Land  Issue  in Thailand

The first section ( blue background) is extracted from the special issue of the ACHR Newsletter on Tsunami recovery. The second part (white background below) is an update on the LAND dipsutes from the Network April 2006

A big contrast between the flow of human kindness and all the problems and conflicts around the issue of LAND

The fishing villages along Thailand's Andaman coast have a long history of being pushed around in a titan's game of money and power.  A lot of this land, especially in the worst affected province Phangnga, used to be public land.  Despite being already occupied by long-established fishing villages, huge tracts of this land have been concessioned out over the past century for commercial exploitation, first to tin mining companies and later to shrimp farming interests.  Now tourism is upping the pressure to chuck these perpetually vulnerable communities off their ancestral land.  Many of the resorts where so many foreign tourists perished were built on land previously occupied by fishing communities.  Those which survive have faced increasing threats of eviction. 

The land status of most of the tsunami-hit communities is extremely precarious.  Some are on public land (under the control of many different ministries and government agencies and subject to many different policies), some are on national park land while others are on land being fought over by two owners or claimed by private businessmen.  Though people have lived here for decades - even centuries - many have no title deeds or lease contracts, and therefore considered by some to be illegal squatters.  Even within these villages, the tenure situation is a messy patchwork of murky tenure rights, conflicting claims of ownership, spurious land titles and criss-crossing land disputes.

Post-tsunami land grab resumed in earnest just a few weeks after the waves . . .

For a while after the tsunami, there was a lot of hand-wringing in the press about the ravaged coastal ecosystems even before the waves, vanishing mangroves, illegal resort building, banished indigenous peoples and unrestrained capitalism.  This rhetoric wasn't much help for Andaman villagers, however, who found that after a very brief lull, the assault on their land rights was resumed with even greater energy and viciousness than before.

Of the 47 villages destroyed by the tsunami, at least 32 are now embroiled in serious land conflicts - about half of these in the province of Phangnga.  In the village of Ban Nam Khem alone, more than 80 court cases over disputed land have been filed since the tsunami, mostly by wealthy, "influential" people.

In recent months, variations on the same story have played themselves out in 30 or 40 villages, as armed thugs, policemen, officials and perspiring lawyers try to prevent villagers from returning to their land.  And it's not only  private land-owners.  In other cases, local administrative bodies have conjured up bogus civic projects or newfangled zoning plans as a pretext for preventing villagers from rebuilding houses on the public land they have occupied for ages.        

Because both local and national politicians have been partners in - or beneficiaries of - schemes to commercialize the Andaman coastline, the government's role in managing these public lands is deeply compromised by conflicts of interest.  To these powerful interests, the tsunami has been like a prayer answered, since it literally wiped the coast clean of the last communities which stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, golf courses and shrimp farms.  As far as they're concerned, these ruined villages are now open land!  Senator Chirmsak Pinthong, on a recent tour of tsunami-hit areas to investigate land rights, put it this way:  "The developers have tried before to chase people away.  Now the tsunami has done the job for them."        

Under Thai law, squatters can apply for legal title to a plot of land after 10 years of continuous occupation.  In practice, few succeed and millions of people around the country continue to live on what is technically public land in a kind of legal limbo, without papers, without clear rights.  Speculators exploit this ambiguity by using various "informal" means to get land purchase records back-dated or documents issued in their names, and then accusing villagers of encroaching.  Battles over land title are common, particularly where tourist dollars are at stake. 

 

What the tsunami has done is to tear open and aggravate all these already difficult issues of land:  who determines how it's supposed to be used and who has the right to use it. 

Bringing land into the public discourse

But the voices of the fisher folk who want to go back to their land have become very strong now.  Newspapers are filled with stories of small fishing communities fighting the fat cats to reclaim their land and rebuild their lives.  Their land problems have also come out in a series of well-publicized meetings and large seminars organized by different ministries and civic groups in the aftermath of the tsunami. Behind the scenes, people's groups and prominent figures have also been lobbying government advisors and officials, on these people's behalf.  In these ways, the issue of land for these traditional coastal communities has become much more open.  There is now more information, more discussion, more awareness of the needs of these fishing communities among all the groups involved in tsunami rehabilitation.  All this public discussion has helped to slow down the land grabbing (and the eviction of traditional fishing villages) considerably.

For the affected communities and their supporters, the biggest and most difficult post-tsunami project has now become finding ways to resolve the overlapping "traditional" land rights of these fishing villages, and the so-called "legal" land rights of the speculators, developers and politicians.

 

UPDATE ON LAND DISPUTES APRIL 2005

A survey by the SA Network found 81 communities were facing problems over land.

No.	Name of Province	Areas Affected by the Tsunamis			Communities with Land Dispute problems
		District	Sub-district	Communities
1	Pang Nga	6	19	69	14
2	Krabi	5	22	112	13
3	Phuket	3	14	63	12
4	Ranong	3	10	47	6
5	Trang	4	13	51	15
6	Satoon	1	17	70	23
Total		25	95	412	81

The attempts to solve land disputes began when people were unable to rebuild their home on their community land. The network of Tsunami affected communities, therefore, held seminars on 26th January and 2nd Feburary, 2005 to draw up a plan for community rehabilitation together.  The results of these seminars indicated that the main obstacle of community rehabilitation arose from land problems and this result was submitted to the Deputy Prime Minister. Consequently, the government appointed a subcommittee to resolve land disputes in Tsunami affected areas in the six southern provinces. The progress of the procedures taken to resolve the problems is detailed below:

Serious stuff    On May 20, an 18-year old boy from Ban Laem Pom, Piyawat Suksrikaew, was found dead, hanged from a pine tree on the beach near his former home.  After losing his mother, sister and home in the tsunami, Piyawat faced the additional stress of a private company's attempts to take away their land for a luxury resort, and his father's being arrested for "trespassing" on their own land.

 

1 Examining Community Background
            The name list of 412 Tsunami affected communities was submitted to the local authority. The provincial Land Department and the community organization networks in the area collaborated in examining the background information of the communities and the report of the examination was submitted to the subcommittee.

2 Progress of the Subcommittee Consideration for Solutions

            2.1 Problems solved
There are 13 areas settled by 1,156 households whose problems have been resolved. These communities comprise Paktriam and Thungwa communities in Pang Nga province, Hualaem-Sangkau community in Krabi province, Pakbang and Nokle (Kamala beach) communities in Phuket province and Koe Muk, Tase, Laemsai, Changlang, Kuantungku, Mottanoi, Phramuang and Hatsaithong communities in Trang province. The problems were resolved in three ways: community resettlement on a new plot purchased for them with titles issued to them; recognition of the people’s right over the community land (where they were before the Tsunami disaster); and community resettlement on some public land.

            2.2  Cases in the Process of Seeking Solutions:
            These are cases in which problems have not been resolved. These cases include three areas on private land (Laem Pom, Nairai and Tabtawan villages in PangNga province) and areas in Krabi province in which the authority’s utilization plan is not clearly stated.

            2.3   Newly Proposed Cases: 
            12 cases have recently been proposed to the subcommittee. They are cases related to Tsunamis and cases of villagers’ farmland being claimed as part of the National Reserve land. All these cases are in the process of seeking proper solutions.

 

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