RELEVANT LINKS

• Hilltribes in Thailand
  

• Mirror Art Group

• Forum Asia

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Ayo risks being arrested if he leaves his village, nestled in the gentle slopes along Thailand's hilly northern border, and goes south, say to the capital Bangkok.

His crime? Being a member of a hill tribe, the Akha. The same risk awaits other members of the tribe, even though many of them, like the fair, slender-built Ayo, were born in Thailand. "We live in fear of the police, so we have to be careful about our movements," says Ayo, who only has one name, like some of the other Akha.

The Akha are one among the four major ethnic groups in 20 in northern Thailand, the others being the Lahu, Lisu and Karen. Together, they make up close to a million hill tribe people.

The 20-year-old Ayo is well aware that the predicament faced by his hill tribe—which lives close to the northern city of Chiang Rai—stems from Bangkok's policies toward the hill tribes.

Yet it is also in Chiang Rai that Thailand's tourism authorities offer another face of the hill tribe people—as a welcome magnet for tourists who visit the northern reaches of this South-east Asian country.

Be it at the airport or in some shops huddled along Chiang Rai's small streets, visitors come face to face with posters and postcards celebrating the colourful dress and culture of the hill tribes.

Last year, the northern towns of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai attracted over 1.9 million tourists out of the record 10 million foreigners who visited Thailand. In 2000, the national tourism authority reports that 1.7 million tourists vacationed in the northern towns.

"The hill tribes are important for tourism in the north. They come second, after trekking and exploring nature, to draw visitors," says Smithseth Chantusen of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

These twin realities do not sit well with Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, an anthropologist at Chiang Mai University, who says they reveal a glaring duplicity in the Thai government's attitude towards the hill tribe people.

Thailand comes out in poor light, he says, since the government's policy toward the hill tribes translates to them being acceptable to the country as a commodities but having little value as peoples.

Activists are equally troubled by the scale of discrimination these groups are subject to. "It is exploitation, because the government is only interested in profiting from them," says Sombat Boongamanong, director of the Mirror Art Group, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with hill tribe children here.

"They should be offered the right to stay, move around freely and to work, particularly the generations born in Thailand." he argues. "As they are, they have little freedoms and are vulnerable, with little protection."

According to rights activist Sunai Phasuk, even those who helped draft Thailand's landmark 1997 Constitution dismissed the concerns of the hill tribes. "The tribal people made representations about their rights, their need for citizenship during the public hearings for the current constitution, but their views were not incorporated," says Sunai, a political analyst at Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog.

"The work and practice of the governments in the past has displayed a constant view of indigenous and tribal people as the source of problems for the government," the Assembly of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Thailand (AITT) said in a petition to the government earlier this year.

During the Cold War, the hill tribes were welcomed by the Thai government during its battle with communist rebels. But since the early 1990s, they have been marginalised.

Moving across borders from northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia to even southern China is common for hill tribe people, given their nomadic origins and their movement in the region even before political boundaries were put in place.

Among the one million hill tribe people in northern Thailand are some 300,000 who have legal papers, enabling them to stay in the country. The rest live in a state of limbo, even though they have been born here.

Ayo is doing his bit to increase that number by securing legal residency for his community of 76 families. "I have been reading about our rights and helping families fill the papers, but it is not easy," he says. "If I don't do this no one will. I want to fight for my village, for us to be Thais.'