Looking Down on the Akha
IT MUST HAVE been difficult for the pioneering Akha who established themselves downhill from the Lisu in Doi Chang, since most Lisu held the Akha in low esteem. Akha girls were said to have fat legs because they ate dog meat. “In general being married to an Akha,” Hutheesing observed, “is interpreted as a loss of repute.” Nonetheless, she noted, “five Lisu boys of the village have recently married Akha girls, who are looked down upon, but for whom no bride-wealth needs to be paid.” While Lisu women may have lamented their status, they told the anthropologist that Akha women had it even worse. As Leo Alting von Geusau wrote, “The Akha are much more frequently subject to adverse comments than other groups.”
The Thai lowlanders spread rumors that the Akha washed only once a year. It was widely claimed that Akha girls practiced “free love” and that Akha men were all opium addicts. And as far back as 1929, a missionary in Burma wrote about the “low standard of morality” of the Akha, complaining of “licentious orgies among the unmarried.” Another missionary wrote in 1962 that the Akha were a “malodorous and filthy people” and conveyed the misinformation that during annual rites, an Akha man was assigned to deflower village virgins. An anthropologist observed that “Akha women in particular are considered by Thai to be sexually uninhibited, wild like the forests they inhabit.” In 1982, a Taiwanese journalist claimed that “the Akha can’t even count up to ten, [so] they have been unable to undertake work of a higher cultural level.” He described “a family squatting in a small circle and helping themselves with revoltingly filthy black hands to a pot of rice that was covered with flies.”
It is little wonder, then, that Aje, the son of Aso, Doi Chang’s unofficial Akha headman, should have felt inferior. “I didn’t want to be an Akha,” he recalled. “Akha were the lowest, the poorest, the outcast, with no citizenship.” Because he was relatively well-off, Aje’s father sent him to Chiang Rai to attend a private Christian missionary school in 1975, when Aje was nine years old. There he wore a school uniform—white shirt, blue shorts, black shoes—and learned to speak fluent Thai. “I had a pretty good Thai accent. I didn’t wear Akha clothes. I could pass for non-Akha,” he said.
Yet he was torn. “If I had to be an Akha, I wanted to be the pima, the spirit priest, the big man with power and privilege. I had concluded that Buddhism was for the Thai and that Jesus was the white man’s God.” Sure, he heard Christian stories in school, but they were similar to many Akha tales, and the Akha had more dramatic, interesting myths. But one night in 1981, when Aje was fifteen, he attended a movie about a missionary among New Guinea headhunters. During the intermission, a preacher asked a question that resonated deeply: “Do you want to have a friend who will be with you at all places and all times?” Aje accepted the altar call. Ironically, once he accepted Jesus as his personal lord and savior, he became proud to be an Akha, now that he had a special calling to proselytize. “I was not shy to be Akha or Christian.”
The following year, when Aje returned home to the village of Hue San on Doi Tung for his school break, he found to his shock that his family was no longer there. “They were all gone. It was quite a traumatic experience.” He learned that they had moved south to Doi Chang, a Lisu village. “It was unthinkable. You just didn’t see Akha move to a non-Akha village.” But that is where he found his family.
Changing Life in Doi Chang
IN JULY 1982, an American anthropologist named Deborah Tooker moved to Doi Chang, first staying with Aso’s younger brother, Alae, and his family. They subsequently built her a nearby hut of her own, where she lived for three years, conducting field work that eventually resulted in a book, Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life. In the book, she named the village “Bear Mountain” rather than Doi Chang (Elephant Mountain). The villagers called her Michu, an Akha name, or Palama, which meant “foreign white woman.”
Tooker documented the traditional way of life that the Akha reestablished in their new home. They built three village gates to define the upper, lower, and side boundaries. The gates separated the domestic life of the Akha village from the external world, which included antagonistic forest spirits, the Lisu, and lowland Thai. Outside each gate they placed a carving of a man and woman, with the male figure sporting an oversized, potent penis. Adopting powerful symbols of the modern warfare they had fled, they gave the man a carved rifle and placed a wooden airplane model atop the upper gate. Near that main gate, they built a swing for the annual harvest festival and a clearing for the courting yard where young people danced, sang, and flirted in the evenings. They built their homes from bamboo, wooden poles, and thatched grass and hung up the ancestor shrines they had brought with them.
With appropriate rituals and on auspicious days, they cleared fields and planted dry mountain rice and corn. In the fall, after the corn was harvested, they sowed poppy seeds to produce opium, their primary cash crop, to be harvested in January and February. There was not enough land to grow sufficient rice for each family, so the cash from the opium crop was used to purchase extra rice.
They also needed cash to pay Beno, the bald-headed Lisu headman. As a show of honor and respect, it was customary for Lisu villagers to pay a small amount during their ceremonies or to donate pigs or chickens for sacrifices. The Akha found that they, too, were expected to pay for the predominant Lisu rituals.
Only two Akha spoke Thai, so they generally relied on the more sophisticated Lisu to conduct business. Beno himself had realized at a young age that he had to learn from lowlanders. In 1959, when he was twenty, he volunteered to work for free for three years on a farm in Chiang Rai, so that he could learn to read and write in the Thai language. (He knew the family because they were opium dealers.) Back in Doi Chang, he worked with the Thai army’s anti-Communist efforts. The military trained him to be a paramedic, so he became a kind of public health clinician until he was elected the village headman in 1970—an office he held for twenty-eight years. To make extra money, Beno grew opium poppies and boarded tourist trekkers in his home for 20 baht a night (30 baht = $1.00 approximately, a fair amount of money at that time).
Thus life in Doi Chang village was not an ideal situation for the Akha, but it was better than many others, and more Akha moved to Doi Chang during the 1980s.
Crop Substitution Programs
IN 1983 THE Thai-German Highland Development Program arrived in Doi Chang to help the Akha and Lisu convert from illegal opium production to other sustainable cash crops. This was one of several such efforts in Thailand to entice hill tribes away from poppy cultivation.
The first crop substitution program grew out of the king’s interest in the hill tribes. The widely revered Thai monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) was a polymath who played jazz and composed music, painted portraits, never went anywhere without his camera, built and raced sailboats, wrote books, and invented scientific instruments. He first began to visit Hmong villages in 1967.
Two years later, the king decided that the hill tribes should stop growing poppies for opium. Not only was it illegal, but it also left the tribal people in a state of perpetual debt bondage. Each year, they took out goods on credit from village shopkeepers, paying for them with opium, and at year’s end, they were no richer. Hill tribes made little money from opium. Traders might buy raw opium for US$20 that would be sold for US$90 in Chiang Rai, $110 in Bangkok, and $2,000 in the USA. They were in no position to bargain because, without connections or influence, they would be arrested if they complained.
During the annual royal winter sojourn at the Bhubing Palace in Chiang Mai, the king and queen would travel to remote regions in helicopters or by jeep, then hike up mountains to visit various hill tribes, bringing gifts such as blankets, mosquito nets, clothing, medical supplies, rice, iodized salt, vegetable seeds, notebooks, pencils, and candy. In 1969, King Bhumibol established the Royal Project to test various crops for the hill tribes.
The
king’s first idea was to encourage fruit trees, after he found that peaches fetched higher prices than raw opium. The humanitarian king emphasized that opium poppies should not be destroyed until viable alternatives were in place. Unfortunately, the price of peaches plummeted when his program resulted in overproduction.
But the real push for crop replacement programs came in 1971, when one of US president Richard Nixon’s top advisors, Egil “Bud” Krogh, Jr., flew to Thailand and let it be known that the United States would help pay for programs to find alternatives to opium poppies. Over the next two decades, a variety of initiatives came and went, including projects cosponsored by the United Nations, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand (with the member countries offering support independently of their UN membership). Most lasted only a few years and, while well intended, were ineffective top-down affairs.
The missionary anthropologist Paul Lewis wrote scathingly in 1985: “The tribal people themselves were not brought in at the planning stage. The program was brought to them, with the general attitude, ‘Aren’t you lucky! Look at the wonderful goodies we are bringing to you!’ If they found that any villagers did not like what they proposed, they sometimes talked them into accepting it one way or another.”
Administrators of such programs referred to the “hill tribe problem,” implicitly blaming the mountain people. At best paternalistic, their attitude was sometimes overtly hostile. “They [hill tribes] only know how to hold out their hand to get what they want,” wrote one public welfare administrator in 1982. “Their conscience (a sense of their full responsibility as Thai citizens) is still not developed to a satisfactory level.” Another Thai development official summarized the prevalent attitude:
They [the hill tribes] are thought to have a unique way of life, which poses a threat to the majority Thais. The problems perceived as generated by the tribal peoples are: their traditional practice of shifting cultivation, destruction of the forests and deterioration of soil and water resources, frequent migration, opium cultivation and addiction, and their propensity for illegal behavior or other misconduct.
Responsibility for the hill tribes was scattered across eleven Thai government ministries, under which were thirty different departments and 168 agencies. A former Thai administrator of the ironically named Center for the Coordination of Hill Tribe Affairs and Eradication of Narcotic Crops (COHAN) recalled his frustration. “Our attempts to solve the hill tribe problem received little interest… Whether it was government policy, plans or projects, each were scattered about the various agencies with no unity or purpose or action. There was no real coordination or close contact exercised… The whole business evolved into one of extended and complex conflict among the Thai government agencies.” He concluded, “The hill tribe problem can be compared to a balloon. If you squeeze it here, it bulges elsewhere. If you squeeze it in too many places, it bursts with a bang.”
Given this background, it is hardly surprising that the Thai-German Highland Development Program did not involve the Akha or Lisu of Doi Chang in planning sessions. Instead, the Thai-Germans concluded that tomatoes were the most appropriate crop for the mountain villagers, along with cabbages, kidney beans, and some experimental coffee, peach, and apricot trees.
The Akha were willing to give it a try. As anthropologist Leo Alting von Geusau wrote in 1983, “They [the Akha] are interested and willing to accept beneficial changes, but only if they believe that drudgery will be reduced, that some profit will accrue, that they will be treated like equals by those who advise a change, and that they can trust their benefactors not to exploit them.” Though they were not treated as equals by the Thai-Germans, the villagers were eager to explore profitable alternatives, so both the Lisu and Akha farmers planted tomato seeds and accepted the chemical fertilizer and pesticide that came with them. “The good faith shown by highlanders is often amazing,” wrote one observer later that decade. “They will go along with extension worker plans even though they are well aware that they face serious transport problems.”
The Thai-Germans also paid for the construction of a new dirt road to the south, connecting Doi Chang with the main road between Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, near the city of Mae Suai. Although the new road was almost impassable at the height of the rainy season, when it turned into a muddy quagmire, it allowed the farmers to get their tomatoes down the mountain. The Chinese Haw families in the village, who helped trade opium, owned pickup trucks and charged for transportation down the mountain. Still, the new crop yielded a profit during the 1983 and 1984 seasons, since tomatoes grew in the mountains when it was too hot for the plants in the lowlands. Encouraged by the success, the Thai-Germans stopped subsidizing the seeds, fertilizer, and pesticide, since the villagers could now pay for them.
The Opium Raids
THE VILLAGERS SOON had no alternative but to rely on tomatoes as their main cash crop. In December 1984, without notice, the local police searched village homes for guns and drugs. The next month, the dreaded Thahan Pran—many of them criminals recruited into the military in lieu of prison—rampaged through the village and decapitated field after field of poppies, lopping off the ripe seedpods with their machetes just before the harvest. They stayed in the village for several days, heavily armed and drunk from the homemade rice liquor they stole.
The raids ended poppy cultivation in Doi Chang, though a few Lisu continued to grow them in more distant, hidden locations for a few years. There was much discussion of where else the Akha might move, but there were few options. They had reached the end of their long migration.
In 1984 and the following year, attracted by the Thai-German project, three other governmental units moved to Doi Chang. The anchor program was the Wawi Highland Agricultural Research Station, which commandeered 3,000 rai (about 1,200 acres) of sloping land just up the mountain from the village. The villagers could do nothing about the confiscation of their fields, since they held no legal title to them. The Lisu, who had farmed it the longest, were particularly angry. “They wanted to slit my throat,” recalled Bandid Jangnam, the agriculture station’s founding director. So, like most other people in Doi Chang, he carried a gun. When one of the road construction crew was shot, rumors circulated that a Lisu had done it.
The only Lisu who welcomed the agricultural station, and who urged others to give up their land for it, was Beno, the village headman. He thought that the researchers would eventually help the villagers make a living. Soon after Bandid arrived at the agricultural research station, someone shot Beno in the leg, though it wasn’t clear why.
A few Buddhist monks also moved up the mountain, living in a bamboo grove where statues of Buddha had been placed the century before. They walked down into the village every morning to beg, and despite the hill tribes’ poverty, the villagers gave them food.
At the same time, a “mobile unit” of the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) moved from Doi Lan to Doi Chang, lodging with the new agricultural station, and more Thai teachers (who spoke neither Akha nor Lisu) arrived to teach at the primary school in the village. All of the Thai socialized primarily with one another (one referred to individual villagers as “it”), and the incompetent head of the DPW unit spent most of his time elsewhere. Administrators at the agricultural station told Deborah Tooker that the Akha, whom they hired for 35 baht per day (a bit over a dollar), were diligent workers, unlike the Lisu.
Impinging Modernity
ALSO AROUND THIS time, a lay “doctor” was hired to dispense medicine (if he was around), but for any serious medical problem, villagers had to travel down the mountain to hospitals in Mae Suai or Chiang Rai. This they did as often as they could, since they were losing their faith in traditional Akha healers.
There were plenty of health problems among the hill tribe population. According to one survey, infant mortality among hill tribe children under five years old was 21 percent, due to infectious diseases and malnutrition. Women and children were second-class citizen
s who ate after the men, even though the women did the bulk of the work. A 1986 nutritional survey of a different Akha village revealed that only nine of fifty-three children were of normal weight, with nineteen exhibiting severe malnutrition. Those who were breastfed were better off, but once they were weaned, they lost weight steadily. Two of the five-year-olds died a month after the study ended. A survey of ten Doi Chang households revealed that 90 percent of the families had inadequate rice supplies, and 19 percent of the children were chronically malnourished.
Yet the modern world was crashing into Doi Chang, even as the children went hungry. The Chinese Haw, some intermarried with Lisu, ran restaurants and shops selling lowland goods in the middle of the village and operated rice mills. They now opened two video theaters, powered by their pickup truck motors or generators. These theaters showed Chinese and Thai movies, bringing loud violence, sex, and consumer culture to the villagers who were willing to pay 5 baht apiece. On men-only nights, they sometimes showed pornography.
Doi Chang took on the character of a town in the Wild West. As tomato sales continued to bring a modicum of wealth to farmers, highway robberies became common on the mountain roads. When five Akha resisted, two were shot and seriously wounded. All gave up their money and wristwatches. A government official tried to extort money from a wealthy Lisu by falsely claiming to have found a bag of heroin in his house. When farmers carried guns for self-protection, they were stopped by soldiers and fined for the illegal possession of firearms. Nonetheless, Beno, the Lisu headman, openly carried a pistol on his hip. He also made money by turning his large home into a guesthouse for the occasional tourist.
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