Mythologies of the Bang Kloi Tribes

Bang Kloi Khuen Thin (“Bangkok Returns Home”), a group of community members campaigning for their right to return to their traditional way of life, issued a statement on 22 August calling for the new government to allow them to return to Chai Phaen Din as soon as possible. They noted that the independent committee formed to investigate and solve the community rights issues they face agreed that they should be allowed to do so, and called for encroachment charges brought against community members who decided to return to Chai Phaen Din in 2021 to be dropped. The group is demanding a public apology from the new government for the violence and discrimination committed against indigenous communities by the authorities. They also ask that those responsible for the abduction and murder of Bang Kloi Community rights activist Porlajee Rakchongcharoen to be prosecuted. To open the door to solving community rights issues, they further propose that the new government acknowledge to the United Nations that the country has indigenous communities. The group asks that the new government amend outdated conservation laws, including the National Park Act of 2019, so that the rights of indigenous communities are not infringed upon. They also call for the passage of a law protecting the indigenous way of life as well as legislations on land rights and other laws on behalf of these communities and other marginalised groups. The Bang Kloi indigenous Karen community was forcibly evicted from Chai Phaen Din, their ancestral homeland in the Kaeng Krachan forest, in 1996, and again, for a second time in 2011, when park officials burned down their houses and rice storage barns. They were then relocated to the Pong Luek-Bang Kloi Village, where they now live. The authorities promised each family 7 rai of land. However, the community was not allocated the promised amount of land and the land they were given were not suitable for agriculture. The lack of farmland has resulted in malnutrition, food insecurity, and economic issues. The community also faces epidemics of seasonal diseases like Dengue Fever and Malaria. Access to a hospital is difficult due to the condition of the road to and from Pong Luek-Bang Kloi Village. Earlier this May, activist Gift Tonnamphet died from Dengue Fever. Her family and other activists have said that her death is the result of medical negligence and racial discrimination by a local hospital which delayed her treatment, resulting in complications.

Three years after a group of villagers from the Bang Kloi indigenous Karen community were prosecuted for returning to their ancestral land in the Kaeng Krachan forest, the community is calling on the new government to help them return to the original location of their village at Chai Phaen Din, from which they were evicted over 20 years ago. Bang Kloi Khuen Thin (“Bangkok Returns Home”), a group of community members campaigning for their right to return to their traditional way of life, issued a statement on 22 August calling for the new government to allow them to return to Chai Phaen Din as soon as possible. They noted that the independent committee formed to investigate and solve the community rights issues they face agreed that they should be allowed to do so, and called for encroachment charges brought against community members who decided to return to Chai Phaen Din in 2021 to be dropped. The group is demanding a public apology from the new government for the violence and discrimination committed against indigenous communities by the authorities. They also ask that those responsible for the abduction and murder of Bang Kloi Community rights activist Porlajee Rakchongcharoen to be prosecuted. To open the door to solving community rights issues, they further propose that the new government acknowledge to the United Nations that the country has indigenous communities. The group asks that the new government amend outdated conservation laws, including the National Park Act of 2019, so that the rights of indigenous communities are not infringed upon. They also call for the passage of a law protecting the indigenous way of life as well as legislations on land rights and other laws on behalf of these communities and other marginalised groups. The Bang Kloi indigenous Karen community was forcibly evicted from Chai Phaen Din, their ancestral homeland in the Kaeng Krachan forest, in 1996, and again, for a second time in 2011, when park officials burned down their houses and rice storage barns. They were then relocated to the Pong Luek-Bang Kloi Village, where they now live. The authorities promised each family 7 rai of land. However, the community was not allocated the promised amount of land and the land they were given were not suitable for agriculture. The lack of farmland has resulted in malnutrition, food insecurity, and economic issues. The community also faces epidemics of seasonal diseases like Dengue Fever and Malaria. Access to a hospital is difficult due to the condition of the road to and from Pong Luek-Bang Kloi Village. Earlier this May, activist Gift Tonnamphet died from Dengue Fever. Her family and other activists have said that her death is the result of medical negligence and racial discrimination by a local hospital which delayed her treatment, resulting in complications.

For more than a decade of struggles and generations away from home, the Bang Kloi community are ethnic Karen people who have been living within the Thai state since possibly before the state became Thailand itself. The uses of the term ‘indigenous’ are still questionable by institutions, yet it has been widely accepted that indigenous people are often on the frontlines of where we must all re-consider our own actions, given the consequences of climate change. They are also recognized as people who hold knowledge of how to address some of these issues. Climate justice and environmental rights in Thai contexts need further scrutiny, to explore the political transitions where forests and mountains are demarcated, and the adoption of the Western conservation paradigm without regard for the pre-socio-economic contexts that existed within the sub-region, where people have been living in the forests and mountainous landscapes before the modern nation state came to claim the land. This photo essay takes the reader on a journey through some recent struggles, of cases related to the conflicts between what we might call or question as ‘justice’. Are the forests (the protected status of certain areas designated by the state) impeding people’s lives, or is it the people who have invaded them? If we talk about the ‘just’ in climate crisis contribution in the sense of what and how we manage to live in the city through modern life facilities and technologies, what if we, the city dwellers, get to enjoy what we have because of the consequences and tradeoffs of someone else’s suffering somewhere else all along? Whilst that question is still under debate as well as being explored by many academic studies and campaigns, the Bang Kloi people are not fighting alone, as many civil society organizations (CSOs) banded with Thai environmental and political activists and allies have launched a series of campaigns in the ongoing conflict between indigenous forest defenders and National Park/government officials tracing back to 1996. This is the year which can be considered as the baseline for understanding the relocation attempts by the state where many other notable concurrent events occurred afterwards [1], and many cases before that in the context of the Thai conservational paradigm. Events related to this case include the lawsuit of violence rendered by the state, where Kaeng Krachan National Park officers had burnt Karen houses and rice silos[2] in order to force and displace “forest-encroaching people” from their homeland, called Jai Pan Din (the ‘heart of the land’ in English), demarcated through annexation of the national park in 1981. More recently, the ongoing case of Mr ‘Billy’ Porlajee Rakchongcharoen, a Bang Kloi Karen former leader and activist, whose enforced disappearance demonstrated another form of ‘justice on hold’. The recent judgment [3] has taken a heavy toll on the family members of the disappeared.