The emergence of the Assembly of the Poor (Samatcha khon chon) has been one of the most striking political events in Thailand in the 1990s. The agitations which led up to the foundation of the Assembly in December 1995 were the first major assertion of a rural political voice since the suppression of the Peasants’ Federation (Sahaphan chao na chao rai) twenty years earlier. The Assembly’s chosen name, its decentralized network style of organization, its diffuse leadership, and its espousal of both local battles and global issues, represent a break from previous forms of rural politics. In February–May 1997, the Assembly led a 99-day demonstration in Bangkok which won concessions from government unprecedented in scale and content. The (qualified) success of this event can be measured by the subsequent reaction. The Chuan Leekpai government (1997– ) was provoked into a fierce campaign of suppression. The official mind reacted in some places by reviving the anti-communist discourse to intimidate rural protest (for example Pasuk, 1999:1–2). The Ministry of Interior suddenly discovered a new interest in rural uplift.
The emergence of such a new and powerful force has provoked debate
on its origins and political significance. Yet at present this debate
is conducted in an elusive, indirect way. Fundamentally, there are two
main positions. [2] The most detailed study of the Assembly, by Praphat
Pintoptaeng (1998), [3] drew its theoretical approach from studies of new
social movements (NSM) in the West, and in particular from the ‘political process’ model popular in the United States. Praphat explained the Assembly’s emergence and success in terms of three main elements: the ‘political opportunity’ which opened up with the decline of Cold War repression; the adoption of an organizational model based on loose networking; and the building of alliances, particularly with middle-class pressure groups, on the common ground of environmentalism. Praphat’s approach emphasizes the Assembly as a new political phenomenon.
The second approach to understanding the Assembly, by contrast, strives to emphasize the continuities between the Assembly and Thailand’s earlier history of peasant protest. In this version, the Assembly is the latest iteration of a long-standing struggle between peasant and state. This struggle changes in form through different historical eras – runaway phrai, millennial revolts, the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) insurgency, the Peasants’ Federation of Thailand. But the essence of the struggle remains constant (Kanoksak, 1997).
The difference between these two approaches reflects a much larger debate over the origins, nature, strategy, and prospects of popular political movements in the contemporary world, and in particular within societies which still have a large, poor agrarian population. One side in this debate argues that ‘new’ forms of political organization and struggle reflect the ‘new’ conditions of the post Cold War era. Radical organizations no longer have the backing of an international ideology or international political bloc. They have little prospect of seizing power or overthrowing the state. At the same time, the agenda of political and social organizations has expanded beyond matters of class and power to
include environment, gender, and other issues. These changes in the
background and objective of these movements are reflected in new forms
of organizing (networks rather than parties), new tactics (everyday forms
of resistance, wars of position), and new ideologies revolving around
culture, identity, and community.
In reply, many of the old left have argued that this emphasis on ‘newness’ and on non-political aspects amounts to a form of political defeatism. They contend that the NSM approach unduly down-plays the role of class. More pointedly, they argue that the NSM approach, particularly when conflated with postmodernist forms of analysis, leads to poor political strategy – concentrating on local struggles, community autonomy, and inward-looking cultural revival, while ignoring the expanding domination of the state and global forces. Henry Veltmeyer argued that the
NSM theories result in ‘intellectual immobilization and political demobilization’ (Veltmeyer, 1997:141). Tom Brass contended that the
movements’ emphasis on local autonomy ‘represents a retreat, amounting to abandoning the field of battle to the enemy’ (Brass, 1995[a]:19). He argued that the combination of postmodern forms of analysis, ideologies of community and culture, and the abandonment of socialism resulted in ‘populist movements proclaiming resistance/empowerment on the basis of a romantic anti-capitalism, anti-modernity, nationalism, even fascism’ (Brass, 1995[b]: 263).
Since this debate was joined in such clashing terms in the early 1990s,
both sides have modified their positions. From the NSM side, Latin
American theorists admitted that they too readily adopted theoretical
approaches from Europe, and that they needed to give more attention to
the class basis and the importance of politics. But they reasserted the
belief that both political economy and political strategy had been radically
altered by changes in the international context (Alvarez, Dagnino,
and Escobar, 1998). From the left, writers such as Veltmeyer (1997)
argued that class categories should be retained, but ‘in a radically different
form from that analysed and theoretically constructed in traditional
marxist analysis’, taking into account new local social realities and international
links. In a survey of recent agrarian movements in India, Terry
Byres admitted that much had to be seen as ‘new’ since in recent years
‘agency had passed from “peasants” to “farmers”; the central focus of
rural agitation had shifted from land to prices; the essential agitational
form was a non-party one; and distinctive forms of agitation were
employed . . . with a broadening of agenda and ideology, to include the
environment and women’s issues’ (Byres, 1995:2).
This essay is an attempt to broaden the understanding of the Assembly
of the Poor. It does not deal with the Assembly’s organization and internal
history, or with the details of the 99-day demonstration. These matters
have already been covered elsewhere. [4] Instead this essay looks at four
less well-appreciated aspects of the Assembly’s emergence: changes in
rural society; the division between the Assembly and other new rural
organizations; the evolving ‘public drama’ of rural protest in the 1990s;
and the government reaction in the aftermath of the 99-day protest.
Peasant politics without peasants
The Assembly of the Poor is at heart a classic peasant struggle over
rights to resources of land, water, and forests. However, it differs radically
from peasant movements of earlier eras. Peasants are not what
they were. The emergence of the Assembly reflects not only a widening
of the space available for peasant politics but also the appearance of a
new political economy of the Thai peasantry or post-peasantry.
Robert Elson (1997) has argued that the peasant disappeared from the
South East Asian landscape around the middle of the twentieth century.
Elson defined peasants as rural dwellers whose economy was very largely
oriented to subsistence and localized systems of exchange (xix–xx), and
whose social and political horizons were correspondingly local. Over
the last century, they have been transformed:
[They] still live in the countryside, but not with the permanence, rural focus, and sense of local identity their forebears had. . . . They sell the great bulk of what they produce, they produce it to sell, and they purchase the great bulk of what they use. . . . They work outside the village. . . . Their culture is not just that of the village but of the nation and the world (xxii).
Within this overall picture, however, it is worth making a couple of
qualifications about timing and differential impact in the Thai case. For
Elson, the peasantry disappeared as a result of commercialization, particularly
of rice farming, which gathered pace from the late nineteenth
century and was largely complete by the Second World War. Thailand
certainly experienced such commercialization, but the impact was circumscribed. It was limited to the larger, land-secure, and
entrepreneurial farmers in long-settled zones (central plains, northern
valleys). Many smaller peasants escaped from this process by joining
the massive post-1950 movement of land colonization in Thailand’s
dry uplands areas. They experienced a phase of re-peasantization which
ended only when the urban economy accelerated and the land frontier
closed a generation later in the 1980s (Pasuk and Baker, 1995:chapter
2).
Moreover, the processes which finally integrated Thailand’s smaller
peasants, upland colonists, and rural labourers into a commercial
economy were very different from Elson’s commercialization of rice
farming. The two main processes were the growth of rural–urban labour
migration, and the expansion of communications. While neither
happened overnight, both processes expanded significantly in the
1980s.
In the 1970s, the Bangkok migration first pulled in the landless villagers
from the adjacent rice zone in the central plain. But by 1980, the
major source of migrants had become the upland zones in the north and
(especially) the north-east. The process was complex. Many rotated regularly
between city and village on the rhythm of the agrarian calendar.
By the 1990s, villages in this zone would typically cite that 50–70 per
cent of household heads were absent in the dry season. Many teenagers
went to the city as much as a rite of passage as an income-generating
activity. When the urban economy boomed after 1985, more stayed for
a longer time or shifted permanently. Precise numbers are difficult. One
demographic estimate reckoned that 1.1 million people in the 15–30
age range had disappeared from the north-east between 1980 and 1990
(Lewis, 1995). In 1995, the transport ministry reckoned that two million
people travelled back from Bangkok to the north-east for the
Songkran holiday alone.
The expansion of cheap communications also narrowed the gap
between village and city over the 1980s. The improvement of the road
network made almost anywhere accessible to Bangkok by overnight
bus. Local assembly made 2-stroke motorcycles so affordable that half
of all rural families owned one by 1992, and 71 per cent by 1996. The
rural TV broadcast network was expanded rapidly from the mid-1980s
while TV set costs dropped in the same period. Rural TV ownership
increased from 30 to 70 per cent over the 1980s and exceeded 90 per
cent by the mid-1990s (data from Deemar media surveys).
Elson’s post-peasant emerges around mid-century and is a commercial
rice farmer. Certainly, such figures populate Thailand’s central plain
and other zones of relatively secure rice production. But through the
one-crop, rain-fed zone – the majority of the area and population – the
Thai post-peasant emerges rather later, in the 1980s, and is a different
figure. His calendar is divided into a subsistence season and a cash season.
During the rainy season, his objective is to grow rice to meet the
family’s subsistence needs, with only a subsidiary hope of some surplus
for sale. During the dry season, his objective is to raise cash. This might
be through cash-cropping, wage labour on the sugar harvest, or even
hunting and gathering. But more and more this cash search has been
directed towards rural–urban migration. Meanwhile he is constantly in
communication with urban Thailand through his motorbike, his TV, the
bus service, and the connections with migrant kin and neighbours. The
Thai post-peasant straddles city and village, subsistence and commercial
economies.
Elson implies that the end of peasant economics also meant the end
of peasant society and peasant politics. Certainly in the Thai case, the
classic form of isolated peasant community has disappeared. Certainly
too, the peasant protests which reflected and often defended this isolation
– the so-called millenarian revolts – have faded away. But Elson’s
argument stops at the interesting point: what came next?
The Assembly of the Poor is a direct reflection of the new hybrid
political economy of Thailand’s peasant mass. The majority of those
involved come from poor, insecure areas (see below). They depend on
the urban economy for a significant (probably a majority) share of their
income. Yet they are reluctant to abandon a rural base, for reasons which
probably include rational self-interest (long-term welfare) as well as
cultural and social ties. The leaders of the new rural politics of the 1990s
reflect this blend of rural and urban experience. Bamrung Kayotha, the
movement’s most prominent early leader, was an early migrant from
the north-east to Bangkok in the 1970s. He had an urban political education
through trade union activities in the Siam Cement Group and
through participation in the 1973–76 agitations. He later returned to the
north-east and took up agriculture and political activism. Prawian
Boonnak, a Loei leader assassinated in 1995, had trained as a teacher in
Udon Thani town, spent some time with the CPT, worked as a teacher,
and stood as a parliamentary candidate. Nakhon Sriwiphat also trained
and worked as a teacher and spent time with the CPT. He then went on
to take an open university degree and work for an NGO in the city slums
before returning home and involving himself in rural organizations.
Sorot (1999:273–76) notes that the north-eastern peasant movement
was transformed in the mid-1990s when sons of peasants who had trained
as teachers or lawyers returned and supplanted city-based NGO workers.
In 1995, some forty teachers were reported as ‘core members’ of
the north-eastern peasant movement (Bangkok Post, 1 February 1995).
Praphat (1998:102–04) conducted an interview survey with 268 leaders
of the Assembly. Eighty per cent of them had worked outside the village,
especially in Bangkok and as overseas migrant labour in the Middle
East.
In sum, the emergence of the Assembly is a direct result of the development
of a new rural political economy, and this is reflected in the
background and life-experience of its leaders. The central goals of the
Assembly are to gain better rights over the land, water, and forest resources
required to sustain a semi-subsistence local economy. Yet the
strategy of the movement reflects a sophisticated appreciation of the
wider (national) political economy. Often this sophistication is attributed
to the role of urban NGOs. Yet in reality, the Assembly acquired its
distinctive organizational form and strategic direction at the point when
leaders with a rural origin and urban experience took over the key roles. [5]
Class division beyond class
The Assembly does not represent the Thai (post-)peasantry as a whole
but a specific segment. This segment cannot be defined using classic
categories such as landlord and tenant (as landlordism has historically
been a minor factor in Thai political economy) [6] or a division into rich,
middle, and small peasants. The Thai post-peasantry has been divided
by the very uneven impact of commercialization and its attendant bundle
of civic and legal rights.
It is difficult to generalize about Thai rural structure because of the
huge variation. One way to manage this variation is to portray it as a
spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is the advanced commercial farmer.
He is found throughout the Chaophraya river system, and in smaller
pockets elsewhere. His forebears have been engaged in commercial farming
for a century and a half. He is highly entrepreneurial and
market-sensitive. He has secure land rights, and faces only moderate
year-to-year seasonal variations. The ownership and management structure
of his farm may be highly complex. His production is relatively
capital-intensive because of the use of machinery and expensive inputs.
He is a long-time client of the government’s agricultural bank. His main
concern is pricing – of capital goods, inputs, outputs, and credit.
At the other end of the spectrum is the late frontiersman who colonized
new land in the few years before the closure of the frontier in the
late 1980s. His land is classified as ‘forest’ or (worse) ‘protected area’,
and hence he has no secure land title and faces the threat of dislodgement
by official or speculator. His land is in an ecologically precarious
zone of unreliable rainfall, poor soil, and susceptibility to erosion. He
has had neither the time nor opportunity to generate a capital fund, and
has no access to government loans because he has no land title for collateral.
His cultivation strategy is to minimize input costs and hence
minimize his risk exposure to moneylender capital. In addition, there is
also a strong chance he comes from a minority group – either a hill
people or one of the lowland groups that have never been fully absorbed
into modern Thai state culture and have been gradually pushed towards
the periphery on the outer edge of the advancing frontier. Equally there
is a chance that he has a history of involvement in the protest politics of
the periphery, including participation in the CPT-led resistance of the
1970s. Finally his remote area attracts the designers of dams, pipelines,
waste disposal sites, and other projects which enclose land and water
resources. In sum, his position is highly insecure because of uncertain
rights in land, poor access to capital, susceptibility to seasonal variation,
cultural marginalization, political history, and the likelihood of being
displaced by infrastructure projects.
Between these two ends of the spectrum, there are various intermediate
forms. Plotting the profile of groups along the spectrum is difficult.
In the early 1990s, it was reckoned that around a quarter of all farming
families lacked land rights because they were settled on ‘forest’ land.
Since then, some of these have been legitimated under the government’s
SPK land schemes, and some have negotiated stand-off arrangements
with local authorities. Others abandoned poor land and went to the city
while urban labour demand was good (but often retained a residual village
base). Large numbers remain in ‘protected areas’ where land rights
are consistently denied. Probably ten to fifteen per cent of all farming
families are still huddled at the wrong end of this spectrum.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are moderate numbers of very
secure farmers who have sizeable landholdings in zones with good water
supply and easy market access, particularly in the central region.
Then there are much larger numbers who are in an intermediate site on
the spectrum. These are found in the northern valleys, where most of
the landholdings are small, and in the north-east, where even the more
developed areas are confined to one crop a year, and liable to large
variations in rainfall and flooding.
Two groups have figured strongly in the new rural politics of the 1990s.
First there are those at the far ‘insecure’ end of the spectrum. Second
there are those in an intermediate position – with a secure asset base
and high involvement in the commercial economy, and yet with high
vulnerability to climate and market. Both of these groups are concentrated
mainly in the north and especially the north-east. The different
backgrounds of these two groups have shaped different politics.
Rural protests emerged from the mid-1980s as parliament replaced
military dictatorship and the military-run vigilante network gradually
faded into the background. Initially protests were highly localized and
involved conflicts and negotiations with local officials. The build-up of
NGOs in the late 1980s, and the increased attention to rural protests in
the press, gradually built linkages between local movements and local
groups. In the early 1990s, several new supra-local organizations appeared.
The most important were the Assembly of Smallscale Farmers
of the North-East (So Ko Yo Oo) formed in March 1992 and the Northern
Farmers Network (Kho Ko No) formed in early 1994 (Pratuang,
1996; Jarin, 1995; Sorot, 1999).
The protests of the early 1990s were of two types, roughly reflecting
the different interests of the two groups outlined above. The first set of
protests were basically about income issues. They involved attempts to
alter the pricing of agricultural inputs (credit, fertilizers) and outputs
(crops) by bargaining with the market and the state. Most involved specific
groups of cultivators (rubber, garlic, cassava), but the dispute which
found a wider constituency and attracted public attention focused on
the fall-out from failed agricultural development schemes. Government
agencies had promoted the schemes and induced villagers to take out
loans from the government agricultural bank (BAAC) to participate.
When the schemes failed, villagers demanded that the government take
responsibility for the remaining debt. The most famous scheme involved
the import of Australian breeding cattle which turned out to be infertile
and were dubbed ‘plastic cows’. Others involved crops promoted in
ecologically inappropriate areas (cashew) and crops which could not be
profitably marketed (red millet).
The second set of protests focused on insecurity issues, particularly
over access to land, water, and forests. Many involved dams. Several
groups who had been displaced by dams had never received compensation
(in land or money), largely because of official intransigence. Other
groups faced imminent displacement by new dam projects. Another subset
of protests involved access to forests. After the end of the communist
insurgency, government launched policies to ‘reforest’ large areas through
commercial tree plantations. These plantation concessions often closed
off areas which villagers had formerly used for collecting food, herbal
medicines, firewood, natural manure, and saleable forest produce. Another
sub-set involved land rights. During the massive upland frontier expansion
from 1950 onwards, large numbers (estimates ran up to twelve million
people) had settled in areas which government officially defined as ‘forest’.
Government refused to grant land rights, and from the mid-1980s
various government agencies launched schemes to resettle people out
of these forest areas. The largest protest of this type erupted in 1991–
92, when the army laid a plan (Kho Cho Ko) to move six million settlers
out of 1,250 ‘forest’ areas, and began implementing the plan with brute
force – dismantling villages, burning crops, manhandling people (Local
Development Institute, 1992; Chai-Anan and Kusuma, 1992; Pasuk,
Sungsidh, and Nualnoi, 1996).
In the early 1990s, these two types of protest worked in alliance. The
coincidence of the army resettlement scheme and the failed agriculture
schemes provided the background for the surge in organization building.
Groups of both types found a common cause in opposition to a
proposed ‘national agricultural council’ (sapha kaset haeng chat) on
the grounds that it would favour state and agribusiness at the expense of
the individual peasant. So Ko Yo Oo, founded on 6 March 1992, emerged
as the champion of both income and insecurity issues. In 1994 and 1995
it spearheaded protests which highlighted both types of complaint.
But in 1995–96 the alliance split. At one level this split appeared as a
typical leadership dispute. Bamrung Kayotha, who had become the most
high-profile rural leader since the mid-1970s, resigned from the general
secretary post of So Ko Yo Oo in November 1995 amid talk of mismanagement
and corruption. A month later he helped to form the Assembly
of the Poor. But at a deeper level, this was a much more fundamental
split between two different causes and two different groups of people.
From this point on, the more settled farmers and the income disputes
were represented by organizations descended from So Ko Yo Oo, while
the more insecure peasants grouped under the Assembly of the Poor.
The division was far from exact. Politics (and especially rural politics)
are rarely so neat. But there were two distinct approaches to organization
and strategy which reflected the background difference in political
economy.
The income agenda moved away from protest and agitation towards a
strategy of negotiation with local officialdom and with government. The
new leader of So Ko Yo Oo, Nakhon Sriwiphat, publicly announced he
would work through negotiation with politicians rather than through
demonstrations (Sorot, 1999:275). The organization built alliances into
national politics, especially with Chavalit Yongchaiyudh’s New Aspiration
Party which was increasingly projecting itself as a north-eastern
party with a popular, rural base. So Ko Yo Oo fragmented, partly because
of leadership disputes, partly because of the new and divisive factor of
political patronage, and partly because of the variety of local issues.
Several new organizations appeared with a similar style and strategy
(Praphat, 1998:58–60). [7] These different units bickered among themselves,
but also co-operated on key issues, and usually distanced
themselves from the Assembly of the Poor and its agitational approach.
Besides negotiating with government, they also launched various selfhelp
schemes of income enhancement, including local credit schemes,
livestock development, and subsidiary income projects. Within the income
agenda of negotiation, the key issue became debt, specifically the
high level of debt to the government agricultural bank, not only as a
result of failed schemes but more generally because of the rising costs
and market uncertainties of cultivation. In June 1998 and again in February
1999, these organizations mounted campaigns for a moratorium
on agricultural debt.
While the Assembly of the Poor drew in some fishermen, industrial
workers, and slum groups as allies, the core of the network consisted of
the insecure peasant groups, and their core agenda concerned land, dams,
and forests. [8] Most originated in the north-east and to a lesser extent the
north, either in hill areas or upland zones of relatively recent colonization.
[9] While the income groups adopted a classic party or association
form of organization (president, general secretary, membership dues),
the Assembly built a decentralized network with no central office-holders,
and only a skeletal secretariat (of NGO workers) to process basic
administration (calling meetings, distributing documents). Each participating
local group contributed a pho khrua yai (group father/head) who
met in assembly to debate overall strategy. The chosen name, Assembly
of the Poor, deliberately emphasized this form of organization. Samatcha
means an assembly, coming-together, or conference. [10] This decentralized
form reflected a commitment to localism, but was also influenced by
the known vulnerability of rural leaders to violence, intimidation, and
political co-optation. The Assembly sought no political links, and party
politicians kept a firm distance. However, the agenda of land, dams, and
forests provided a platform for co-operation with environmental groups
and a basis for more sympathetic press coverage than was generally
available to the So Ko Yo Oo farmer associations. The term ‘Poor’ in the
organization’s title reflected this strategy. It not only marked a break from
old ideological camps of the past but also provided a constant, accusing
reminder of the widening income gap between rich and poor. The Assembly’s
strategy focused on large non-violent agitational campaigns to
overcome the deep-seated structural biases which created the asset insecurity
underlying the poverty of large parts of the population.
In sum, the rising rural politics of the early 1990s split along a dividing
line in the rural political economy. The Assembly of the Poor emerged
as the organization of peasant groups that had been at the outer edges of
the frontier colonization movement, and that faced multiple forms of
insecurity. They adopted a name and organizational style which marked
a deliberate break from both the ‘party’ format of the CPT days, and the
‘lobby’ format of the more secure farmers’ new organizations. [11]
The theatre of non-violent war
The power of the soldier is the gun. The power of the businessman is money. . . .
From the experience of the poor, the power of the poor is their feet. [12]
The Assembly was formed to provide a basis for co-operation between
dispersed local movements but also to provide a mechanism for bargaining
with the central state. Hence the Assembly’s activities
encompassed both local campaigns and national campaigns. Local campaigns
were staged within the space and the culture of local society. [13]
But the national campaigns had to be staged within the modern and
postmodern political space of national politics and electronic media.
While these campaigns were in essence negotiations between village
and state, the negotiations were carried out in the view of a national
audience – and particularly an audience of the politically-aware, media-
viewing segment of the urban population. This audience became an
essential part of the campaign drama.
This aspect of the theatre of contemporary politics is often ignored,
and is not easy to analyse. What follows is an experimental account,
which focuses on one particular aspect of this public negotiation – the
equivocal role of violence in the public drama of protest.
Any rural movement of political assertion in Thailand is set against a
history of state violence. Most recently, the Peasants’ Federation of 1974–
76 was dispersed by a campaign of selective assassinations. In the early
1990s, four leaders of the emergent rural movement were shot dead –
one by an assistant village headman and one by a policeman. [14]
After the insurgency collapsed in the early 1980s, there was a strong
reaction against the CPT strategy of armed insurrection, and more generally
against the role of violence as an instrument of political struggle.
Intellectuals criticized the CPT for pitching a weakly organized rural
base against a powerful central state. Others regretted the social division
and violence which had characterized the late 1970s. The first NGOs
were formed by ex-radicals who hoped to find an alternative to the politics
of confrontation. The NGO movement developed around a philosophy
of non-violent action.
But rural protest involves confrontation. The challenges to government
authority, and the official response, contained an implicit aggression.
In the public drama of these politics, this aggression was expressed in
military metaphors of invasion, siege, and battle. However, this was
warfare in which the role of violence was inverted.
Invasion
In June 1992, the groups protesting against the army’s mass land resettlement
scheme convened at Khon Kaen, the unofficial capital of the
north-east. They had appealed to the army and to the provincial authorities
without success, and resolved to direct their final protest at the
government in Bangkok. To get there, they decided to march.
The route from Khon Kaen to Bangkok was a passage from periphery
to centre, from the Lao territories gradually annexed by Bangkok during
the nineteenth century to the heart of the Ayudhya-Bangkok-Siam-Thai
state. The critical boundary was the Dongphyayen, the steep escarpment
falling down from the north-east plateau to the Chaophraya deltaic
plain. For centuries, the central plain based government had placed a
key garrison at Saraburi, just below the pass. Troops had marched on
Bangkok along this route during the Boworadej rebellion in 1933, and
again during the suppression of the April Fools Day coup in 1981. More
importantly, the last time the periphery had marched on the centre along
this route was Chao Anou of Vientiane in 1827 (Mayoury and Pheuiphanh,
1998). Whatever the truth of this event, it is written into the school
history books as an invasion, a khabot (revolt), an attempt to seize and
overthrow Bangkok.
Into this historical background of armed invasions, the Assembly
marchers in 1992 inserted a foreground display of peace and loyalty.
The march was headed by a group of old ladies. Some carried national
flags and large pictures of the king and queen as direct affirmation of
loyalty and as denial of any attempt at khabot. Some danced, a further
affirmation of peace, recalling the tradition of old women dancing at
the head of festival processions in the north-east. This delicate mix of
political messages was highly effective. The government dispatched a
junior minister by helicopter. In negotiations beside the highway, he
agreed to kill the Kho Cho Ko resettlement scheme on condition that the
march dispersed.
The 1992 march had been a largely spontaneous response to the threat
of mass forced evictions. But the success of the strategy was proven. In
1994, the north-eastern groups repeated the strategy but with two major
differences. First, this time the march was planned as a deliberate attempt
to force government’s attention to a long list of north-eastern rural
grievances, including both income complaints (debt, failed agricultural
schemes, prices) and insecurity complaints (dams, land, forests). Second,
the groups assembled at Lamtakong, a flat plain half-way down
the Dongphyayen escarpment, less than half the distance from Khon
Kaen to Bangkok, and right at the entrance to the final pass down to the
Chaophraya plain. The press recognized the site’s strategic importance
in language which recalled the region’s old pattern of marauding warfare.
The Nation (12 February 1995) called it a ‘haven and stronghold’,
‘a launching pad for political trouble’, with good supplies of food and
water and convenient routes for dispersal in the face of attack. Government
again responded urgently and with a military sense of strategy. It
ordered police to seize the villagers’ cavalry of i-taen trucks. [15] When
the marchers continued on foot, the police blockaded bridges and seized
the vehicle carrying food supplies. Finally government dispatched the
agriculture minister to talk with the marchers and convey their demands
to the cabinet. The government agreed to form a committee to evaluate
the demands. The march dispersed.
A year later, in January 1995, after this mechanism had produced no
result, the protest groups again assembled at centres around the northeast
and then converged on the encampment at Lamtakong. They
demanded negotiation at ministerial level. They waited twelve days until
their numbers had risen to 8,000 and then began to march. Again government
responded to maintain the central/north-east border unbreached.
A minister was dispatched to the protest site. The pattern was repeated
again in early 1996. Groups from the outer north-east assembled at Sakon
Nakhon before moving to Korat en route for Bangkok. Two ministers
and a bunch of senior officials rushed up by helicopter to head them off
before the pass (Bangkok Post, 2 and 25 February 1996). [16]
Siege
The stretch of road alongside Khlong Prem Prachakon in Bangkok behind
Government House had long been used by the police to site protest groups,
but usually in small numbers for short periods. In April 1996, the
Assembly of the Poor brought several thousand to occupy this site for
three weeks. Government negotiated a quick agreement to dispel the
protest, but again the resulting agreement proved worthless. In January
1997, the Assembly brought in 20,000 people by truck, train, and i-taen
to camp on this site. The siege remained for 99 days. If a historical
parallel were now required, it would be the repeated Burmese sieges of
the old capital of Ayudhya.
But the siege strategy was double-edged. Moving the location of this
periphery-centre warfare to the heart of the capital also meant an upward
shift in media attention and public anxiety. The protest itself came
under siege by the media. The press reported daily. Television ran regular
news stories and shot interviews and talk shows from inside the siege
encampment. The attitude of the electronic audience now had a bearing
on the moral right of the Assembly to engage in such negotiations with
government. The behaviour of the siege camp was subject to public
scrutiny. Any ‘incident’ would quickly change the media tone and disperse
public sympathy. Any violence would count as a strategic defeat. The
same rules counted for the government defenders. The police were kept
at a distance and instructed to minimize violence.
These conditions imposed a need for organization and discipline in
the siege encampment. The basic framework of the demonstration was
mapped over the Assembly’s decentralized pattern. Each participating
group was a self-governing unit with a pho khrua yai in charge of political
activities and a mae khrua yai in charge of logistics. Each unit
organized its own commissary by importing rice from its home base,
supplemented by donations and various hunting-and-gathering activities
in the city. [17] Over this ‘local’ organization was laid a superstructure
to take care of watch-and-ward, entertainment, dispute settlement, fund
raising, and education.
But excessive good behaviour ran the risk that the demonstration would
be forgotten. And, as with earlier sieges, both sides knew that the rains
would bring the campaign season to an end. After six weeks, media
interest dwindled and negotiations stalled. On 17 March, 20,000 protesters
walked round the perimeter of Government House, emphasizing
the metaphor of siege. Again, in early May, with the talks deadlocked
and rains approaching, the Assembly repeated the encirclement manœuvre,
ending with a blockade of the gates of Government House which
penned ministers inside for two-and-a-half hours. An appearance by
Samak Sundaravej, a right-wing minister and vocal opponent of the
Assembly, provoked a small scuffle. This limited and largely symbolic
use of violence proved effective. The prime minister agreed to restore
the momentum of negotiations, and the press took heart that the siege
would soon be lifted.
Throughout this state of siege, the principle of inverse violence reigned.
The Assembly protesters announced their own body counts of dead and
injured as victory claims. At the outset of the protest, they claimed six
had been hospitalized as a result of stress and Bangkok pollution. Many
others complained of fevers and headaches. When three villagers died
from heart failure shortly after returning home, it was attributed to ‘protest-
induced stress’ (The Nation, 19 February 1997). One participant
committed suicide after being intimidated by local officials. Another
returned to his home village and jumped to his death from a moving
train, apparently in frustration at the protest’s lack of success. [18] A negotiator
collapsed on emerging from a meeting. One protester threatened
to set himself on fire. Another was photographed with his head in a
noose. During the set-piece marches, Assembly members re-enacted
these deaths and violent incidents in mini-dramas. On the government
side, the same rules of engagement applied. After the scuffle at the blockade,
Samak complained that he had been prevented from attending a
hospital appointment, while a pregnant protester claimed Samak had
trodden on her stomach. At the end of the protest, the Assembly announced
the final body count as ten deaths and six miscarriages (Bangkok Post,
4 May 1997).
Peace treaty
The Assembly negotiated with government in the style of a peace treaty.
In 1996, the Assembly had negotiated with a group of junior ministers
from the Banharn government on a list of 47 grievances, resulting in an
18-page treaty document which was ratified as a cabinet resolution. When
this format proved as ineffective as earlier agreements with officials
and ministers, the 1997 protest insisted on a more complex procedure
and negotiation through to final decisions. They began with a list of 125
issues. [19] Twice a week the pho khrua yai met with ministers and officials
– facing off across long negotiating tables piled with documentation.
Each side compiled minutes. The Assembly’s NGO and academic helpers
served as interpreters, sometimes translating between local dialect
and central Thai, more often translating between the style of officialdom
and the style of the village. Agreements were solemnly signed in
duplicate copies. The event was occasionally recorded for posterity with
a ceremonial photograph. The documents were then referred up to the
cabinet for ratification, and announced by press release and conference.
In sum, the negotiations between rural protest and the state took place
in the public space of the media. The watching and reading observers
became an essential part of the negotiation. The confrontation was expressed
as a drama of conflict which evolved over the course of five
years from invasion, to siege, to peace negotiations. In this public drama,
the role of violence was inverted. Injuries received counted as victories,
injuries inflicted as defeats. The achievements of the 99-day demonstration
depended in no small measure on the protesters’ success in
intimidating government without raising the anxiety of the electronic
audience beyond a critical threshold. The final act of the protesters before
leaving Bangkok was to conduct a bai si su khwan ceremony, to settle
the spirits and restore harmony.
The right to have politics
Possibly one of the most extraordinary relics of the 1997 protest is found
in the funeral commemoration book of ex-premier, Chatichai
Choonhavan. The picture, taken at the wat in May 1998, shows the
Assembly leader, Bamrung Kayotha, and the head of Bangkok Bank,
Chatri Sophonpanich, standing side by side for the benefit of the photographer. [20] Bamrung had become a representative figure in public politics
in a way that no previous rural leader had achieved.
The concessions won by the Assembly’s 99-day siege and peace negotiation
covered only a handful of the 125 issues raised in the Assembly’s
going-in agenda. The most important were: compensation to almost 7,000
families for loss of land and livelihood arising from dam schemes; cancellation
of one dam project and review of five others; and three
resolutions which ended summary eviction from ‘forest’ lands and admitted
the principle that long-settled groups should be allowed to remain
in ‘forest’ zones. The immediate cost to government, largely from the
compensation payments, was 4,657 million baht. Although far short of
the Assembly’s original agenda, concessions on this scale were totally
unprecedented.
More importantly, the event established a precedent for a new form
of politics – the peace treaty negotiation – involving groups which had
been systematically denied political access in the past. Furthermore, the
concessions had broken some constraints of law and procedure which
were biased against the poor. Earlier rounds of protest had foundered
when bureaucrats argued that demands made by the Assembly were
counter to the law – most prominently, the right to reside in areas which
the government called ‘forest’. At the start of the 99-day negotiations,
the Assembly leaders demanded this constraint be lifted, and Chavalit
Yongchaiyudh agreed.
Finally, the Assembly had created an organization which did not seem
susceptible to the usual tactics of political co-optation. Its leaders were
not tied to any ‘big’ figures. Its finances were meagre and transparent.
It was obviously different from the ‘organized mobs’ which had been
an integral part of the politics of coups and military dictators.
However, in the aftermath it became clear that the political space opened
up by the Assembly was extremely narrow and vulnerable. While Chavalit
was prepared to allow this space, other members of his party and coalition
had been openly hostile. Samak’s opposition was public knowledge.
The interior minister, Snoh Thienthong, had publicly mocked the negotiations
at every opportunity. The science minister aired the usual line
that the demonstration was an ‘organized mob’ (Matichon, 1 February
1997). Some ministers had to be pulled away from the negotiating table
because their hostility was too obvious. [21] The Bangkok media had been
generally sympathetic. But some city residents had complained to phonein
radio that the protesters had disrupted traffic, hindered access to Wat
Benchamabophit, and degraded Bangkok’s international image.
The Chuan Leekpai government, which succeeded Chavalit in November
1997, deliberately set out to erase the political space secured by
the Assembly. In little more than six months, the government reversed
out of all the major concessions from the 99-day event.
Chuan retreated behind the barricades of law and bureaucracy. He
insisted that laws must be upheld and officials must be in charge. When
rural protesters arrived outside Government House in early 1998, Chuan’s
personal secretary called the leaders ‘parasites’ and ‘opportunists’, and
said: ‘politics and interest groups are major hindrances to easing their
[the poor’s] plight’ (Bangkok Post, 4 March 1998). Chuan snubbed the
Assembly’s attempts to continue negotiations. In early February 1998,
groups rallied in the north-east to discuss another march on Bangkok.
The government dispatched a minister to negotiate, but the protesters
pronounced it ‘useless’ to talk with someone who lacked the power to
solve problems. Government then agreed to set up a series of taskforces
to continue negotiation. But this turned out to be a smokescreen. From
April, the government began systematically undoing the concessions
which the previous government had made to the Assembly. It revoked
the promised dam compensation through a cabinet resolution denying
any compensation for projects already completed. It launched court
proceedings claiming fraud in the case of the Rasi Salai dam where
some compensation had already been paid. It cancelled a project for
digging reservoirs. It revoked three resolutions allowing settlers to remain
in areas of ‘official’ forest. It laid down that settlers would have to
prove they had occupied such areas before 1941. Local officials were
emboldened to restart dam projects which had been frozen. The forestry
department seized the opportunity to sabotage the passage of a community
forestry bill.
As the city became absorbed in the economic crisis from mid-1997
onwards, parts of the press returned to reporting the Assembly as a ‘mob’
which specialized in conducting disruptive demonstrations for no good
reason. Supara Janchitfah noted that her fellow journalists had become
bored at the lack of novelty (‘They protest against the same old issues’),
had resurrected old themes of the paid mob (‘I suspect they get paid. I
know some politicians are behind these people’), and feared escalation
(‘if the Government gives them what they want, there will be endless
protests’) (Bangkok Post, 21 June 1998).
The aggression of the Chuan government stemmed from the Democrats’
paternalist attitude towards rural society and politics. Over the
1980s and early 1990s, the Democrats evolved from a royalist, conservative
party into a party of small and medium businessmen and urban
middle class. It adopted a modernist vision of Thailand developing as a
prosperous, urbanized society. The continued existence of a large rural
society is an embarrassment to this vision. Chuan once stated that the
agrarian population should ideally be reduced to 15 per cent of the total
(currently around 50 per cent). The Democrats are aware that their urban
supporters are reluctant to see rural people gaining more control over
resources and more political power which might threaten the urban vision
of modernization. [22] Hence the Democrats stand for democratization,
but with a heavy urban bias. In parallel they accept with no question the
colonial-style administration of the countryside by the Ministry of Interior.
The Assembly created an organization whose independence
challenged this model, whose demands questioned the morality of existing
laws and bureaucratic practices, and whose strategy established a
precedent for direct negotiation with the executive. The Democrats’
reversal of the Assembly’s gains was a reassertion of paternalist control,
and a denial of political space for the Assembly’s new form of politics.
In meetings of the Assembly and related groups in 1998, when the
impact of Chuan’s offensive against the Assembly had become clear,
one major issue was whether the Assembly would have to abandon its
strategy of decentralized, peripheral, organization-free organization, and
take some role in formal politics. At a meeting of NGOs, activists, and
local groups in July, [23] several speakers expressed a wish for some kind
of central organization to provide better co-ordination of local movements,
and to create a stronger bargaining position with official agencies.
Local movements were all very well, the argument went, but they were
too easily picked off one by one. At the third anniversary of the Assembly
of the Poor in December 1998, Piphob Thongchai questioned whether
the Assembly would always remain vulnerable and ultimately powerless,
unless it developed some way to enter the formal political process.
The answer at both meetings was negative. At the first, Banthorn Ondam
(a respected senior NGO leader, formerly an academic) argued that forming
a central body would result in splits and discord. At the Assembly
meeting, the proposal was not formally addressed. In 1999, the Assembly
reverted to the dao krachai (scattered stars) strategy of multiple local
protests rather than a major event in the city (Matichon sutsapda, 4 May
1999:13–14). This move tacitly reasserted the Assembly’s commitment
to a locality-based organization and strategy.
Conclusion
The appearance of the Assembly of the Poor, So Ko Yo Oo, and other
rural groups in Thailand in the 1990s reflected not only the lifting of
repression and the enlargement of civil society from an urban base, but
also changes in the nature of the Thai peasantry. The disappearance of
the peasantry, in the Elsonian sense, has not left a blank space but rather
a new kind of hybridized post-peasantry. It retains vestiges of the selfsufficient
style of peasant production, side by side with close involvement
in the urban economy, largely through the sale of labour. It combines
rural residence with constant rural–urban migration, and consumption
of national and global culture. It still accounts for over half the population.
The end of the peasantry has not meant the end of peasant politics.
Rather it has seen the emergence of movements involving people who
may derive a majority of their income from the urban economy, but
who want to protect the rural base which still serves as their social security and cultural anchor. The emergence of new rural politics in Thailand
in the 1990s was a direct reflection of this new urbanization of the
peasantry, the development of leaders who represented this combination
of rural roots and urban experience, and the formation of
organizations which articulated rural demands with urban-aware strategies.
[24]
While this emerging movement, especially in the key area of the northeast
and north, maintained a loosely networked unity in the early 1990s,
the middle of the decade saw a significant split. This split was not simply
a product of leadership squabbles and outside interference (although
both were present) but reflected a division within the peasantry between
groups with different historical experience, different resource bases, and
different agendas for negotiation with the state. The peasantry from more
settled zones, whose demands focused on opportunities to increase their
income, were being gradually drawn into the expanding world of formal
democratic politics (local government, MPs, political parties). The
peasantry from marginal areas, whose demands focused on asset insecurity,
were drawn into agitational networking to protect, regain, or be
compensated for their access to resources of land, water, and forests.
These two groupings adopted different strategies and organizational styles.
The income groups tested the opportunities opening up in formal parliamentary
politics. They organized as pyramid-shaped lobby organizations,
bargained with MPs and party leaders, and often attracted accusations
of co-optation and corruption. The insecurity groups worked through
agitation at both local and national levels. They adopted a loose, flat,
networked style of organization with virtually no central structure. They
avoided charges of political co-optation, but depended on a fragile ability
to intimidate government without alienating urban public opinion.
The Assembly of the Poor is a classic peasant struggle over rights to
land, water, and forests. Yet it differs from traditional peasant movements
in many important ways. It does not operate only in the political
space of a locality, with tenant pitched against landlord or peasant against
official in direct localized confrontation. Rather it operates within the
political space of the nation (and in some senses, beyond). Its campaigns
are played out not only on the street (as Praphat’s book title,
Politics on the street, graphically emphasized), but also in the particular
form of political space provided by the media and other platforms of
political debate. The confrontation between rural protest and government
developed over the 1990s as a public drama marked by warlike
images of invasion, siege, and treaty negotiation. This confrontation
had its own rules of engagement in which the role of violence was inverted.
The challenge which the Assembly represents goes beyond the agenda
of specific peasant demands to question some of the conventional limitations
of Thailand’s democracy. The use of the word ‘poor ’ in the
organization’s title serves as a constant reminder of the widening rich–
poor gap, and of the monopoly of the rich on direct political representation.
It challenges the paternalism built into a bureaucracy evolved from absolute
monarchy and military dictatorship – a paternalism which has
been easily adopted by both establishment ‘liberals’ and by the dominant
political parties such as the Democrats. By using both the street
and the mediascape to open up space in national politics for rural demands,
the Assembly questions the assumption that the countryside can still be
managed through official paternalism. In 1998–99, the Democrat Party
government reacted fiercely against this challenge. It overturned the
Assembly’s gains, closed down the space for negotiation, and led urban
opinion to resurrect the discourse of rural protesters as an unruly, threatening
‘mob’. This reaction in turn provoked a wide-reaching debate
among the Assembly’s leaders, participating groups, and sympathizers
over strategy and organization.
Notes
1. Thanks to Pasuk Phongpaichit, Kanoksak Kaewthep, Praphat Pintoptaeng, the journal’s anonymous reader, and several participants in the Assembly’s campaigns.
2. A third approach focuses on the term ‘civil society’. In 1997, Suthy Prasatset (1997:97) enthusiastically concluded: ‘The Assembly of the Poor is one of the leading movements
in the struggle to strengthen civil society’. But civil society is a slippery term,
and in the late 1990s was often appropriated for a particular urban and middle-class
view of political change. In a review of the Assembly in one of the many volumes
on civil society in this period, Sorot Sirisai (1999:282) concluded: ‘Finally this essay
tries to answer the question always in my mind whether the association of villagers
in the shape of the Assembly of Smallscale Farmers of the Northeast and the Assembly
of the Poor achieves the objectives of association in the form of “civil society” or
not. Let me answer briefly: no.’ Sorot did not go on to justify this conclusion. Suthy
(1997:98) had predicted: ‘The Thai middle classes almost in total will need a long
time before they understand or support the movement of the Assembly of the Poor.’
3 Praphat’s book carries an enthusiastic, legitimating foreword by one of Thailand’s
leading political scientists, Prudhisan Jumbala (see also Prudhisan, 1998).
4 Especially by Praphat (1998) in Thai and the summary in English in Prudhisan (1998).
5 James Petras (1997:19–20) identified a similar process in Latin America: ‘. . . the
new peasants are former workers, particularly miners, displaced because of plant or
mine closures, or they were peasants one generation earlier. In other cases, they are
the “excess” sons and daughters of peasants who entered religious institutions, became
involved in the rural struggles, and abandoned the Church to lead the struggle
for land reform. In many cases, they are daughters of small peasants with primary or
secondary education, who join and sometimes lead land occupations rather than
migrate to the cities to work as domestic servants. The “new peasantry”, especially
those who are leading the struggle, travel to the cities, participate in seminars and
leadership training schools, and engage in political debates. In a word, even as they
are rooted in the rural struggle, live in land settlements and engage in agricultural
cultivation, they have a cosmopolitan vision.’ Thanks to the journal’s reader for this
comparison.
6 In 1983, only 11 per cent of land was held by landholders, mostly concentrated
around old political centres in the central plain and north. Since then, land speculation
has probably inflated this figure, but there is no recent estimate.
7 So Ko Yo Oo broke into three parts, while three other major groups appeared, including
the Munniti Kasetakon Thai (Thai Farmers Foundation), led by Asoke Prasanson.
See The Nation, 5 February and 24 June 1998.
8 The 125 ‘problems’ presented to government at the start of the 1997 protest broke
down as follows: land and forests, 93; government schemes, 5; dams, 16; slums, 8;
and one each on alternative agriculture, health and safety in the workplace, and
small-scale fishing. See Praphat (1998:73).
9 The 125 ‘problems’ broke down by region as follows: north-east, 74; north, 37;
south, 2; central, 2; Bangkok, 6; other, 2. See Praphat (1998:73 and map on 72).
10 Samatcha is also the term used to translate the UN General Assembly into Thai.
Sometimes the organization has been translated as ‘Forum of the Poor’, but ‘Assembly’
is its own preference.
11 To add to the groupuscule complexity, one of the major So Ko Yo Oo fragments,
usually called So Ko Yo Oo 1, led by Nakhon Sriwiphat, also belongs on the ‘insecure’
side of the split, and often worked in alliance with the Assembly. In early
1999, So Ko Yo Oo 1 was involved in the ‘land invasion’ of Dong Larn forest to
draw attention to issues of land rights and land access.
12 Wiraphon Sopha interviewed on 10 March 1997, quoted in Praphat (1998:150).
13 See for instance the account of Bamrung Kayotha’s mediation of a dispute between
villagers and police in Kalasin in 1998 (Madsen, unpublished). This account is
enhanced and coloured by the fact that the writer is accustomed to studying India
and hence tends to highlight the very local character of the negotiation which would
be missed by a more experienced Thai specialist.
14 Sangiam Tomjai-od was killed at a rally in Kamphaeng Phet in 1993. Prawian Boonnak
was shot in Loei on 11 July 1995; the assassin was an assistant village headman, and
the gun belonged to a police officer. Prawian had recently led successful protests to
close three stone-grinding quarries, and had unsuccessfully opposed the quarry-owner
in parliamentary elections. See Thai Rath, 12 July 1995, and Bangkok Post, 13, 22,
and 23 July 1995. Jun Bunkhunthot was shot in Chaiyaphum by a policeman who
claimed it was an accident during a raid on a marijuana patch. Jun was active in
opposing the Phong Khun Petch dam and had just demanded removal of the village
headman for his involvement in rackets by land speculators. The local police chief
stated: ‘These locals and the Forum of the Poor use their group to pressure government
and force it to surrender to their requests. They are obstacles to government’,
Bangkok Post, 4 August 1996. Thongin Kaewwattha was killed in early 1996 during
protests against the Genco waste treatment project in Rayong.
15 I-taen is a modern version of a bullock cart with the bullock replaced by an allpurpose
diesel engine.
16 The leaders took pains to emphasize the non-violent aspect of this strategy. Bamrung
Kayotha said: ‘In all of our protests, we caused no turmoil in the country. We held
peaceful rallies. We didn’t block roads or cause traffic [jams].’ The Nation, 7 February
1995.
17 The organization of the demonstration, and especially the finance and provisioning,
is covered in detail by Praphat (1998:chapter 6). Journalists who interviewed Assembly
members arriving in Bangkok for this demonstration were first disbelieving and
then awe-struck to discover that they were not being paid by anybody.
18 Punsa Dokkamji, a Karen from Samoeng, threw himself off a moving train after the
agriculture minister, Chucheep Harnsawat, had told him there was no chance his
group would get land rights; The Nation, 7 March 1997. A village headman in
Mukdahan shot himself after the amphoe officials had threatened him for not keeping
his villagers out of the demonstration; The Nation, 19 February 1997.
19 See notes 8 and 9 on the breakdown.
20 This appeared in the commercially-sold version of the volume entitled Amla alai
‘Na Chat’ [Farewell to Uncle Chat]. Bamrung is wearing a denim jacket and a tie.
21 A case in point was Chucheep Harnsawat, the ‘meatball king’ who was serving as
minister of agriculture. ‘The villagers feel, after yesterday’s meeting with Chucheep,
that he has too little knowledge about their problems’, Wiraphon Sopha in The Nation,
4 February 1997.
22 On the ideological background, see Pasuk (1999:12–15).
23 The thammarat meeting of NGOs and local groups convened by Thirayuth Boonmi,
at Chulalongkorn University on 25–26 July 1998.
24 Also internationally-aware strategies. In 1999, the Assembly forged links with similar
organizations in other Asian countries.
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