnutrition many porters flee to Thailand.

The porters that reach Sai Sam's clinic are often severely malnourished, suffering from untreated injuries, slightly dependent upon opium used to relieve pain and fatigue, and deeply traumatized.

The curious fact of the border region is that the internal and external issues of the region are not actually locally driven issues but issues influenced by politics of countries and distant economies.

Shan State is locked into perpetual conflict because of its resistance to becoming subservient to a large state dominated by ethnic Burmese.

Thailand's minorities are forced to be residents of a large country that is alien to their culture, language, and beliefs yet is also a country that actively discriminates them.

And finally, the drug based economy of Shan State is directly fuelled by the global thirst for illicit drugs.

Although this posting has focused upon one village and how it is influenced by border issues it should be noted that Tong Hong is one of thousands of villages lining Thailand's periphery.

Each one of those villages is intimately linked to the internal and external issues that revolve around borders.

Tong Hong may have a front row view to the humanitarian crises that exists along the border but, unfortunately, so do the thousands of other villages.

Between Armed Factions,Drug Production,and International Borders

Thai Rangers on border patrol near Mai Sot.

“Burma is currently a land where there is no human security and where several millions are displaced externally as refugees or illegals in neighbouring countries. Burma and Shan state is a land where hundreds of thousands are dispossessed, dislocated, and hunted down like animals by army columns and search and destroy patrols. It is a country where almost everyone is without hope, living lives of utter desperation in abject poverty, without a shred of dignity or human rights of any kind” - Chao Tzang Yawnghwe

On the opposite side of Thailand’s far northwest border, in Burma, is a large mountainous region called Shan State.

Everyday refugees and drugs flow across the border from Shan State into Thailand.

In order to understand what refugees are fleeing from and why drugs continue to flow across the border it is necessary to understand the dynamics of drug production, resistance armies, and Thai policy towards refugees.

Burma is the second largest producer of heroin in the world and the majority of its poppy fields and drug refineries are located in Shan State.

Shan State is also home to a bewildering array of armed factions and most of them have been locked in a seemingly intractable conflict with the government of Burma.

How the politics of drug production mingle with the politics of armed resistance is often misunderstood and insurgent armies are mistaken for narco-armies.

In order to understand the various armed factions it is important to first clarify drug production in Shan State.

Along with the more traditional opium/heroin production there is a booming methamphetamine industry.

Yaba (ยาบัา or ‘crazy medicine’ in Thai) is produced from a cocktail of chemicals, with minimal labour, in drug labs lining the Thai border.

The primary motive is profit, the market is largely confined to Thailand and China, and the business is dominated by apolitical drug runners.

Opium, in contrast, is an agricultural product that a large number of peasant farmers depend upon for their livelihood.

It is transported by farmers to local market dealers who then take the raw opium to a broader network of dealers, primarily Chinese, who render it down into a more concentrated form or refine it into heroin 'number 4’.

It is then transported by large drug syndicates across the Thai and Chinese borders where it then joins the world market.

The armed factions that operate in and around Shan State cross the whole political spectrum from ethnic nationalists to the Burmese military to multi-ethnic communists to Chinese Nationalists to well armed criminal gangs.

All armed factions are somehow linked to the drug trade.

Ethnic nationalist armies are primarily associated with opium/heroin through the taxation of trade goods passing through their territories.

Many of the ethnic nationalists, such as the Shan State Army, have/are attempting to wean their economic dependence away from drug profits and to end the growing of poppies within their spheres of control.

The Burmese government and its military, the Tatmadaw, may not be active in drug production yet they are a main beneficiary of the profits and are directly responsible for creating a drug based economy in Shan State.

The grotesque economic failure of ‘Burmese socialism’ dismantled the country’s economy to such an extent that paper currency, the Burmese kyat, became worthless. The economy reverted back to the bartering of commodities.

In Shan State, opium became the principle commodity because it is easy to transport, can be stored for long periods, and is far more valuable than any other agricultural crop farmers can grow.

The opium economy in Shan State has also been encouraged by the Tatmadaw’s brutal 'four cuts' military campaign.

The four needs of insurgent armies were deemed to be access to food, finance, recruits, and intelligence and the Burmese military launched a campaign to eliminate those resources.

The campaign directly targeted the civilian population with search and destroy patrols that murdered, tortured, raped, and confiscated land and property from peasants in order to cut any supplies from reaching insurgent armies.

Opium became the single commodity that peasants could take with them when fleeing from rampaging Tatmadaw patrols.

Flourishing in the chaotic environment are the remnants of the Kuomintang (KMT or Chinese Nationalists) army and various criminal gangs.

The KMT have been involved in drug production in Shan State since retreating from China after Mao’s victorious communist revolution in 1950.

Being capitalists, and rationalizing their need to purchase arms as well as being apathetic to Shan nationalist aspirations, the KMT were uniquely qualified to revolutionize the opium trade.

Their global connections to Chinese diaspora afforded them both the global reach and capital to reap enormous profits from drugs.

Criminal gangs, with various allegiances and ethnicities, account for the rest of the drug trade.

As many Shan State residents are internally displaced by the political chaos and endless conflict they are being pushed up along and over the Thai border.

How refugees are received in Thailand is a reflection of the Thai held stereotype that everyone from Shan State is either a drug runner or an insurgent soldier.

Refugee camps lining the border are filled with Shan State residents who have fled conflict and the Tatmadaw but live as prisoners surrounded by barbwire fences and bristling with Thai military sentries.

More worrying has been Thai Prime Minister Thaksin’s ‘war on drugs’.

In a reactionary and ineffectual response to the flow of drugs, particularly the near epidemic use of yaba in Thailand , Thaksin launched a draconian extermination campaign against drug dealers.

Because Shan State is a major source of drugs, the power of the police and military has been unleashed and focused upon the border.

Low level drug dealers, suspects in rural and poverty stricken villages, and often those with out any connection to drugs, were not just at risk of mass arrests but were at risk of state-sanctioned assassination.

Approximately 3000 extrajudicial killings have been carried out by joint military/police patrols under the orders of Prime Minister Thaksin.

The aggregate result of both drug production and politically diverse armies in Shan State and the hostile reception that refuges receive in Thailand has been the immense suffering of peasants caught between armed factions, drug production, and international borders.

The one simple truth, and articulated in the opening quote, is the abysmal conditions forced upon the average resident of Shan State.