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Cold War History

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In the eyes of the beholder: American and Thai perceptions of the highland minority during the Cold War

Sinae Hyun

To cite this article: Sinae Hyun (2022) In the eyes of the beholder: American and Thai perceptions of the highland minority during the Cold War, Cold War History, 22:2, 153-171, DOI: 10.1080/14682745.2021.1928077

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2021.1928077

Published online: 01 Jul 2021.

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In the eyes of the beholder: American and Thai perceptions of the highland minority during the Cold War Sinae Hyun

Sogang Institute for East Asian Studies, Seoul, Republic of Korea

ABSTRACT The highland minority in the northern border areas of Thailand received special attention from the United States and Thai govern- ments from the early 1950s, as its members were suspected of being supporters or sympathisers of the Chinese communists. After a brief review of the ethnographic research in Thailand before the 1950s, this article examines the ways the Thai and US military researchers promoted racially and culturally hierarchical concepts of national security during the Cold War. Their views directly affected policymaking processes in Thailand, widening further the extant gap between the Thai government and the ethnic minority.

KEYWORDS Highland minority; Cold War; national security; United States; anticommunism, Border Patrol Police; Thailand; military research

‘The highland minority’, often called hill tribes or chao khao in the Thai language, is relatively new terminology, originating in the 1880s when King Chulalongkorn reigned. According to Pipad Krajaejun, the image of chao khao was built upon the previous widely used term ‘wild people’ (chao pa/khon pa). It is unclear when the term khon pa was used by the Thais. Thongchai Winichakul states that the use of the word ‘pa’, which means forest or jungle, connotes ‘wild, untamed, or uncivilised and culturally non-Tai’.1 Pipad argues that Thai elites coined the term chao khao based on the well-known images of khon pa in order to facilitate their political, social and cultural domination against the historical backdrop of western colonialist aggression.2 During the Cold War, there was a sharp increase in the use of the term chao khao, as well as research on the highland minorities in the border areas, in direct relation to the escalating tensions of the Indochina Wars. As Thongchai puts it, the increased attention reflects ‘as much through the ethnography of socio-cultural change as by the security paranoia of the Thai state’.3

The late-nineteenth-century Bangkok elite’s perception of the highland minority in Thailand has continued to evolve, producing a large amount of academic and non- academic literature to the present day, responding to the needs of the time and the people who survey the history and contemporary status of the minority group. What has not

CONTACT Sinae Hyun [email protected] Institute for East Asian Studies, Sogang University, 35 Baekbeom-ro (Sinsu-dong), Mapogu, Seoul, 04107, Republic of Korea

1Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-Spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects 1885–1910’, in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (London: Curzon Press, 2000), 38.

2Pipad Krajaejun, ‘Kan sang phapphalak khong klumchattiphan “chao khao” nai sangkhom thai rawang thotsawat 2420 thueng thotsawat 2520’ [The construction of ‘hilltribe’ ethnic images in Thai society during 1880s–1980s] (Master’s Thesis, Chulalongkorn University, 2007), 1–2.

3Thongchai, ‘The Others Within’, 56.

COLD WAR HISTORY 2022, VOL. 22, NO. 2, 153–171 https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2021.1928077

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

changed over the course of the twentieth century and perhaps to the present day is the status of the highland minorities, who remain more ‘the others’ than members of a nation or a nation itself.

This article examines the context of the Thai and US military research interest in understanding the highland minority in northern Thailand, how they converged and how their shared interests directly mirrored their respective governments’ desire for keeping the Thai nation-state safe from ‘the others’ during the Cold War. More precisely, this survey questions why the ethnographers of Thailand’s highland minority began studying the ethnic minority in the first place, and how the Cold War context influenced their views and subsequently their policies towards their research subjects. Previous ethnographic work treats the Cold War as a divider or given condition and does not delve into the ways in which it really worked to create certain stereotypes and result in visible consequences, as Katharine McKinnon argues.4 The Thai and US militaries viewed the ethnic minority as a threat to Thai national security. The way the militaries could legitimise their views was by identifying the minority people as communists. Their research was intended to confirm their own belief, not for the sake of fact-checking.

The story begins in the early twentieth century when western civilians and militaries produced various research on the ethnic minorities in the mountains. With the escalating anticolonial nationalist movements in Southeast Asia between the interwar years and the Second World War, the Thai military was alerted to the ethnic minority’s presence in the remote border areas. The United States’ interest in defending mainland Southeast Asia increased alongside the so-called ‘loss of China’ discourse in the late 1940s.5 The United States set Thailand as its outpost of the anticommunist campaign and assisted the Thai military’s efforts at assimilating ethnic minorities in the border areas. Both Thai and US militaries paid particular attention to the highland minorities in the northern border areas because they were aware of the uninterrupted migration of the Southern Chinese as well as the remnants of the Chinese National Revolutionary Armies across the border areas of Burma, Thailand and Laos during and after the Chinese Civil War. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, they relied heavily on previous research done by Western scholars and the Thai military’s experiences during the Second World War. From the mid-1960s, both the Thai and US military researchers focused on drafting policy-oriented research materials that could accelerate the forceful assimilation and/or alienation of the highland minorities.

A common trait of their research on the highland minorities is an adaptation of the racialised cultural hierarchies that presume unequal relationships between the cultural practices and beliefs of different races or ethnicity into concepts of national security. For the Thais, highland minorities were ‘the others’: a marginal group that demanded differentiation from the lowland Thai nation because the former group are considered wild and uncivilised, as expressed through the term khon pa or chao khao. For Western observers, the highland minorities were and are stateless, migratory, primitive people, but still Asians like the Thais and the Chinese. What enabled the convergence of the Thai and US military researchers’ interests is the Cold War context that necessitated one united

4Katharine McKinnon, ‘(Im)Mobilization and Hegemony: “Hill Tribe” Subjects and the “Thai” State’, Social and Cultural Geography 6, no. 1 (2005): 35.

5Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 36–7.

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nation under one state rule, with a fixed loyalty of the nation towards the state. In other words, the global Cold War created a conducive environment wherein the extant racialised cultural hierarchies could be applied to the national security policies.6 As such, both Thai and US military researchers focused on ‘othering’ the highland mino- rities to subjugate the latter’s identity to the allegedly superior Thai nation and to assimilate them into the Thai nation-state. Their ultimate goals were the same: ‘the others’ shall not exist within a nation-state, especially when the ideological boundaries of imagined communities seem to be unfixed.

Setting the stage

Roughly speaking, there were three key groups that produced a vast amount of ethno- graphical and anthropological studies on the highland minority in Thailand since King Chulalongkorn’s reign. The first group was the Christian missionaries, especially the British and Americans who had been actively engaged in proselytising the non-Buddhist ethnic minorities in the remote areas of Thailand and its immediate neighbouring countries like Burma, Laos and China since the early nineteenth century.7 The second group of researchers were scholars from various countries and fields, ranging from natural science to social and political science, and linguistics. The early academic researchers, especially European natural scientists, developed a peculiar interest in the presence of mountain people acquainted through their expeditions to the remote jungle areas. Thus, the early accounts of the highland minority came along with descriptions of the natural settings like the flora and fauna around these communities, as well as their physical shapes. Later, the scholarly focus shifted to the social and political behaviours and attitudes of a target population against the historical backdrop of exploding antic- olonial nationalist movements around the time of the Second World War.

The third main group which showed great interest in the ethnic minority consisted of state agents like the foreign service officials and military officers from Europe and the United States. Compared to the missionaries and academic researchers, the state agent group’s survey accounts directly reflect the contemporary government’s interest in and concern about the presence of the ethnic minority within the state boundary. Oftentimes, they did not conduct their own extensive ethnographical research, but instead based their assessment on the information provided by academic and missionary groups’ accounts. Nevertheless, the early military researchers’ contribution to bringing attention to the minority population in remote border areas is far from negligible. One of the well-known examples of an early military researcher-cum-ethnographer is Major Erik Seidenfaden, a Danish officer of the Royal Siamese Provincial Gendarmerie who lived in Thailand from 1906 to 1947. Seidenfaden wrote a number of pieces on the subject of what he called ‘tribes’ and ‘peoples’ based on his extensive travels to outlying provinces and gendarmerie offices.8 He is regarded as one of the early pioneers of ethnographical studies in Thailand. In his note entitled ‘The Hill Tribes of Northern Siam’, published in the Journal of the

6McKinnon, ‘(Im)Mobilization and Hegemony’, 38. 7Kenneth E. Wells, History of Protestant Work in Thailand, 1828–1958 (Bangkok: Church of Christ in Thailand, 1958);

and William A. Smalley, ‘Anthropological Study and Missionary Scholarship’, Practical Anthropology os-7, no. 3 (1960): 113–23.

8For example, Erik Seidenfaden, The Thai Peoples (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1963).

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Siam Society in 1932, he emphasised the necessity and expected gains of the ethnogra- phical research that identifies the relations and racial characteristics of the highland minority in mainland Southeast Asia, especially in the contact zone of Thailand, Laos and Burma’s mountainous border areas.9

Major Seidenfaden’s concern about the ‘scant attention’ given to these people in 1932 met with a historical turning point after Phibun Songkhram assumed the prime ministership in 1938, the same year in which Seidenfaden became president of the Siam Society. There are three notable historical events which occurred during Phibun’s first premiership that resulted in the Thai military’s increasing attention to the highland minorities in the margins: first, the change of the country’s name from Siam to Thailand by the first State Convention (ratthaniyom) in 1939; second, Phibun’s irredentist move- ment during the Indochina border crisis, 1940–41; and, third, the Thai military’s Shan States mission between 1942–46.

In 1939, Phibun’s government changed the name of the country from Prathet Siam to Prathet Thai in the Thai language and Thailand in English. Since the beginning of King Mongkut’s reign in 1851, the name of the country in the Thai language was Prathet Siam, and, in Western languages, Siam. In response to the critique of its lopsided representation of the Thais, the regime claimed in the convention: ‘most of the citizens call it Prathet Thai, which, in any case, corresponds with race and what the Thai people favour’. The name change was not only to demonstrate that Siamese society under Phibun’s regime was entering a new era, but it also implied that ethnic minority groups within the state boundary were ‘supposed to be subject to ethnic Thai majority norms’.10 It also provided a pretext for justifying the Phibun regime’s irredentist movements with its eventual aspiration of restoring maha anachak thai, the Great Thai Empire, during the border dispute with France in 1940–41.11

The conflict broke out in December 1940 along the border areas of Thailand and French Indochina, and the ceasefire was declared in February 1941, aboard a Japanese ship anchored in front of Saigon. Three months later, the Thai and French governments signed a peace treaty in Tokyo, agreeing that Thailand could retain the Sayaburi, Champassak, Siem Reap and Battambang regions of French Indochina.12 During the conflict, Phibun and Luang Wichit Wathakan, a well-known intellectual and then minister without a portfolio, staged a nationwide irredentist movement to heighten anticolonial resentment against France and hypernationalistic sentiments among the Thai people. University students, school children, traders, labourers, public servants

9Auton F. Bruun, ‘Danish Naturalists in Thailand 1900–1960’, The Natural History Bulletin of the Siam Society 20, no. 1 (1961): 77; ‘Obituary: Major Erik Seidenfaden, President of the Society (1938–40), Honorary Member’, Journal of the Siam Society 46, no. 2 (1958): 257–9; and Erik Seidenfaden, ‘The Hill Tribes of Northern Siam’, Journal of the Siam Society 25, no. 2 (1932): 215.

10Preecha Juntanamalaga, ‘Thai or Siam?’, Names, A Journal of Onomastics 36, nos. 1–2 (1988): 75–6; and McKinnon, ‘(Im)Mobilization and Hegemony’, 37.

11Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 147–9; Shane Strate, The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation (Honolulu: University of Hawai�i Press, 2015), 94–122; Charles F. Keyes, ‘“The Peoples of Asia” – Science and Politics in the Classification of Ethnic Groups in Thailand, China and Vietnam’, Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 4 (2002), 1180; and Preecha, ‘Thai or Siam’, 75.

12Strate, Lost Territories, 37–41, 61–3; Charnvit Kasetsiri, ‘The First Phibun Government and its Involvement in World War II’, Journal of the Siam Society 62, no. 2 (1974): 25–88; E. Thadeus Flood, ‘The 1940 Franco-Thai Border Dispute and PhibunSongkhram’s Commitment to Japan’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 2 (1969): 304–25; and Thamsook Numnonda, ‘PhibunSongkhram’s Thai Nation-Building Programme during the Japanese Military Presence, 1941–1945’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (1978): 234–47.

156 S. HYUN

and members of the local Muslim and Chinese communities demonstrated in the streets of Bangkok, calling for the return of ‘lost territories’ and allegiance to the Thai nation.13

Essentially, Wichit and Phibun were looking forward to making Thailand a greater power through the heightened irredentist movement. Wichit wrote in a newspaper in November 1940 that when the border conflicts with French colonialists end, ‘there are only two ways left for us to choose, either become a Power or be swallowed up by some other Power. If we got back our lost territories, then we could have the hope of becoming a Power’.14

It should be noted that the ‘lost territories’ movement was to restore not only the land but also the people within the territory by associating them with the Thai ethnic group. Wichit produced a number of writings and plays to show the cultural and racial links between the ‘great Thais’ of Siam/Thailand and the ‘minor Thais’, such as the Thai Yai in the Shan States, Lao and Khmer in Indochina.15 In this context, Phibun’s use of the concept chonchat thai, a combination of people (chon) and nation (chat), was to integrate ‘all the peoples of Thai stock, wherever they may be settled, into a single State with Siam [Thailand] as its nucleus’.16 The Shan States which the Thai Yai inhabited became the first destination for bringing the Thai brothers back home in 1942. In March 1942, Phibun requested that the Japanese colonial government approve a Thai military campaign in the Shan States above the northern Thai border areas and the Tenasserim Province in the east. Phibun reorganised the Thai army troops in northern Thailand into the Phayap division and called on Major General Phin Chunhawan, the commander of the Army Division at Nakhon Ratchasima, to join the expedition. In May 1942, after receiving the order from the Thai Supreme Command Headquarters, the Phayap Division commander led the three brigades of the Thai army to the Shan States and eventually occupied the city of Chiang Tung/Keng Tung in early June.17 In September, Phin was appointed the military governor of the United Thai Yai States (saharat thai yai). Eventually, the army reached the border of Yunnan Province in China in that year and occupied the area in January 1943.18

In June 1943, the Thai Supreme Command Headquarters announced: ‘[N]ow is the right time to begin administering the regained Saharat Thai Doem. Establishment of the administrative divisions and local courts of justice will enhance the convenience of the people in the region’.19 Thai newspapers celebrated the restoration of the Shan States, or

13Strate, Lost Territories, 57–60. 14Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 167. 15Strate, Lost Territories, 48; Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan, 126; and B. J. Terwiel, ‘Thai Nationalism and Identity:

Popular Themes of the 1930s’, in National Identity and Its Defenders, Thailand 1939–1989, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Victoria, Australia: Aristoc Press Pty. Ltd., 1991), 141.

16Quoted in Keyes, ‘The Peoples of Asia’, 1180. Originally from Josiah Crosby, Siam: The Crossroads (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945), 13.

17Phin Chunhawan, ‘Chiwit kap hetkan khong chomphon phin chunhawan [Life and events of Field Marshal Phin Chunhawan]’, in Anuson nai ngan phraratchathan phloengsop chom phon Phin Chunhawan [In memorium to the royal- sponsored cremation ceremony of General Phin Chunhawan] (Bangkok: Arun Karn Phim, 1973), 50, 57.

18Eiji Murashima, ‘The Commemorative Character of Thai Historiography: the 1942–43 Thai Military Campaign in the Shan States Depicted as a Story of National Salvation and the Restoration of Thai Independence’, Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (2006): 1053–96.

19Saharat Thai Doem in literary translation should be the United States of the Original Thais. Thais also use the term Saharat Thai Yai to refer the Shan States. In this essay, I will use the United Thai States. Ratchakitchanubeksa [Royal Gazettes], ‘Supreme Command Headquarters Announcement on the Administration of the Saharat Thai Doem’ 60, no. 31 (15 June 1943): 2486.

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United Thai States (saharat thai doem), to the nation and began introducing the people, as well as their cultures and religions, claiming they were ‘just like us’.20 Phin’s first-hand accounts also resonate with the importance of recognising the citizens of Chiang Tung as Thai brothers (phi nong thai). These people shared ‘real Thai blood (luat thai the)’ and Thai cultures. A majority of them were Buddhist and able to communicate in the Thai language, and thus immediately showed friendly attitudes towards the Thai army that came to occupy their city. Interestingly, Phin mentions that the new name, Prathet Thai, attracted the other Thais in Yunnan province. When the Shan States came under the rule of Prathet Thai, the latter group wanted to live under the rule of Thais.21

A year after the Japanese surrender, the then prime minister Pridi Banomyong announced the nullification of the Phibun government’s declaration of war on Britain and the United States. His successor, Khuang Aphaiwong, returned the Shan States to the British colonial government and the Thai army troops were called back. After years of enduring hardship in the malaria-infested Shan States as well as the declining interests of the Thai government in the mission, the embittered army members returned to Thailand.22 Shortly after, a group of army officers led by Lieutenant General Phin Chunhawan, Colonel Kat Katsongkhram, Colonel Phao Siyanon and Colonel Sarit Thanarat, with the junior officers who had served in the Shan States , staged a coup against the Khuang government in 1947 and brought Phibun back to power a year later.

Although Phibun failed to incorporate the Shan States as part of Thailand, the mission’s military leaders came to dominate Thai politics in the post-war period.23 In particular, their experiences in the Shan States influenced the general national security policies for decades to come. Numerous encounters with ethnic minority soldiers in the Shan States showed their military strength as well as the absence of national loyalty, unlike the Thai Yai. Some of the junior officers such as Charoenrit Chamratromran, who later became the founding father of the Thai Border Patrol Police, recalls his encounter with the Lahu warriors:

I got a lesson about the hill tribes from the Pacific War. The military forces under my command were ambushed by Musser [Lahu] tribes. Eight soldiers were killed on site and only one survived. Later, I went to inspect the ambush site but only found twenty bullet casings. The corpses were severely damaged as far as I can remember. The military had superior weapons to the enemy though.24

Predictably, the first target of the Thai Border Patrol Police’s intelligence mission in northern Thailand was the highland minority in the remote border areas, reflecting the founding fathers’ fear of their jungle fighting skills. They also distrusted the loyalty of the highland minority to the Thai nation.

When Phibun started his second premiership in 1948, Southeast Asia was witnessing a rise in communist insurgencies from Burma to Malaysia, deepening both the Thai and US governments’ fears of immediate communist domination in the region. This fear

20Strate, Lost Territories, 119. 21Phin, ‘Chiwit kap hetkan’, 71–2. 22Phin mentions the decreasing support of the Thai government after the establishment of the United Thai States in

the Shan State, until he was called back to Thailand and stripped of his position after Phibun stepped down in August 1940: Phin, ‘Chiwit kap hetkan’, 49–72.

23Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand, the Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2007), 26–7.

24Border Patrol Police Headquarters, Sisippi rongrian tochodo [40 Years of the Border Patrol Police School] (Bangkok: Border Patrol Police Headquarters, 1996), 81.

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prompted the Thai military government to promote research on the ethnic minorities in order to gain information and direction for policymaking. One of the notable examples of this effort is Boonchuai Sisawat’s account on the ethnic minorities in northern border areas entitled Thirty Nations in Chiang Rai Province (samsip chat nai chiang rai), published in 1950. Appointed to be a local governor of Chiang Rai, Boonchuai spent his breaks travelling to remote villages which various nations (chat) or ethnic groups (chonchat) inhabited.25 Two observations from this account need to be highlighted for our analysis. First, Boonchuai’s criteria for the categorisation of the nation, chat or chonchat, following Phibun’s use of this term, is based on a common origin of the people, implying his definition of the nation was in line with the modern Thai elites’ reconcep- tualisation of a nation as a ‘community of people who shared a cultural commonality particularly defined by being the subjects of the same monarch’.26 In a similar vein, the account follows the popular trend of Anglo-American ethnologists and anthropologists from the 1930s that had focused on ‘community studies’, emphasising the social struc- tural, cultural and economic differences above the biological and physical differences of the people.27 This shows Boonchuai’s definition of the nation was not based on the biological, morphological race concept, but derived from the ‘culture-bearing unit’.28

Second, in his examination, Boonchuai consciously differentiates the ethnic groups’ chonchat, the term he frequently mixes up with chat, between those within and outside the Thai state boundary. Interestingly enough, the first minority group he examines is the Thai Yai or, in the Thai term, Ngieo. According to Boonchuai, the Thai Yais had their autonomous kingdom in the Shan States until the Thai army entered to build the United Thai States in 1942. Those people who had moved into Thailand or lived under Thai rule in the Shan States quickly changed their lifestyle to be like the Thais, while the same group of people living under the Burmese or Chinese rule, Boonchuai noted, tried to keep their own primitive traditions.29 By indicating their autonomy from the Burmese, Boonchuai, like Phin Chunhawan, reminds that blood is thicker than water. He recog- nises that their thick Thai blood helps them become assimilated into the Thai nation more easily than other ethnic groups. In conclusion, he marked the northern Thais (chao nuea) as consisting of different groups (phao) of people including the highland minorities (chao khao), and he asserted that their diversity deserved further examination. Wichit Wathakan, in his foreword to this volume, agreed with Boonchuai about the necessity of an in-depth study because ‘these people are the branches of the Thai nation’.30

Coming to terms with the Cold War, 1950s–60s

The highland minority in the northern border areas of Thailand received special atten- tion from the US and Thai governments from the early 1950s, as they were suspected of

25Boonchuai Sisawat, 30 chat nai chiang rai [30 nations in Chiang Rai], 2nd ed. (Bangkok: Kled Thai, 2004), 8–9. 26Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of A Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai�i Press,

1994), 134–5. 27Charles F. Keyes, ‘Ethnography and Anthropological Interpretation in the Study of Thailand’, in The Study of

Thailand: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, ed. Elizer B. Ayal (Athens, OH: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 1978), 3; and Keyes, ‘The Peoples of Asia’, 1169–70.

28Keyes, ‘The Peoples of Asia’, 1170. 29Boonchuai, 30 chat nai chiang rai, 49. 30Boonchuai, 30 chat nai chiang rai, 8–11.

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being supporters or sympathisers of the Chinese communists. The Chinese Communist Party’s creation of a Thai Autonomous Zone below southern Yunnan in 1953 – in the region of Xishuang Banna in Chinese and Sipsong Panna in Thai – particularly caused the US government to panic over the possibility of a general rebellion among the Thai peoples of Thailand, Laos and Burma under the direction of the Chinese communists.31

Sipsong Panna came under the rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s government in 1912 and was considered of ‘vital strategic importance’ by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. The leaders of the dominant group, called ‘Tai Lu’ in the region, were close to the Nationalist Party government during the Chinese civil war, and thus the Communist Party abolished the Tai Lu royal institutions and reorganised it into an ‘autonomous prefecture’ in 1953. What alarmed the US government in the 1950s stemmed from the geopolitical and strategic importance of this region: it borders Burma and Laos directly, and its largest population is consisting of the Tai Lu, popula- tion, linguistically, ethnically and culturally related to the other Thai ethnic groups in the Shan States of Burma and northern Laos, especially Phong Saly province.32

In this context, the US government’s Psychological Strategy Board prepared a report entitled ‘U.S. Psychological Strategy with Respect to the Thai Peoples of Southeast Asia’ in mid-1953.33 The report suggested a wide-ranging set of unconventional warfare strategies and intelligence operations among the ethnic minority groups.34 To implement what was proposed by the Board, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Thai government formed the Border Patrol Police (BPP) in 1951. The BPP was a police organisation initially created under Thailand’s Ministry of Interior, but the founding members and leadership mostly came from the military, especially those who shared wartime experience in the Shan States. The unit was specifically designed to conduct intelligence and counterinsurgency campaigns in the border areas.

The formation of the BPP under the auspices of the Phibun administration and the CIA in the early 1950s indicates the changes in the Thai ruling elite’s perception of the strategic importance of the highland minority. The BPP’s counterinsurgency pro- grammes, duly dubbed ‘civic actions’, were the actual steps to creating a system for assimilation. The first civic action of the BPP, named ‘Development and Aid for Hill Tribe People and People Far from Communication’, began in 1956 under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior.35 The then Minister of Interior and Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram had set up a ‘Committee to Aid Hill Tribe People and People Far from Communication’ and the Thai National Police Department under the command of Director-General Phao Siyanon assigned the BPP to the project in August 1956.36 The BPP soon prepared a bilingual report in Thai and English entitled, ‘Aid Given to Hill

31Edwin F. Stanton, ‘Spotlight on Thailand’, Foreign Affairs 33, no. 1 (October 1954): 72–85. 32Foon Ming Liew-Herres, Volker Grabowsky and Renoo Wichasin, Chronicles of Sipsong Panna: History and Society of

a Tai Lu Kingdom, Twelfth to Twentieth Century (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Mekong Press, 2012), 5–72. 33Psychological Strategy Board, U.S. Psychological Strategy with Respect to the Thai Peoples of Southeast Asia,

2 July 1953. 34Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–1958 (Honolulu:

University of Hawai�i Press, 1997), 170–1. 35Soem Yakhasem, Rueang tamruat trawen chaidaen, mokarakhom 2521 [Border Patrol Police Story, January 1978]

(unpublished manuscript, 1978), 39–40. 36Border Patrol Police Headquarters, Kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao lae prachachon klai khamanakhom [Aid given to

hill tribes and people in remote areas] (Bilingual report with English title, ‘Aid Given to Hill Tribe People and People far from Communication’) (Bangkok: Border Patrol Police Headquarters, 1956).

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Tribe People and People Far from Communication’ for the committee to introduce its past and present services for the highland minorities and also to seek material support from various governmental organisations.

From the beginning, the main objectives of the CIA’s and the BPP’s intelligence and civic actions among the highland minorities in the remote border areas primarily centred on the anticommunist campaign and assimilation. The BPP’s 1956 report stated that the central goals of the BPP’s action plan among the chao khao were to provide them security, medicine and medical treatment, as well as to build schools for children and community programmes for adults in order to teach them how to improve their way of living. The author of the report then explained these services were necessary because if these ‘uneducated’ people were not ‘led to the right way’ by the Thai government, they could become ‘a tool of the enemy [sic]’. More important, the report noted, was that since they were accustomed to jungle living, they would become the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Thai authorities during peacetime. In wartime, the hill people could help the armed forces by guiding the way and transporting supplies, and if they received proper training, the authors suggested, they could also be used in war.37

All these efforts to educate and sanitise highland minorities in the border areas through the BPP’s civic actions underscore the typical response of the Thai ruling elites from the nineteenth century to the Cold War: infantilisation of ethnic minorities as a way to remind all parties of the traditional hierarchical order between the highland minorities and the lowland Thais. The second commissioner of the BPP Headquarters, Brigadier General Chan Angsuchot, said in 1958 that it was easier for the BPP to deal with the children than the adults, as the Thai saying goes: ‘Young sparrows are easy to tame, old sparrows are difficult to tame’.38

Without proper sanitation and education, these ethnic minority people, it was implied, whether young or old, were just like children. The BPP’s infantilisation attempt largely mirrors the Thai and US elites’ desire for limiting their view to the allegedly self-contained, unalterable characteristics of the highland minority people without recognising the ongoing socio-economic and political changes in their communities.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the ethnographers and anthropologists who conducted research about the chao khao in Thailand’s border areas were predominantly Americans. The number of Thai anthropologists also began increasing alongside the swelling number of research projects funded by the US government. One of the first of that kind was by Oliver Gordon Young, a descendent of an American Baptist missionary . His research was commissioned by the United States Operations Mission (USOM) to Thailand and published under the title ‘The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand’ in 1961.39

The Siam Society has been reprinting Young’s report courtesy of the USOM since 1962, with funding partially from the Asia Foundation and the Ford Foundation.40

37Border Patrol Police Headquarters, Kan songkhro chaopa chaokhao, 4–5. 38Chan Angsuchot, ‘Kan chattang rongrian tamruat chaidaen’ [Building the Border Police School], in Kanprachum khru

rongrian tamruat chaidaen duai khuam ruam mue rawang krom samansueksa lae krom tamruat na rongrian phayathai changwat phranakhon rawang wan thi 15–31 phruetsaphakhom 2501 [Meeting of the Border Police School Teachers with the Department of General Education and the Thai National Police Department in Phayathai School, Bangkok, during May 15–31, 1958], ed. Department of General Education (1958), 14.

39Oliver Gordon Young, The Hilltribes of Northern Thailand: A Socio-Ethnological Report (Bangkok: USOM, 1961). 40‘Second Annual Report: The Siam Society Research Center’, Journal of the Siam Society 49, no. 2 (1961), 196–200.

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The enormous amount of research undertaken by mostly foreign and some Thai researchers among the ethnic minority people in northern Thailand at the beginning of the Cold War stressed ‘stability and integration of local communities’ that could be used to support ‘the status quo’. As Charles Keyes argues, a great surge of anthropological and sociological research carried out by US anthropologists during this time period reveals where the national interests of the US government lay.41 Between 1964–65, the Thai Ministry of Interior decided to receive financial and technical assistance from the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to induce both Thai and foreign researchers’ participation, leading to the inauguration of the Tribal Research Centre in Chiang Mai in 1965. In his speech at the opening of the Tribal Research Centre on 21 October 1965, the General Secretary of SEATO reiterated, ‘I need not remind you . . . that it is among minority peoples that Communist propagandists and agitators find a fertile field for their subversive activities’, directly hinting at the importance of ethnographical research for enhancing national, and even regional, security.42 The US and Thai government’s army research group also joined this ever-widening enterprise in the 1960s.

Thai and US attitudes towards the ethnic minority remained relatively congenial up to the beginning of the 1960s, partly due to their insufficient accumulation of knowledge and experience and partly due to their condescension over the allegedly less educated and uncivilised wild people. Their counterinsurgency approach changed from 1962, pushing the Thais’ and Americans’ attempts at domesticating the ethnic minority not only through infantilisation, but also by incrimination. In June 1959, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat and his administration created the National Hill Tribes Welfare Committee. The Hill Tribe Welfare Division under the Department of Public Welfare came to take over responsibility for implementing and administering the government’s hill tribe programmes from 1963 onward.43 After a guerrilla band attacked local policemen in Nakhon Phanom province in August 1965, the Thai government established the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC). The author of a summary report on the National Hill Tribes Welfare Committee’s programmes remarked in 1965:

These hill tribes people are uneducated, unhealthy, and have a poor standard of living. This makes it convenient for outsiders to infiltrate and it causes problems of economy, society, politics, and governing to Thailand. An immediate acceleration of improvement should be conducted before the security of the country is destroyed.44

The then Minister of Interior army general Praphat Charusathien similarly contended that ‘because the region [northern Thailand] is mountainous and much of it jungle- covered, it could, under the right conditions, offer an ideal cover for the infiltration of foreign agents and the establishment of guerrilla base’.45

41Keyes, ‘Ethnography and Anthropological Interpretation’, 15–16. 42Kwanchewan Buadaeng, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Tribal Research Institute (TRI): “Hill Tribe” Policy and Studies in

Thailand’, Kyoto University Southeast Asian Studies 44, no. 3 (2006), 362–9, 373. It is unclear if the SEATO had its own projects for surveying and controlling the ethnic minorities except the overseas Chinese. See Damien Fenton, To Cage the Red Dragon: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia, 1955–1965 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 153–7.

43Krachang Bhanthumnavin, ‘Overcoming the Problems of Resettling Hill Tribes’, Spectrum 1, no. 1 (1972): 24. 44National Tribal Welfare Committee, Summary of Welfare and Development Programs among the Hill Tribes of

Northern Thailand (Public Welfare Department, Ministry of Interior, July 1965), 1. 45Prapas Charusathira, Chaokhao nai prathet thai [Thailand’s hill tribes] (Bilingual report with English title, ‘Thailand’s

Hill Tribes’) (Bangkok: Ministry of Interior, Department of Public Welfare, Hill Tribes Welfare Committee, 1966), 1–2. I used the English name Praphat Charusathien instead of Prapas Charusathira (as in his 1966 book entitled Thailand’s Hill Tribes), because of its closeness to the sound of the name.

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In 1968, on witnessing a dramatically increasing number of insurgencies in the mountainous border areas of northern Thailand, the CSOC dispatched Colonel Sudsai Hasdin and the Third Royal Thai Army.46 An Agricultural Advisor to the Hill Tribes Affairs Centre under the CSOC, Krachang Bhanthumnavin contended that the ‘spread and intensity of insurgency among the hill tribes in northern Thailand had exposed the inadequacies of the “non-integration” philosophy and of the tribal welfare and develop- ment programmes’. The reason why previous Thai governments’ development pro- grammes among the ethnic minority failed, according to Krachang, was because the government’s integration of the ethnic minority into the mainstream of Thai society was ‘confined to economic development, social adjustment and administrative participation only. Cultural and traditional matters are completely left to the tribes’. Therefore, the Thai government abandoned the ‘open-ended integration’ or ‘non-integration’ philoso- phy and switched to an ‘accelerated integration’ approach in dealing with the ethnic minority in northern Thailand.47

In this context, the Thai and US governments’ efforts to domesticate the ethnic minority came to focus more on incrimination. Generally speaking, the US and Thai counterinsurgency strategists agreed on the problems they associated with highland minorities, such as opium growing and trade, slash-and-burn cultivation, their migratory nature, and their lack of identification with the Thai government.48 They took two parallel approaches for an ‘accelerated integration’. One was to make the ethnic minor- ity’s customs and livelihoods, such as opium cultivation and trade, illegal; the other was to create indigenous militias and vigilante groups. Thailand had banned opium cultiva- tion and sales in 1959, leading to the growing poverty of the highland minority groups that had relied on a cash income derived mainly from opium cultivation and trade. As such, violent conflict between the highland minority people who tried to protect their livelihoods and the Thai government’s armed forces grew. Especially from late 1967, the Third Royal Thai Army began bombing the ethnic minority villages in northern Thailand in the name of anticommunist suppression. The operation generated not only the further loss of arable land, but also war refugees in the border areas.49 The ethnic minority people who were evacuated or fled from the bombing in northern Nan province, eastern Chiang Rai province, southwestern Tak province and the Tri-Provinces (Phetchabun- Phitsanulok-Loei) were relocated and resettled in what the Thai government called ‘self- help land resettlements’, or nikhom in an abbreviated Thai language term, in Tak, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Phetchabun provinces.50

Disruption of the highland minority’s livelihood by the Thai government forces pressed the former to choose a side: collaborator or enemy of the Thai government. One means of becoming a collaborator was to join the Border Security Volunteer Teams (BSVT), a military training programme for the ethnic minority villagers in Chiang Mai

46Robert M. Hearn, Thai Government Programs in Refugee Relocation and Resettlement in Northern Thailand (Auburn: Thailand Books, 1974), 49–50; and Krachang, ‘Overcoming the Problems of Resettling Hill Tribes’, 28.

47Krachang, ‘Overcoming the Problems of Resettling Hill Tribes’, 26, 2, 23. 48Ministry of Interior, Thailand, Report of the Socio-Economic Survey of the Hill Tribes in Northern Thailand

(September 1962); Manas Khantatatbumroong, Khrongkan phathana phuea khuammankhong [Development for security project] (Internal Report, 28 September 1975), 1–2; and Edward B. Hanrahan, An Overview of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Thailand through 1973 – A Background Survey for Perspective and a Guide to the Literature (CHECO/CORONA Harvest Division, Operations Analysis Office: HQ PACAF, 1975), 16.

49Hearn, Thai Government Programs in Refugee Relocation, 40–5. 50Ibid., 1, 30.

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province. The project was initiated by the BPP with the support of the United States Operations Missions to Thailand and the Thai CSOC in September 1968 to supplement BPP’s shortage of manpower and to fight communists in the remote border areas.51 It should be noted that the BSVT project was some of the first officially government- sponsored military training of the highland minorities. The programme equipped this alleged potential threat to national security with BPP-provided weapons.52 The Thai government terminated its funding for the project in 1975, reasoning that it still could not wholly trust the ethnic minority trainees who held ambiguous positions towards the government. The highland minority trainees themselves felt that they were not trusted by the government and the BPP.53 Not only did the provision of obsolete weapons to these volunteers, but also the constraints to their careers due to their unsettled citizenship and lack of language proficiency, contribute to enlarging this mutual distrust.54 Indeed, even though the project was innovative in the sense that it attempted to encourage the ethnic minorities to defend themselves from external enemies, the government’s continued suspicion of their loyalty to the Thai nation, as well as the imposition of unequal criteria of qualification, eventually hampered the project’s continuation.

What kind of lessons can be gleaned from these two actions undertaken by the Thai government in their ‘accelerated integration’ process? First, their attempts resulted in the enlargement of discomfort, if not disloyalty, among the ethnic minority groups who had felt that they were neither trusted nor treated equally like the Thais; and, second, the realisation of the constraints of their ethnic minority status which would continue to limit their lives in Thailand. These constraints and discomforting factors became the main sources of tension between the ethnic minority and the Thai government through- out the 1970s.

Problem in the eyes of the beholder, 1970s

The Thai military’s research on the highland minorities in northern Thailand began increas- ing from the late 1960s. The then Assistant Commissioner of the Provincial Police, Police Major General Suraphon Chulaphram, submitted a personal report to the National Defence College in January 1971 pertaining to the planned research trip to northern Thailand with his 13 cohorts in the Politics Department. A progress report in preparation for the field research that was approved by the College in November 1970 and undertaken between January– February 1971 reveals that the main goal of the trip was to gain first-hand experience of the politics, economy, socio-psychology and military conditions of the northern provinces in order to understand the northern Thai people’s characteristics and the ‘problems’ of the highland minority.55 A separate report submitted by Suraphon, who would soon become the commissioner of the Border Patrol Police Headquarters, clarifies three main goals of the trip:

51Phairot Pusayanawin, ‘Somdetya kap kansakatkan kankhayai itthiphon khong phak khommunit haeng prathet thai [Special essay: Princess Mother and the interception of the Communist Party of Thailand’s influence]’, Tamruat trawen chaidaen parithat [Border Patrol Police Review] 11, no. 41 (October 1995–January 1996): 58–9.

52John L. Champagne, The Border Security Volunteer Team Program: An Appraisal (Bangkok: USOM, 1971), 8–10; and Hearn, Thai Government Programs in Refugee Relocation, 27.

53Hearn, Thai Government Programs in Refugee Relocation, 26. 54Champagne, Border Security Volunteer Team, 9. 55National Defence College Class 13, kandoenthang paidukitchakan lae suksaphumiprathet phaknua khong naksuksa

withayalaipongkan ratchaanachak runthi 13 [Research trip of the National Defence College Class 13], internal report, January 1971.

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first, to show the highland minority’s problematic characteristics, such as their migratory lifestyle; second, to introduce the past and present government policies and assistance pertaining to the development of the highland minority communities for national security; and, finally, to show the effectiveness of the Border Patrol Police’s missions in controlling and assimilating the highland minorities. In his identification of the chao khao’s problems, he specifically mentioned how their ‘different’ or, more precisely, ‘non-Thai’ behaviours and customs as well as their migratory lifestyle could result in dissonances within Thailand and their easier associations with communism.56

The timing of Suraphon’s personal report and the mixed Thai armed forces’ research trip to northern Thailand to observe the highland minority problems demands particular attention. The so-called ‘Thailand controversy’ began in November 1970 with the pub- lication of an article written by Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen, members of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association.57 The controversy continued at the Association of Asian Studies convention in April 1970. Alfred McCoy subsequently published an article entitled ‘Subcontracting Counterinsurgency’ in February 1971, con- demning the academic studies for ‘consciously supporting the [Vietnam] war and related counterinsurgency efforts’.58 Both articles specifically mentioned the names of the Border Patrol Police and the Tribal Research Centre, as well as other US military research groups, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defence. As a long-time leader of the Border Patrol Police who had been in close touch with the USOM’s Public Safety Division as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, it may not be a coincidence that Suraphon proposed the research trip to northern Thailand in 1970. In his personal report, Suraphon carefully evaded the BPP’s relationship with the US organisations and instead focused on examining the impacts of the Thai government’s policies and actions on the highland minority devel- opment programmes and the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) highland minority community projects.59

There were several compilations of research projects on the highland minority by military research divisions published in the United States and Thailand. Among them, two sets of armies’ research collections stand out in terms of their coverage and purpose. The US Department of Army’s Minority Groups in Thailand, prepared with the Centre for Research in Social Systems (CRESS) at American University, was published in 1970.60

Another set of research consisted of six volumes of ethnic minority group reports by the Thai Army’s Psychological Operations Schools (rongrian songkhram chitwithaya).61 In October 1974, the Thai Army’s Psychological Operations School under the Supreme Command Headquarters received an order to conduct research about the highland

56Police Major General Suraphon Chulaphram, ekasan wichai suanbukhon nai laksana wicha kanmuang ruang nayobaidamnoenngan phathanachaokhao phua haengchat [Personal Research report regarding the politics and policies of developing the highland minorities for national security] (internal report, January 1971), 1–6.

57Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen, ‘A Special Supplement: Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand’, The New York Review 19 (November 1970): 26–35.

58Alfred McCoy, ‘Subcontracting Counterinsurgency: Academics in Thailand 1954–1970’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 2 (1971): 56.

59Suraphon, ekasan wichai suanbukhon, 134–51. 60Joann L. Schrock, ed., Minority Groups in Thailand (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research. Cultural

Information Analysis Center Department of the Army, 1970). 61I was able to acquire five volumes out of six including those for the Karen, Lahu, Hmong, Mien and Akha from the

Border Patrol Police General Headquarters in Bangkok.

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minority in Thailand by dividing military officer students into six groups.62 Each group was assigned to conduct both field and documentary surveys about the six target high- land minorities including the Karen, Hmong, Mien (Yao), Akha (Ikor), Lahu (Muser) and Lisu (Liser). These six individual reports were submitted and printed in January 1975.63

As mentioned earlier, the military research on the highland minority in Thailand clearly reflects the immediate needs of the US and Thai governments at the time of commission. The US account, Minority Groups in Thailand, stated its main purpose in the foreword: the compilation was designed to ‘be useful to military and other personnel who need a convenient compilation of basic facts about the social, economic, and political institutions and practices of minority groups in Thailand’.64 Similarly, the introduction to the Thai Army’s Psychological Operations School’s report on the Mien group stated that the book presents the interests of the Thai government and was ‘prepared for the people who are interested in studying and surveying the highland minority so that it could benefit the development and aid of the highland minority’.65

The survey outlines of both accounts are very similar. Starting from the introduction of the group’s name, size, location and topographical environment, they proceed to the ‘tribal’ background such as ethnic/racial origins; language; legendary and factual his- tories; relationships with neighbouring groups and settlement patterns; physical and psychological characteristics; social structures based on class; family relations and cere- monies; customs and taboos; religious activities, mostly focusing on animist and shama- nist rituals and the group’s past contacts with major religions like Buddhism and Christianity; economic organisation, like agricultural practices and trade systems; poli- tical organisations, starting from leadership and including legal systems; and commu- nication techniques.66 Both accounts use this approach more or less identically, and they draw most of their information from the academic researchers’ and missionaries’ accounts. Their reliance on secondary sources affirms that they were not particularly concerned about the originality or accuracy of their information. Their aim was to provide ‘necessary’ information to the relevant parties and interest groups for devising tactics, strategy and policies, and undertaking certain planned actions in the most convenient, practical fashion. As such, they proposed ‘civic action considerations’ and ‘suggestions for personnel’ working with a target group at the end of their reports.

The six minority groups that the Thai military students at the Psychological School researched were selected according to recommendations from the Tribal Research Centre in Chiang Mai and the size and location of the minority groups. The Thai army researcher who compiled the report on the Karen group states that almost half of the chao khao in Thailand were Karen, and that their communities were widely spread from

62Currently, the Army’s Psychological Operations School (1955–78) is under the National Defence Studies Institute, National Defence College of Thailand with a new name: Psychological Security Institute (sathaban chitwithaya khwam mankhong). ‘Khwampenma/prawat sathaban [Institutional History]’, National Defence College, http://www.thaindc.org/ index.php?lay=show&ac=article&Id=539832877 accessed 19 June 2020.

63Psychological Operations School, Class 18 (1974–75), Chao khao phao ikor [Akha hill tribes], (Bangkok: Psychological Operations School, 1975). 1. The names in parenthesis are the Thai names used in the reports.

64Schrock, Minority Groups in Thailand, iii. 65Psychological Operations School, Class 18 (1974–5), Chao khao phao yao [Yao hill tribes] (Bangkok: Psychological

Operations School, 1975), 1. 66The list of information given in these volumes is similar to what the Tribal Research Centre’s proposed village data

card code as shown in McCoy, ‘Subcontracting Counterinsurgency’, 61.

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north to west and central Thailand.67 Interestingly, the research account on the Mien ethnic group was published first, although the Mien population was the smallest com- pared to the other five highland minority groups. The next account was on the Hmong, which was the second largest highland minority at the time of publication, and it has an extensive analysis of the group’s military operational capability. The Thai army researcher who compiled the report on the Hmong emphasises its importance to national security. The researcher first explains the distribution of the Hmong people in China, Vietnam and Xiang Khouang in Laos, implying the Hmong people’s close connection to the communist movement. The report also highlights that despite the Thai government’s efforts to improve their welfare and living standards, some Hmong people became communist helpers. Some travelled to Laos and North Vietnam to receive training, then returned to Thailand and joined the Thai communists from 1967. Thus, although the number of Hmong people in Thailand was not as great as the Karen, its importance to Thai national security made the group a key target of the Thai army.68

The United States also had great interest in studying the Hmong and Mien people. In 1969, the USOM in Bangkok released a report prepared by US Development Consultants International (DEVCON Inc.), which had been contracted by the USOM to support the Thai BPP’s Remote Security Area Development projects after the 1965 incident.69 In this report, the DEVCON Inc. consultants highlight the importance of giving special atten- tion to the Hmong and Mien people because of their deep involvement with opium cultivation and trade, as well as their jungle fighting capability.70

How were the Hmong and Karen people seen through the eyes of Thai and US beholders? The US account Minority Groups in Thailand emphasises the peaceful nature of the Karen by stating that: ‘Traditionally, war was never declared by the Karen’. It explains that most ethnographical accounts described the Karen as a timid people, which made the group a passive, non-military people. One crucial factor informing the Americans’ friendly view of the Karen is their long history of contact through the American Protestant missionaries.71 The Karen people had been known to the American Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries as a ‘particular success in the field of missionary work’. Thus, in its suggestions for civic action with the Karen, the US account points out that ‘most Karen would probably respond favourably to ideas for change presented in terms of local community betterment’.72

The Thai army researchers’ accounts on Karen military organisation and capabilities are more detailed than that of the US account as they were concerned by the long-lived independence movements of the Karen National Union. The Thai army researcher’s account analyses active Karen military organisations and leaders, as well as their fighting capability based on recruitment, weapon possession and morale. For the Karen

67Psychological Operations School, Class 18 (1974–5), Chao khao phao ka-riang nai prathet thai [Karen hill tribes in Thailand], (Bangkok: Psychological Operations School, 1975), i.

68Psychological Operations School, Class 18 (1974–5), Chao khao phao mong [Hmong hill tribes] (Bangkok: Psychological Operations School, 1975), 1.

69Thomas D. Lobe, ‘U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1975), 334; and Jacob Tropp, ‘“Intertribal” Development Strategies in the Global Cold War: Native American Models and Counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 2 (2020): 421–52.

70Raymond Coffey et al., Contractors Semi-Annual Report, Devcon Development Consultants in Support of Border Patrol Police Remote Area Security, August 1968–January 1969 (Bangkok: USOM, 1969).

71Schrock, Minority Groups in Thailand, 829, 850. 72Ibid., 848.

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inhabitants of Thailand, the Thai army’s account maintains a favourable attitude by stating that they prefer democracy. Finally, the Thai army’s suggestions to the govern- ment for working with the Karen focus on differentiating the Karen people outside and inside Thailand. The Karen people in Thailand were described as harmless and ‘stable’ because they had not caused any serious problem to the Thai government after living in Thailand for more than a hundred years. On the other hand, it suggested that the Karen people who migrated from other countries, especially from Burma, should be treated differently because they were not accustomed to the Thai system, might be radical in their political thoughts, or might even be communist sympathisers.73

The US account on the Hmong highlighted their ‘warrior-like’ nature, saying that ‘one of the traditional activities of the Meo [Hmong] has been war, and the Meo [Hmong] are rated as brave and excellent soldiers’.74 A very detailed explanation of the Hmong’s paramilitary capabilities is provided, ranging from the organisation and training of militia, to weapons and their effectiveness in killing, fighting tactics and abilities, and the contemporary military condition of the Hmong in Thailand. In the section entitled ‘Subversive Influence’, it says: ‘The Meo [Hmong] of North Thailand are particularly vulnerable to Communist propaganda, agitation, and terror. This subversion . . . relies heavily on appeals to Meo legends, ethnic pride, and nationalism’.75 At the same time, the US account reiterated disunity among the Hmong communities in Thailand in addition to the weakness of the Communist Party of Thailand for influencing the Hmong people, as well as the efficiency of the Thai military government’s suppression of such subversive activities, thereby accentuating their possible vulnerability more than the group’s active participation in subversive activities. Thus, it suggested seeking assistance from the local headman and also the shaman when planning civic actions with the Hmong group.76

Similar to the US account, the Thai army researcher’s description of the Hmong military characteristics focused on their fighting spirit and bravery. The Thai account said that because the Hmong were freedom-loving people and had fought for their independence from the Chinese for so long, they would be warriors of high morale in battle, as shown by the success of General Vang Pao and his Hmong guerrilla armies in Laos. The Thai account also explained the on-going Border Security Volunteer Teams projects for training the Hmong as a volunteer militia group. The Thai army researcher stated that the BPP consciously selected trainees from the Hmong group because of their proven capability in guerrilla fighting and jungle survival.77 Since the Hmong were viewed as highly independent, was there any possibility that the Thai government would work with the Hmong people and make them understand that they are governed by the Thai government? The researcher again emphasised that the Hmong people were not Thai, and that they did not value Thailand like other Thais did. The researcher concluded that to resolve the security problems caused by the Hmong rebels in northern Thailand and to instil in them national loyalty, the Thai government must strive to make the Hmong become Thai.78

73Psychological Operations School, Chao khao phao ka-riang, 59–65. 74Schrock, Minority Groups in Thailand, 660. 75Ibid., 654. 76Ibid., 658, 664. 77Psychological Operations School, Chao khao phao mong, 35–6. 78Ibid., 58.

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In what ways had these descriptions of the highland minority affected the US and Thai national security policies? One common goal of both accounts was determining whether these people were able to work or cooperate with the Thai government based on their assessment of the target group’s characteristics and tendencies. The first assumption is that the Karen and the Hmong in Thailand are different from their relatives and cousins outside Thailand. The second is that even the highland minority in Thailand are non-Thai, which demands close examination and guidance. The differentiations of the highland minorities and lowland Thais were also shown in other accounts by the US military, such as that of Major Edward B. Hanrahan, who was hired by the US Air Force’s research project in Southeast Asia. In his 1975 overview report, Hanrahan stated that the ‘4,000 to 5,000 armed insurgents under CPT [Communist Party of Thailand] control have been essentially high- land tribal people’, and that ‘their dissatisfaction centers on cultural issues of land use in the mountains, economic pursuits, and political autonomy’. Therefore, he concluded, com- munist insurgents have been mostly ‘working to bring the hill tribes into conflict with the Thais’.79 A document entitled ‘Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribe Areas’ released in May 1968 confirmed this view: ‘an ethnic minority is a ready-made target for communist subversive attempts’, and the subversion of the ‘hill tribes becomes the forward edge of the communist offensive against Thailand’.80

Then a question remains regarding the process of ‘including’ these potential insur- gents against the Thai nation into the Thai nation. In a booklet published by the Psychological Operations School under the Joint U.S. Military Advisor Group (JUSMAG) in Bangkok, the author remarked that there were three types of relationships that the minorities and the Thai people could have: namely separation, assimilation or integration. According to the author, assimilation meant ‘making people alike’; in the case of Thailand, it would mean ‘changing the hill tribesmen into Thai’. Integration meant ‘building into one whole’, and in return for earning full citizenship rights and equal political, economic opportunities, the minority peoples ‘expected to have common loyalties to the national government’.81 These definitions of assimilation and integration policy reinforced the importance of nationality over ethnicity. Because the highland minority groups were considered as non-Thai, their loyalty to the Thai nation and state should be questioned, automatically making them a population problematic for national security. In fact, it was not the minorities’ illiteracy or ignorance, or their poor living conditions, that both the Thai and US military researchers considered as the root cause of the non-Thai minority’s turn to communism. The problem was in the eyes of the beholder, who had the intention of racialising the national threat with a presumption that only a full Thai can be assured not to become communist, and vice versa.

The others in between the boundaries

Through the eyes of the Thai and US military researchers, this article attempted to show the ways in which the racialised cultural hierarchy and the imperatives of defending the nation-state, Prathet Thai in this case, before the integration of nation, chonchat thai,

79Hanrahan, An Overview of Insurgency, 16. 80‘Border Patrol Police: Program for the Hill Tribes Areas’ (1968), 1. 81Psychological Operations School, JUSMAG, Hill Tribe Research Center (Bangkok: Psychological Operations School,

nd), VI-1, VI-3, VI-8.

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made the highland minority ‘the others’ of any nation during the Cold War. The Thai and US military researchers paid special attention to the highland minorities during and after the Second World War because of the Chinese civil war that eventually gave birth to the People’s Republic of China and caused a massive migration of ethnic minorities in South China down to Southeast Asia. The emergence of newly established nation-states in Southeast Asia at the dawn of the Cold War narrowed a boundary of nationhood for the alleged others of the nation-state, like the highland minorities of northern Thailand. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Mien and Hmong people came to occupy military research- ers’ attention not only because of their Chinese heritage and their association with supposedly illegal residency and opium cultivation, but because of their presumed lack of national loyalty towards the Thai nation. In other words, what the Thai and US researchers saw as a key problem with the highland minority was their swaying or unidentified national loyalty that seemingly neglected the extant boundary of the Thai nation-state.

In the first place, the nationhood of the prathet thai has been far smaller than that of the chonchat thai.82 Worse yet, the gap between the two boundaries widened continu- ously as the Thai and US military researchers consciously instilled the racially and culturally defined terms of national security. They focused on identifying the population as either loyalists or insurgents against the Thai nation-state, which had allied with the US-led Free World. The constant impulse to draw a boundary between groups of people within and outside the nation-state as well as ideological camps during the Cold War contributed to refashioning ‘the others’ as a threat to national security.

The United States began withdrawing its aid programmes from Thailand when the Vietnam War came to a close in the mid-1970s. Yet, the Thai military politicians and researchers had already set their goals for the forceful assimilation of the highland minorities, and they practised their racialised terms of national security through the process of infantilisation and incrimination. In this context, ‘the others’ of a nation became the enemies of the Thai nation-state. The Thai government and its security forces are still searching for the strategic target population in between the boundaries of nation- state and nation, because they know too well that the placement of highland minorities in between the boundaries will allow them to have a recruitment pool for the next enemies of the Thai nation-state, elongating their terms of office. Problems, again, are in the eyes of the beholder.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5C2A01080959). The author would like to thank Michael Montesano for comments and suggestions to the earlier version of this article; and Linda Chhath and Vaneesa Cook for editing the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

82Mckinnon, ‘(Im)Mobilization and Hegemony’, 37.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2019S1A5C2A0 1080959].

Notes on contributor

Sinae Hyun is a historian specialised in the Cold War, nationalism, and Southeast Asian studies. Her current research interests include a history of the American Protestant missionaries in Southeast Asia and their roles in bringing Christian modernity; and the racialising nature of the nation-building in mainland Southeast Asia. She is also preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, 'Indigenising the Cold War'.

ORCID

Sinae Hyun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8265-9233

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