Karen people

Karen
ปกาเกอะญอ (Pga K'nyau, Sgaw) · โพล่ง (Phlong, Pwo) · กะเหรี่ยง (Thai) · Kayin (Burmese)
Total population
three to seven million in Myanmar (estimates); 438,131 in Thailand (2003 survey): 2: 5
Regions with significant populations
Myanmar: Kayin State; the Ayeyarwady, Yangon, Tanintharyi and eastern Bago regions; Mon State Thailand: 15 provinces of the north and the west
Languages
Karenic languages, above all Sgaw and Pwo
Religion
Buddhism, Christianity and the cult of spirits
Related ethnic groups
Kayah, Pa-O

The Karen (Sgaw Pga K'nyau; Pwo Phlong; Thai กะเหรี่ยง kariang; Burmese Kayin) are a people of Myanmar and Thailand who speak Karenic languages. About 90 per cent of them live in Myanmar,^: 422 where their number is unknown and estimates run from three to seven million.^: 2 Only a minority live in Kayin State. Most are scattered through the Ayeyarwady, Yangon and Tanintharyi regions, eastern Bago and Mon State.^: 10 In Thailand a government survey of 2003 counted 438,131 Karen, about half of the highland population that the Thai state classes as "hill tribes".^: 5 The Sgaw and the Pwo are the two largest groups.^: 435

Karen communities lived between the lowland courts of the Mon, Burmans and Siamese, whose armies took Karen levies as porters and spies. American Baptist missionaries baptised their first Karen convert in 1828 and made scripts for Sgaw and Pwo. A Karen nationalist movement dates from 1881. The Karen National Union, founded in 1947, took up arms against the Burmese government in 1949. Most Karen in Myanmar are Buddhists. In the hills of Thailand many Karen villages live by the rotational farming of upland rice and keep the cult of the spirits of the land and the water. Some of them lie in national parks. At Kaeng Krachan the park authorities and the Karen of Bang Kloi have long been in dispute over land. In the 1890s officials in Burma told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission that Karens grew ganja as a medicine for the elephants of the timber trade. A Karen villager in western Thailand has described how cannabis was sown among the upland rice.

Name and identity

The Sgaw call themselves Pga K'nyau (ปกาเกอะญอ), which means "person" in their language. The Thai ethnic-groups database of the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre contrasts the name with kariang and yang, names given by others whose meaning the people did not know. It states that kariang has been tied to a discourse about "hill tribes" (ชาวเขา, chao khao) that carries a sense of underdevelopment and backwardness. Pga K'nyau covers the Sgaw only. Kariang therefore remains the name for the people as a whole in Thai. The Pwo of the west and of parts of the central region call themselves Phlong (โพล่ง). In the north they are known as kariang po. Burmese speakers call them Talaing Kayin, "Mon Karen". The Pwo dislike the name yang as impolite and prejudiced. In 1989 the government of Myanmar replaced "Karen" in official use with the Burmese exonym Kayin; Karen State became Kayin State.^: 6

The historian Kazuto Ikeda dates the naming of the Karen language to the years 1826–1852, when the British held Tenasserim. In his account the two scripts that missionaries made for Sgaw and Pwo gave rise to the popular idea of the Karen as a people of two main subgroups. The colonial censuses of 1921 and 1931 listed 16 Karen subgroups, following the linguistic survey of Burma in the 1910s.^: 435 The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre lists four Karen subgroups in Thailand: the Sgaw, the Pwo, the Kabae or Kaya and the Pa-O or Taungthu. A report for the National Human Rights Commission lists the Sgaw, the Pwo, the Bwe and the Pa-O.^: 38

In 1983 the anthropologist Peter Hinton asked, "Do the Karen really exist". Discussion since then has not settled what makes a person Karen. Millions of people call themselves Karen or use names such as Pgakanyaw, Phlong, Kayin and Kariang that denote some kind of Karen.^: 422 In November 1986 a bulletin of the Karen National Union listed 12 groups under its claim, among them the Red Karen (Kayah), the Black Karen and the Pa-O. Ronald Renard writes that this did not match how most Red Karen and Pa-O see themselves.^: 423–424 U Hla Pe, a Pa-O politician from Thaton who became vice-president of the new Karen National Union in 1947, held that the Pa-O were one of the Karen groups.^: 441 Myanmar's 2014 census placed the Karen and the Kayah among eight "major ethnic races". The Transnational Institute, a research institute in Amsterdam, described the Kayah as the largest of several related Karen subgroups in the lands historically called Karenni. It reported that the Kayan wished to be counted as a separate race and rejected their placement under the Kayah.^{: 9, 16}

Population and distribution

No reliable census of the Karen of Myanmar has been taken since the colonial period.^: 10 The Karen were the second largest group after the Burmans in the census of 1931 and the third after the Shan in the census of 1983.^: 432 The 1983 census put them at 6.2 per cent of the population. In 1986 the Karen National Union estimated their number at 7 million.^: 10 The census figures of 1941 for race were lost as a result of the Japanese invasion. Andrew Selth cites a count of 1,367,673 Karens in 1949 by the writer Crozier, against the Karens' own claim of more than two million.^: 485 By 2018 the government had not released the ethnic data of the 2014 census. In February 2018 a Union minister told the upper house of parliament that it could not do so because of disputes over who belonged to which group.

The modern Karen State dates from 1952. Most Karen live outside it.^: 10 The first semi-permanent settlements for Karen refugees in Thailand were set up in Tak Province in 1984. In January 2011 the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, the main group of NGOs assisting the refugees, counted 141,549 people in nine camps along its middle section. Some 30,000 Karen and other refugees from Burma had been resettled in third countries in the three years before.^: 31–32

In Thailand the Karen live in 15 provinces, from Chiang Rai in the north to Prachuap Khiri Khan in the south. Counts of the highland population made by the Thai state found 275,954 Karen in 1992 and 438,131 in 2003.^: 5 The report for the National Human Rights Commission gives the same figure, 438,131 people in about 1,912 villages or communities, from data of Mahidol University for 2004.^: 1 A 2020 ethnobotanical review gives about 549,400 Karen in 1,930 villages of nine northern and seven central and western provinces, citing the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre.

Language

Glottolog classes Karenic as a family of the Sino-Tibetan languages, with 20 languages. In its tree Sgaw and Paku form a southern branch and Pwo and Pa'o a peripheral one. Kayah, Bwe and Geba fall in a central branch and Kayan Lahwi in a northern one. Historical linguists still debate whether Karenic belongs within the Tibeto-Burman family or outside it.^: 218 Ashley South counts some 12 Karen dialects. Most Karen speak Sgaw, above all in the hills and among Christians, or Pwo, above all in the lowlands and among Buddhists.^: 10

The American missionaries first meant to teach the Karen in Burmese. The Karen legend of a lost book led the missionary Jonathan Wade to make a Sgaw script in 1832, adapted from the Burmese script. He made a Pwo script soon after, but its orthography was settled only in 1852.^: 434

History

Between the lowland courts

Anthony Walker places the Karen-speaking peoples, in historic times, in central and lower Burma and the adjacent parts of Thailand. There they lived as minorities, in the hills and on the plains, with complex links to the Mon, Burman and Tai states.^: 218 By the 18th century a large part of the people later called Karen had accepted Buddhism.^: 433 The Karen hills along the border served as a buffer between the rival courts of Siam and Burma. Karen levies worked as porters and spies for one invading army or another, while local Karen rulers kept a fair degree of autonomy in places far from the courts.^: 20 Selth writes that the Burmese monarchy reviled the minorities as illiterate pagans. In his account the Karens suffered most, at the mercy of the Burman communities of the delta.^: 488

The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre traces the Sgaw to the basin of the Salween. In its account they were carried off into Siam as captives after the wars between Siam and Burma of the 17th century. After the Burmese king Alaungpaya defeated the Mon king in 1755, Karen who had lived under Mon rule moved into the hills of Uthai Thani, Suphan Buri and Kanchanaburi. The kings of Siam gave a Karen chief the title Phra Si Suwannakhiri to guard the frontier towns. Five holders followed one another until the post was abolished in the reform of the provincial administration. The last of them lived at Ban Sanephong in Sangkhlaburi and received the surname Setaphan (เสตะพันธุ์) from King Vajiravudh in 1916. In the north, some Karen were brought to Chiang Mai as captives under its ruler Kawila. Other groups moved from Burma into the lands of Lanna and sent tribute and elephants to the lords of Chiang Mai in return for land to live on. Some communities paid the Lua, who owned the land, a tenth of their rice harvest.

Mission, script and nation

In 1827, at Moulmein, the American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson met Ko Tha Byu, hired him as a household servant and began to teach him the Christian faith. George Dana Boardman baptised him at Tavoy on 16 May 1828.^: 219 The rapid spread of Christianity among the Karen began with Ko Tha Byu, the first Karen convert.^: 433 Walker writes that the missionaries, impressed by the Karen belief in a High God and in a "Golden Book" of wisdom, quickly assumed that the people had once been Christian.^: 220 In 1833 the missionary Francis Mason claimed to have discovered in the Karen "a fragment of the descendants of the Hebrews". Ikeda calls the chapter on the Karen in Mason's natural history of British Burma (1860) the first systematic attempt to describe the Karen as a race or nation.^: 435 Hitomi Fujimura argues that Mason presented Ko Tha Byu as an ideal Baptist to show the mission's success and to raise funds. Fujimura also finds that Karen history has been written with a heavy focus on the Baptists, who are only a minority of the Karen.^: 295 By 1925 the American Baptist Mission claimed 60,000 baptised Karen adults, with 886 churches and 807 pastors. The Baptist Karen community as a whole numbered about 200,000.^: 220

The Karen nationalist movement dates from the founding of the Karen National Association in 1881. Its early leaders were influenced by the American Baptist Mission.^: 8 Burman nationalists came to regard the Karen at large as supporters of British rule who enjoyed preferential treatment.^: 436 In Selth's reading the Karens welcomed British rule as protection from the majority. Missionaries commended them to the administration as "loyal subjects". In 1925 the army headquarters in India decided to recruit only Chins, Kachins and Karens.^: 488

Buddhist Karen writers of the late colonial period wrote histories of their own. The Kayin Chronicle of 1929 by U Pyinnya sets out three explanations of the name Kayin. The most elaborate derives it from Karannaka, an old name of Thuwannabumi, the capital of a legendary Mon kingdom: the people of its plain became Mon and the people of its forests became Kayin.^: 445 In Ikeda's reading the authors of these Buddhist chronicles, writing in Burmese for Burmese readers, sought to prove the Karen a legitimate people (lumyo) with royal lineages of their own and faithful to the Buddhist order.^: 431

War and the Karen National Union

During the Japanese invasion of 1942, racial violence broke out between Burman and Karen communities in Salween district and, to a greater extent, in the Ayeyarwady delta, where it lasted some three months or more. Selth relates it to Burman resentment of the Karens and to Burman accusations that the Karens remained loyal to the British.^: 491 The British Special Operations Executive had recruited some 2,000 Karens in the eastern hills by the time of the invasion. By the end of the war the levies numbered some 12,000.^: 496–497 The Karens who fought in the eastern hills believed they would be rewarded with a state of their own. The delegation that Aung San led to London in January 1947 to negotiate independence included no representatives of the hill peoples.^{: 502, 506}

The Karen National Union was founded in February 1947. It went underground on 31 January 1949 at the battle of Insein, a date it keeps as "revolution day". Some observers blame the KNU leadership of the time for territorial and political claims that went too far. Others stress the grievances left in Karen communities by abuses at the hands of mainly Burman militias during and after the war. For much of the next half-century the KNU acted as a de facto government over large parts of Karen State and of the adjacent Bago Yoma highlands and Ayeyarwady delta.^: 8 To keep the communist parties of Thailand and Burma from joining up, Thailand and the United States backed anti-communist Karen leaders such as Bo Mya.^: 20 In late 1994 several hundred soldiers left the KNU to form the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), allied to the government, which soon afterwards overran the KNU headquarters at Manerplaw.^: 8 The political scientist David Brenner attributes the split to a mutiny of Buddhist soldiers against discrimination in a movement dominated by Christians. The KNU agreed a ceasefire with the government on 12 January 2012. In South's view the administrations of the refugee camps in Thailand are dominated by a Sgaw-speaking, largely Baptist elite.^: 32

Hill tribes, citizenship and forest law in Thailand

When Thailand set up its Hill Tribe Welfare Committee, the official definition of "hill tribes" took in only nine groups, the Karen first among them. Kwanchewan Buadaeng writes that the first government socio-economic survey of the hill tribes, made under foreign anthropologists, portrayed them as a problem for Thailand.^: 376 The later policy of national integration set out to turn the hill tribes, seen as "non-Thai", into "Thai", mainly by opening schools in the highlands where the young would learn the Thai language, culture and history.^: 374 Abigaël Pesses lists the labels attached to the hill tribes in the 1960s as "opium growers", "rebel to state authority", "forest destroyers" or "illegal migrants". Highlanders surveyed from 1985 received an intermediate status and identity cards, blue from 1992 and green with a red rim from 1999, that confined their movement to their district.^{: 8, 39} In Pesses's study of Pwo Karen in Chiang Mai Province in 2007, the overlap of regulations, surveys and cards left officials and applicants alike unsure which legal status the Karen could apply for.^: 2

On 3 August 2010 the Thai cabinet approved policy guidelines for restoring the Karen way of life. The resolution, often called simply the "Karen resolution", followed earlier proposals to protect rotational farming as cultural heritage.^: 2 Its short-term measures, to be carried out within six to twelve months, asked for evictions to be suspended, arrests to stop and Karen communities in land disputes to be protected. In 2022 the Thai PBS programme The Active reported that after 12 years the short-term measures had not been put into effect.

Kaeng Krachan

Kaeng Krachan National Park, in Phetchaburi Province, was established in 1981, under a law that allows no one to settle in a national park. In 1995–1996 the government moved the villagers of Bang Kloi Bon and Chai Phaen Din, inside the park, to land it had set aside for them. Some later went back. Surapong Kongchantuk, director of the Karen Cultural and Development Centre, said that before 1985 the community had lived outside the park and that park officials had asked it to move to its present site. The Cross Cultural Foundation, a Thai human-rights group, describes an operation of 2010–2011 led by the head of the park, with rangers, police and soldiers, in which Karen who had returned to Bang Kloi Bon and Chai Phaen Din were arrested and their houses and rice barns burned. In September 2016 the Administrative Court ruled that the park officers had not broken the law in burning the houses, because the villagers had encroached on a protected area. It ordered 10,000 baht in compensation for each villager whose house had been burned. The court held that the cabinet resolution of 2010 gave the Karen no right to settle on virgin land in national parks. In 2018, in the Foundation's summary, the Supreme Administrative Court upheld the villagers' right to their traditional livelihood, rotational farming included, without deciding whether they could return.

Porlajee "Billy" Rakchongcharoen, a leader of the Bang Kloi community, disappeared on 17 April 2014 after park officers arrested him on a charge of taking honey out of the park. In 2019, in the Foundation's account, the Department of Special Investigation found fragments of his skeleton in an oil tank. In 2022 the Attorney General ordered the former head of the park, Chaiwat Limlikitaksorn, to be prosecuted for murder together with his group. In September 2023 the court acquitted Chaiwat of murder, saying that the forensic evidence could not establish that the bones were Billy's. It sentenced him to three years in prison for dereliction of duty.

In December 2020 the Department of National Parks refused to let the villagers return to Bang Kloi Bon and Chai Phaen Din, saying that this was contrary to the National Park Act of 2019. In early 2021, 80 Karen from 36 families, 20 of them children, went back and began clearing forest to farm. An agreement reached in February was revoked after a helicopter patrol reported 0.24 square kilometres of forest cleared. On 5 March more than 100 soldiers and police arrested 85 Karen at the two sites.

Society

Among the Sgaw of Palokhi, a village of Chiang Mai Province studied by the anthropologist Ananda Rajah in 1980–1981, a newly married couple lives with the bride's family, a rule the Palokhi Karen share with other Karen. Household circumstances can change the arrangement after the first period of residence.^: 33 In Thailand Sgaw and Pwo live in the same provinces but in separate villages, which differ in language and custom.

Religion

The censuses of British Burma found most Karen to be Buddhists: 77.3 per cent in 1921 and 76.74 per cent in 1931, when 15.99 per cent were Christians and 7.23 per cent animists.^: 435 Ashley South estimates that perhaps 20 per cent of the Karen of Myanmar are Christians.^: 2 Ronald Renard notes that the Karen in the rebellion were a small minority of the Karen population and that most Karen are not Christians.^: 421 For the Karen of Thailand, an ethnobotanical review states that more than 90 per cent practise animism and the rest have become Buddhists or Christians. Mae Hae Tai, a Karen village of the Mae Chaem watershed, is mainly Christian, yet its people keep their beliefs about the surrounding forest and hold tree ordination ceremonies. Rajah judged that the Palokhi Karen could not be considered Buddhist "in any real sense".^: 102

Each domain (kau) of the Palokhi area has its principal guardian spirit, the Thi Koe'ca, Kau Koe'ca, "Lord of the Water, Lord of the Land".^: 26 In Bernard Moizo's account each Pwo territory has, besides the god of the soil and the water, secondary deities of the streams, the forest and the wind. It also has a rice spirit, without whose protection the Pwo could not grow rice. The traditional Karen religion described in the human rights report venerates the ancestral spirits and a figure called Mue-ka-kler (หมื่อกาเคล่อ).^: 38 In Mae Waluang, in the Tha Song Yang District of Tak Province, villagers interviewed for a study published in 2022 said that they still honoured the spirits because the spirits help them work their fields. The year's rites there include sae mae kho, the first ceremony for the rice soul, held in July.^{: 93, 99}

At Ban Le Tong Ku in Umphang District of Tak, inside the Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary near the border with Myanmar, both the Pwo and the Sgaw follow the hermit teaching of the Talaku sect. Its followers keep no livestock and eat no meat, which they regard as sinful. They farm upland and lowland rice and grow durian and betel nut.^: 96–98

Culture

In Palokhi the farming year opens in January and February, when the swiddens are cleared and the New Year rites (kau lau wae or thau ni sau) mark the passage from the old season to the new.^: 45 The villagers grow a little glutinous rice to make rice liquor and the cakes eaten at the New Year and other ceremonies.^: 23 In six Sgaw villages of Chiang Mai Province, 113 people interviewed named 52 plant species used for dyeing, most of them extracted in hot water.

Economy and livelihood

A text issued in 2011 by the committee for restoring the Karen way of life holds that the Karen way of life cannot be understood without rotational farming (ไร่หมุนเวียน, rai mun wian). It records a dispute over the practice between the Karen and the government, which sees it as forest destruction. The text classes Karen and Lua farming as a system of short cultivation and long fallow. It calls the fallow field (rai lao) the backbone of the system. A Karen swidden produces many vegetables besides rice. One study it cites counted up to 207 plant varieties in such fields. The committee's month-by-month list of the swidden harvest gives sesame, taro, ginger, galangal, turmeric, sugarcane and sorghum for November, the month when the rice is also harvested. Bernard Moizo writes that Pwo who have settled on the plains and grow irrigated rice still keep a swidden, because it is not conceivable to be Karen without one. He wrote in 1993 that the Karen presence in Thailand was still not legal, because land occupied by swidden confers no right to the land.

In Mae Waluang, Tak, each field is cropped for one year and then left to recover. The farmers move round seven plots before they return to the first. The local rice, bue tho la, is sown into dibbled holes in May after the field has been burned.^{: 91, 93} A young villager said in 2021 that the national park wanted the community to cut its rotation from seven rounds to four.^: 96 The 2017 report for the National Human Rights Commission found that 54 per cent of Karen communities still lived mainly by rotational farming, 32 per cent were moving to single cash crops and 15 per cent no longer practised it.^: 38: 89 At Ban Huai Hin Lat the rotation had shortened to seven or eight years from 15 to 20.^: 71 Rajah found that the Palokhi Karen had no carefully worked-out rotation of fallows such as the Lua keep.^: 279

In Myanmar the colonial government created a "Karen Area" in the late 19th century in which swidden farming for the household's own use was allowed.^: 317 In a Sgaw village of the Bago range in Toungoo District, the swidden held upland rice mixed with vegetables, spices, cotton and sesame, grown mainly for the household; small amounts of red pepper and cotton were grown for sale. The fields were burned at the end of March and the rice harvested from the end of October into November.^: 320

At Ban Mae Khi Muk Noi, in the Mae Chaem basin of Chiang Mai, opium growing spread after the Pacific War. The villagers gave it up when the state declared the plant an illegal narcotic.^: 61 Around Palokhi, Rajah describes opium cultivation by the Hmong and the Lisu.^: 36 Eiko Kobori and colleagues report a "stereotyped public view" in Thailand that highland minorities, the Karen among them, destroy the forest by swidden farming. They attribute much of the deforestation to illegal logging.

Plants and medicine

A 2020 review of the published studies of 31 Karen villages in Thailand gathered 3,188 reports of the medicinal use of 732 plant species in 150 families. Its authors write that the Karen, less than one per cent of Thailand's population, use more than a third of the medicinal plant species known in the country. A survey of swidden fallows one to six years old and of sacred forest around Mae Hae Tai and a Lawa village recorded 365 species, 72 of them with medicinal uses. In the swiddens of Palokhi, Rajah and Wieland Kunzel listed 38 crops in August and September 1980, among them tobacco and Job's tears.^: 289

Cannabis

Elephant medicine

In the 1890s British officials in Burma told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of Karen growers who supplied the timber trade. J. E. Bridges, Commissioner of the Eastern Division, recorded the statement of Maung Gyi, the township officer of Lewe in Yamethin district. Under the Burmese kings, Maung Gyi said, a few people in his township grew ten to twenty plants, but "It was only Karens who cultivated large quantities of ganja for sale to timber traders (Thitgaungs), who use it as medicine for elephants". Everyone who kept elephants, he added, was "bound to keep ganja".^: 378 J. S. D. Fraser, the Deputy Commissioner of Pegu, who answered from enquiries rather than his own knowledge, wrote that "The Karens give ganja to their elephants". Asked which classes made the preparations of the drug, he answered "Formerly by Karens and Talaings".^: 388

The Pegu Yoma

Main article: Pegu Yoma

In 1908 most of the people of the Pegu Yoma, the forested range between the Ayeyarwady and Sittaung valleys, were Karens.^: 100 The district gazetteer of Toungoo (1914) wrote that ganja had "for many years" been carried down by Burman traders from the western hills, "where it is grown, in remote spots by Karens", and sold in the plains. The Tharrawaddy gazetteer (1920), on the western side of the range, told how the trade had begun. Ganja was "said to be indigenous in the Yoma" and was at first collected only as a medicine for the elephants working in the teak forests, "but the Karens, finding that there is a market for it, have taken to cultivating it in outlying parts of the Yoma". It came down in baskets to Indian buyers at Gyobingauk, Zigon and Nattalin. The Excise staff's yearly raids found plantations of about an acre each. A police report of 1903 has Indian traders buying ganja in the range from a different people, the Shans.

Swidden cannabis in western Thailand

Main article: Si Sawat

For a book on cannabis in Thailand, ปฏิวัติกัญชาสยาม ๒๕๖๒ (Siam's cannabis revolution, 2019), the writer Niphatphon Phengkaeo travelled by boat to a village in the hills of Si Sawat District in Kanchanaburi Province and interviewed a 56-year-old Karen man called Phi Ton. An excerpt was published by Bangkok Biz News in February 2021. In his account the Karen of old sowed cannabis together with their upland rice in the rainy season, around the seventh and eighth months, to keep pests off the rice. A rai of rice once held 20 to 30 plants. After cannabis was made illegal the villagers went on growing it among the rice, in secret and in far smaller numbers. Only female plants went into the rice, so the crop set no seed. A separate plot away from the field held both sexes to make seed for the next year. The cannabis was picked after the rice harvest, around December.

He named three varieties grown in his village. The oldest, handed down from his grandparents' generation, is chang phueak (ช้างเผือก, "white elephant"), called chong wa (ช่องวา) in Karen: a very large plant that does well in damp, cold weather. The other two have only Central Thai names: foi thong (ฝอยทอง, "golden threads"), which his grandparents did not have, and kan yao (ก้านยาว, "long stem"), which flowers sparsely and carries many seeds.

Hired workers and accusations in Thailand

In February 2013 police found 250 rai of cleared forest in the Mae Sam Muen reserve forest of Mae Ramat District in Tak Province and in the adjoining reserve in Omkoi District of Chiang Mai Province, 100 rai of it planted with opium poppies and cannabis set among them through the plots. The commander of the police division for natural-resource crime said a group of financiers had hired Hmong and Karen people to plant and tend the fields.

On 18 March 2021, after a visit to Bang Kloi in Kaeng Krachan National Park, Prasan Wangratanapranee, an assistant minister attached to the deputy prime minister, Prawit Wongsuwon, said that cannabis growing, forest clearing and hunting had been found there. The next day Aphisit Charoensuk, a villager of Bang Kloi, called this a pretext to keep the villagers from returning to their old land at Chai Phaen Din. He said the villagers had been refused when they asked to see the photographs of the cannabis and to go up in the helicopter. In the dry season, he said, they had not dared plant anything in their fields, so cannabis could not have been grown. He said that the villagers wanted to keep their customs and their rotational farming.

Use in northern Thailand

A public-health survey of two Karen villages in the hills of northern Thailand, made in February and March 2003, found that 21 of the 548 villagers who answered (3.8 per cent) had used marijuana in the past year. All of them were men: 18 of 174 men in the more developed village and three of 100 in the other.

Lu Thaw

Main article: Lu Thaw

Villagers in the KNU's Mutraw (Hpapun) District, in northern Kayin State, grew cannabis in the early 2010s. P'doh Kler Say, the secretary of the KNU's Mutraw district organisation department, told Karen News that villagers who had fled the army and were hiding in the jungle of five village tracts of Lu Thaw began growing it around 2011. At first a few grew a little to feed their buffaloes; then traders came from the town to buy. Some villagers grew it because they had no other work. The KNU destroyed 4,673 plants in 2012 and ordered the township to destroy the rest, saying that it had long prohibited drugs. P'doh Kler Say alleged that soldiers of the Burmese army bought the drug for their own use. A situation update written in January 2013 by a community member trained by the Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) said instead that the army asked villagers of the district to grow it, paying 50,000 kyats a viss. It was sold, the update says, at Ta Kaw Hta and in Mone Township of Nyaunglebin District. The KHRG's report on drugs since the 2012 ceasefire likewise states that in 2013 the army asked villagers to grow cannabis in Hpapun and Nyaunglebin districts and ordered villagers of Nyaunglebin to carry it there from Hpapun.

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

See also

• Demoso
• Lu Thaw
• Mergui
• Myanmar
• Pegu Yoma
• Si Sawat
• Thailand
• Western Thailand