Thai military has dismissed the UN’s concern and suggestion that Thai authorities should uphold human rights while solving land conflicts, saying the information which says the military harassed villagers are false.
Col Tawee Kerdsomboon, the Deputy Army Commander of the southern province of Surat Thani, the province with the highest tension on land dispute, on Monday clarified to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the communication from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) regarding the junta’s policy to solve protected area issue by forced eviction and violence.
In the statement issued on 11 March, the OHCHR said it is “concerned” with the situation. The land dispute has led to four murders and one disappearance of land rights activists in the past ten months, the OHCHR stated. The office also suggested that the Thai Thai government should stop forced evictions -- the result of the junta’s “Return the Forest” policy, which are happening countrywide.
On June 2014, the junta’s National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) issued Order No. 64/2014, which states that encroachers of protected areas and poachers of illegal forest goods shall face severe legal actions.
Col Tawee said Phoemsap community members, the embattled community of Chai Buri District in the southern Province of Surat Thani, illegally encroached public areas, and alleged the leaders of the community of acting as a local mafia group to occupy the land plot under the claims of the villagers’ grievances.
After the military gave statement on the issue, the Southern Peasants’ Federation of Thailand (SPFT), the leading land right advocate group in the South, declared the military’s statement as false and pointed out that the military’s response was aimed at covering up the conflict to benefit the local interest groups.
Meanwhile, on Monday, SPFT urged the governor of the southern province of Nakhon Srithammarat to stop the eviction of Tung Tab Kway Community in Bang Kan District of Nakhon Srithammarat.
The community is located on land plots which overlap with Tung Tab Kway protected area.
According to SPFT, the acting governor of Nakhon Srithammarat in January authorised an order to evict Tung Tab Kway Community by 15 April.
The eviction order was authorised before the survey to determine the boundary between the protected area and the community is complete, SPFT pointed out.
The organisation stated in the letter that the local authorities should wait for the final resolution from the committee to solve land conflict which was established by Gen Prayuth Chan-o-cha, the junta’s leader and prime minister, on November 2014.