Let Ko-ee return home

After a long battle, centenarian grandpa Ko-ee Mimee's legal right to become a Thai has won state recognition.

The Interior Ministry on Tuesday issued the 107-year-old ethnic Karen man the 13-digit identity card which means he is a Thai national. The card also gives him access to state services he had been denied unfairly for so long.

Witnesses to the verification process, assisted by the National Human Rights Commission and human rights activists, told the authorities Mr Ko-ee was an indigenous forest dweller who was born on Thai soil in 1911, contradicting claims by some state officials that he and his forest people were illegal migrants from Myanmar. His birthplace was deep in a pristine forest in Phetchaburi province which became part of Kaeng Krachan National Park in 1981. The designation of the area as a park according to the National Park Act, promulgated in 1961, had cost him and other Karen ethic villagers the right to stay there.

Because Thailand was to later nominate Kaeng Krachan as a Unesco World Heritage site, the old man and his neighbours were forcibly evicted by park officials under then park chief Chaiwat Limlikhit-aksorn.

In an excessively heavy handed raid in 2011, the park team burned down the old man's bamboo hut and rice barn before bundling him on a helicopter and taking him to a resettlement village called Bang Kloy Lang where there was no fertile land to till.

In order to be able to return home, the old man has gone through several legal battles.

Mr Ko-ee said he was born a highlander and just wished to have the chance to return to his homeland on the hill.

But the legal battles were let downs, as the principle of respecting customary rights exists only on paper, not in practice.

More importantly, the battles ended in tragedy. His grandson and rights activist Porlajee "Billy" Rakchongcharoen vanished in 2014, in what is believed to be a case of enforced disappearance, because he was trying to help his fellow Karen gain the legal right to go back home. Billy was last seen on April 17, 2014 when he was taken into custody by Mr Chaiwat who claimed he later released the activist. The case went nowhere, and there is little hope of a resolution despite the Department of Special Investigation finally agreeing to accept the case.

At the same time, the court, while punishing those involved in the forced eviction and burning of the Karen community's homes in its latest ruling on June 12 this year, still threw out their petition to return home on the grounds that they had no land ownership documents.

Giving Mr Ko-ee Thai nationality is the right thing to do, but the state should not stop there.

Now that it accepts the old man is Thai, it must also accept his right to live in his former forest dwelling.

According to the law, indigenous people have the right to stay if their community was there before the national park was established, which in this case was in 1981, about 70 years after Mr Ko-ee was born. He was there even before the 1961 park law came into existence.

They may have missed a legal chance to have their land removed from the park demarcation plan back in 1981, but it was because their village was remote. But there are ways to verify or trace their existence there that stretches back long before the law. On top of that, it is widely accepted that the Karen way of living, with rotational farming, goes hand in hand with nature.

Mr Ko-ee, as well as his ethnic Karen villagers, is a victim of state violence. He deserves justice.

And justice in this case is none other than giving the forest dweller the chance to return to his homeland.