Article

South East Asia Research

2017, Vol. 25(2) 139–156
‘Lead-polluted water ª SOAS University of London 2017
Reprints and permission:

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DOI: 10.1177/0967828X17706566
journals.sagepub.com/sear
A Thai-Karen village’s quest
for environmental justice
Malee Sitthikriengkrai
Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), ChiangMai University, Thailand

Nathan Porath
Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), ChiangMai University, Thailand

Abstract
At the turn of the millennium, inhabitants of a small Karen village situated in one of Thailand’s
UNESCO World Heritage Sites sought access to environmental justice in the Thai courts over
industrial pollution that had contaminated their local stream with lead and caused them years of
degraded health and social misery. The Karen villagers were only able to gain access to justice with
the help of NGOs that served them as a support group during a period when Thailand was
experiencing active civil and democratic awakening. The NGOs, which had a common cause with the
Karen villagers, helped them enter the ‘environmental justice frame’ and its discourse. Their expe-
rience of lead pollution was framed within a moral ‘rhetoric of exposure’, which came to guide their
activism against intransigent agencies and policies, as well as their mobilization for access to justice.

Keywords
Access to justice, civil society, environmental justice, lead pollution, Thai Karen

Song for Peace1

We used to be happy with plenty of food and rice.
(We had) no need to care about (how to get) food.

1. The above lyrics were originally translated from the Karen to Thai language by Tiva Kong-nga-dee, Pwo
Karen of Si Sa-wat District, Kanchanaburi Province.

Corresponding author:
Malee Sitthikriengkrai, Centre for Ethnic Studies and Development (CESD), Chiang Mai University, 239 Huay
Kaew Road, Tambol Suthep, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand.
Email: maleetow2@hotmail.com
140 South East Asia Research 25(2)

We had less need for money.

We had cattle to work for us and other animals for food.
We grew paddy rice and Rai Mun Wiang2 as well.
We never felt insecure as we lived in a self-sufficient community.
Unlike the past,
we now worry about making Rai Mun Wiang and paddy rice.
The Klity Floating Lead Mine has caused us trouble.
We are dependent on the supply of clothes and foodstuff.
We are not only in debt, but have to cope with illness,
and chronic lead poisoning has caused humans and animals to die.
The rich came to visit us and promised to help us with jobs,
money and remedies for our diseases,
but we only received tablets that could not cure our illnesses.
We did not know what to do.
We lost neighbours, husbands, wives and babies,
but we did not receive any compensation.

This song was composed by Paug Pa Pia, a Pwo-speaking Karen of downstream Klity village,
Klity Creek (Kanchanaburi, Thailand), and expresses his co-villagers’ suffering from industrial
lead pollution during the last two decades of the 20th century. Villagers say that when they hear the
song they are moved to sadness as it brings back memories of the healthy and peaceful life they
once enjoyed before the arrival of the Klity Floating Lead Mine. Before its arrival, they had never
before experienced such devastation whereby fish and other river life were frequently seen floating
dead on the surface of the water; there was a strong stench; and mysterious illnesses, morbidity of
children and livestock, depression and anxiety plagued the entire area. Hence, during the first 10
years of the millennium, villagers at downstream Klity Creek found themselves embroiled in civil
action and court litigation. They were seeking environmental justice and a remedy to their health
problems. But they were only able to make their story publicly known and to gain access to justice
with the help of NGOs during a time when Thailand was experiencing the most democratic and
civically engaged period in its modern history (from the 1990s to the first years of the millennium).
During the last decades of the 20th century, environmentally concerned groups began to
question the relationship between industry and the environment. The concept of environmental
justice emerged in the United States as activists, scholars and policy makers raised the issue of the
unequal distribution of environmental burdens between different groups in society (Bryant, 1995).3

2. Rotational swidden-farming.
3. The concept of environmental justice is a contested one and subject to multi-definitional interpretations
emphasizing diverse forms of justice in relation to the human/environment and ecological nexus, but
scholars see this as its evolving strength (Nadel, 2008: 28; Pederson, 2010: 29).
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 141

The concept of environmental justice has developed in relation to three facets: distributive justice,
environmental social inequality (with regards to race, class and gender) and procedural justice. The
first two are based on the idea that the environment and living beings inhabiting that environment
are subject to a series of rights and these rights are then related to procedural justice (Balme, 2014:
173) The concept has been applied to rather diverse socio-structural instances of inequality. These
include: property rights; land grabbing and the distribution of undesirable land; industry regulation
and negotiation; constraints on, or the exclusion of, local agency for those affected by environ-
mental deliberation and planning decisions; halting hazards and protection from natural disasters;
addressing pollution discharges; and environmental illness (Balme, 2014: 173; Nadel, 2008: 31).
For those suffering from environmental injustice, the socio-structural causes underlying the first
two facets (limitations in distributive justice and environmental social inequality) can delimit a
community’s access to the third facet of procedural justice. In a recent article, Bakker and Timmer
(2014) have stressed that where legal mechanisms for pursuing (any form) of justice seem
democratically available in developing nations, not all people, particularly among those living in
the countryside, will have easy access to the law. The ability to pursue environmental justice might
be dependent on extra-legal factors such as the causes of and obstacles to a mobilization for justice,
as well as the methods of communitarian support that make such mobilization possible.
For communities referred to in some international discourse as ‘indigenous peoples’, and in
other developmental discourses as ‘marginal communities’, the problem of gaining access to
justice can be further exacerbated by an inability to communicate the felt injustices because of
cultural differences, prejudice and government indifference to the problems raised (Niezen, 2003:
67). Indigenous people who have specific cultural and spirit-based (animist) relationships with
their environment experience environmental injustice as a total threat to community maintenance
and to their capacity to cope, which is difficult to convey in strict legal and/or empirical terms
(Schlosberg and Carruthers, 2010: 13). Local government agencies may also discourage members
from seeking justice through rhetorical and/or physical means. Communities might have to wait a
long time before gaining the civic breakthrough for the support needed. Seekers of justice might be
frustrated by the need for validation from experts, which might not always be forthcoming, and this
could discourage mobilization while reproducing ongoing suffering, particularly if environmental
pollution and illness are involved (Brown and Kelly, 2000; Couch and Kroll-Smith, 2000; Das,
1999). Such indifference and neglect becomes part of the environmental injustice they are suf-
fering. It is generally recognized by scholars that there are many situations in the world where
marginal peoples demand environmental justice within different political and ideological settings,
but in many cases they do not give it an ‘environmental justice’ label (Carruthers, 2007; Elvers
et al., 2008).
Rosser and Curnow (2014) argue that for marginal peoples the mobilization for justice can only
be carried out through social support structures such as concerned NGOs and advocacy groups,
repeat players who have experience with the legal world and pro bono contributions from lawyers
and experts. They are dependent on civil society and its altruism.4 For marginal peoples, access to
environmental justice can become interlocked with an ecologically aware and ecologically
responsible civil society which extends ecological citizenship to the community (Dobson and

4. Civil society has been generally defined as the space existing between the state and the individual or
household, which consists of voluntary associations of people from different social and ideological
backgrounds (Gellner, 1994; Guan, 2004).
142 South East Asia Research 25(2)

Valencia Sáiz, 2005; Hobson, 2013; Sáiz, 2005). The term ‘ecological citizenship’, which gained
salience during the last two decades of the 20th century, circles around normative practices taken
by citizens to curb an excessive human impact on ecological systems by placing self-restraints on
individuals in relation to the common good. Whereas some authors see the term ‘ecological
citizenry’ as having too narrow a focus on the environment and as irrelevant to environmental
justice, others have argued that ecological citizenship does not precede the politics of nature but
emerges within political struggles and in the space of an ecologically aware civil society (Hum-
phreys, 2009; Latta, 2007). Ecological citizens are those ready to mobilize against parties whose
ecological footprints are excessive and who can come together to form NGOs engaged in envi-
ronmental justice issues. The two concepts (environmental justice and ecological citizenship)
complement each other (Latta, 2007: 388). From this perspective, environmentally-focused NGOs,
which are usually external to the community experiencing environmental injustice, can provide an
important support structure for that community. NGOs can extend ecological citizenry to the
grassroots community in a common civic cause, and they can raise public awareness of envi-
ronmental problems in the wider society. They can also help provide a bridge to the legal structures
of the country for those people seeking access to justice (Escobar, 1996; Peet and Watts, 1996).
While NGOs might lend support to indigenous or marginal communities, for the latter the
space of ecological civil society is not always viewed as being endogenous to the community
but rather external to it. This can place certain strains on the relationship between grassroots
justice seekers and the environmentally-focused chains of civic coalitions. The political rela-
tionship between such movements can become exploitative and produce oppressive structures
that might impose new hegemonic discourses and even perpetuate elements of the experienced
injustice. The needs of the community can become subordinated to the NGOs’ interests, muting
their voices as well as authoritatively defining the type of justice that they should or would like
to seek (Forsyth, 1999, 2004; Nadel, 2008: 35; Rosser and Curnow, 2014). Failure to live up to
the ecological agenda can lead to disillusionment with the justice seekers, and vice versa, and
subsequently to their abandonment in some form or another. Pressure is then placed on
grassroots justice seekers (whose activism has immediate bearings on their everyday lives) to
civically conform to the dominant agenda. Furthermore, the type of public or civic commotion
generated by the NGOs can also work against grassroots interests and raise accusations by
defendants that justice is being marred by public opinion and rhetoric. In other cases where a
measure of justice has been achieved through a benign relationship with one NGO, further
justice can be marred by the actions of additional groups attracted to the grassroots cause.
In this article we present a case study of the Klity Creek villagers’ mobilization for environ-
mental justice against a lead-mining company. The excesses of the mining company’s ecological
footprint not only degraded the environment by contaminating the stream with lead, but also left
deep marks on the villagers’ health, well-being and way of life, causing them years of misery and
illness. With the aid of NGOs and after a long struggle, the villagers were able to prosecute not only
the mining company, but also the government agency responsible for environmental negligence.
However, ecologically concerned civic altruism also brought them new debilitating social
experiences that have not to date been fully addressed. This article is therefore concerned with two
main questions: 1) How can the full measure of environmental justice be framed in relation to the
needs of the local people seeking it? 2) Notwithstanding the benefits that civic altruism and
ecological citizenry bring to a community’s attempts to address environmental injustice, at what
point does the extension of ecological citizenry to a marginal people come to perpetuate elements
of that injustice?
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 143

The Karen, the lead mining company and the toxification of the stream
There are two Karen settlements at Klity Creek which were established in 1897 in part of an area
that would, in the 1960s, be designated as the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary and later
declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The two communities number approximately 500
people or 100 families. The inhabitants of the settlement with which this article is concerned live in
downstream Klity Creek and number approximately 269 residents or 53 households. The village is
200 kilometres north-west of Bangkok.
The Karen are dry (rotational) rice and cassava farmers, who also use the forest and its
waterways for food and for the basic necessities of life. Until the 1990s the stream was the
determining factor of their survival, providing them with protein from fish and other aquatic
animals as well as water. In the words of one villager:

Karen people are only the inhabitants of Klity Creek, not the owners. Klity Creek provides fish for
food. With the stream we could preserve our families. Without the stream, how could we survive and
where could we catch fish to feed our children? If we don’t have enough food, we would die and
gradually become extinct.

For the Karen community of Klity Creek the stream is also part of their cosmic configuration
and has religious significance. It belongs to Tep-Pao-Lau-Ku who, it is said, is the son of the
Buddha. A woman wanted to entice the Buddha to have sexual relations with her. The Buddha
rejected her advances but she was persistent. In response the Buddha wrapped seven pieces of
white cloth around his penis to prevent his sperm from entering the woman’s body. Afterwards he
threw the pieces of cloth in the stream. A baby, Tep-Pao-Lau-Ku, was then born in the stream who
now protects and preserves the water for the villagers and regenerates the vegetation. In deference
to the patron of their environment, villagers perform an annual ceremony offering him foodstuffs.
In return their patron provides water for their survival, but he can also punish the villagers by
holding back his gifts if offended. The patron forms an essential part of the community’s hydro-
social relationship with the stream and the environment. These relations are based on reciprocal
values of sustainable use.
Already in the 19th century Kanchanaburi was known to be rich in lead and other minerals and it
was destined to become one of the main lead-producing provinces in Thailand. It is conceivable
that one reason why the ancestors of these Karen families were originally given permission to settle
in this location was for them to help with the extraction of minerals from the hills, and indeed it is
recorded that during the earlier half of the 20th century the Karen of the area sent lead minerals as
tribute to the royal central government (Fine Arts Department, 1971). During the mid-20th century,
concessions were given to mine the area. Following a drop in the price of lead in the 1950s, the lead
industry in Thailand sought more cost-effective methods of production. Research showed that
floatation was the most cost-effective way of producing lead (San, 1961). The mining company that
entered the area of Klity Creek built Thailand’s first modern floating mine, situating it in a location
between the two Karen settlements. It was placed at a distance of two kilometres downstream from
the upper settlement and eight kilometres upstream from the lower one. Six kilometres north east of
the floating mine was the Bor Ngam mine owned by the same company and which sent its lead to the
mine at Klity Creek for processing. The owners of the mine, the K family, were widely known. The
youngest brother, who died in 2003 as the Karen villagers were filing their lawsuit against his
company, was also a representative of the Democrat Party in the province.
144 South East Asia Research 25(2)

Initially the management of the mine established good relations with local Karen groups in the
vicinity, allowing them to use its services such as the mine’s grocery shop and medical and health
facilities. It also improved the transport and communication services to and from the area.
Although villagers did not work for the mine, its presence gave them an opportunity to sell forest
products to the miners. Congenial relations between the mine and the villagers were further
maintained by the mine’s management, inviting village elders to their New Year parties and other
social gatherings. The company also donated large sums of money to the village health service and
temple in the upstream Karen settlement. Throughout this period only the community at down-
stream Klity were disturbed by the mine’s activities, and not the upstream Karen community.
During the mid-1970s villagers from the downstream Klity settlement noticed that the stream
was muddier and had changed colour. There was also a recurring odour coming from the stream,
which nauseated many villagers. People bathing in the stream started experiencing itchy rashes on
their bodies, and dead fish were frequently seen floating on the water’s surface. Talking about that
period, one informant described her experiences:

Since my youth I have washed myself in the stream . . . I knew it was not clean, but I had no choice. I
had to immerse myself in it (the water) although it made my skin feel terrible . . . dry and flaky. In
honesty I did not know then that the water was polluted. I thought it was caused by dirty rain water.

Another villager explained

Here, we have only one natural water supply. We had to drink the water and catch fish from here (the
stream). We had no choice, although we knew the stream was contaminated with lead. If we did not use
it, where would we drink water from? We did not have enough money to buy food either. We could not
live here as well because of the very bad smell. I suffered from headaches. Sometimes, it looked as
though oil covered the water’s surface. It was more difficult when I was working on the farm. I had to
drink the water. Sometimes I would let the water silt before taking it.

The villagers gradually put two and two together on seeing a pipe stretching out into the stream.
The mine was discharging something into the stream but at the time (1970s–1980s) they did not
know what it was.
As one villager told the author (Malee) in a 2005 interview after the pollution was publicly
acknowledged:

The [tailings] pond does not leak [she emphasized and repeated ‘not leak’], but the mine released waste
water into the stream through a large pipe. I have seen it myself. Two pipes are connected together.
There is a pond built upstream and another here. The pipes are connected here and the end of one goes
directly into the stream. That is why Klity stream is muddy and red. I have seen it myself. I guarantee
sincerely. I am not lying.

Among the first voices of protest directed against the company were those raised in 1983 when a
group of villagers were invited to the New Year party held at the mine. On the way to the mine the
villagers saw many dead fish floating on the surface of the stream. One of the villagers could not
suppress his anger any more. He confrontationally walked up to the manager of the mine and
pointed his finger at him in accusation. In T’s words:
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 145

[Before the party] I went out with YS hunting in the forest. We caught a barking deer and intended to
sell it at the mine. While hunting we saw a lot of dead fish floating in the stream. It caused me concern
about my fellow villagers. If the fish died like this, how can they survive? [In the party] When I saw
Tuek sitting down I asked ‘Are you Kamnan Tuek?’. I pointed my finger at him and accused him and
his mine of releasing toxic-waste water into the stream and killing the fish. He responded to me by
saying we should talk about this in private. However, I did not stop accusing him. I continued
complaining about the dead fish and toxic waste in the water. It could have been a truck load of fish.
I was very angry with him.

Not only was this villager concerned about the waste of fish, he also recognized that the cause of
their demise could be harmful to his fellow villagers. A few years later, in 1995, the villagers’
problems were further exacerbated when ducks and buffaloes began dying. At the time, the
management had to shut the mine for a month. In the words of L, interviewed in 2004:

When our cattle died, the mine was closed for one month. Most villagers supposed that the closure was
somehow related to the cattle dying, even though at the time they were still unsure of what actually
caused the deaths. During this month the mine manager visited the village many times with a letter. He
wanted us to sign it. After reading it, I told myself that I could not sign this. It [the letter] wanted us to
agree and confirm that the mine did not release toxic-waste into the stream [and had nothing to do with
the animals’ deaths]. I tried to explain to the villagers that they should not sign it. But the mine manager
was very persuasive. He visited the village three times a day to request our help. On the last day, he
came here with a lot of bottles of alcohol and beer for the villagers. [After getting them drunk] Teacher
C, P and nine other villagers signed their names. They misunderstood the letter and thought that the
mine would not release waste water into the stream anymore [if we exonerated it from the animals’
deaths]. Actually, he [the manager] had the opposite intention. The letter stated that the mine could
open again because it was not discharging waste water into the stream. Afterwards the mine reopened
and began to pollute the stream again.

Knowing that he could be accused of polluting the environment, as it had become known that
the area was contaminated with lead, the mine manager tried to elicit the villagers’ agreement that
mining activities were not the cause of the animals’ deaths. Thinking that the Karen could not read
Thai very well (if at all), his deception was based on their trust and innocence, persuasively mixed
in with a bit of alcohol.
By this stage the villagers needed help in getting word out, but their means of publicly
communicating with the greater nation and its institutions were highly restricted due to their
limited Thai social and language skills, and a general perception of them as backward, unas-
suming hillbillies (Pinkaew, 2003). To save their health and that of their children, the Karen
villagers would have to traverse not across hills and mountains, as they were historically
accustomed to doing when environmental problems arose, but also social, cultural, educational
and wider geographical divides. They would have to traverse the discursive culture of the
burgeoning Thai civil society.

Entering Thai civil society and the demand for medicine

By the early 1990s it was already known from government surveys that the stream south of the
mine was polluted with lead, but nothing was done to remedy the situation. There was a general
attitude of neglect by the civil authorities. One Karen government official recollected:
146 South East Asia Research 25(2)

Everybody knew our problem . . . government officials, the provincial governor and anyone who had
visited our village knew about our suffering, but nobody was really concerned with it . . . On one
occasion, a representative of the Chart Thai Party visited our village and signed the visitors’ book.
But he wrote ‘Nam Sai Jai Dee’ [the water was clean and the villagers hospitable]. How could he write
that while knowing full well that the stream was polluted with lead? He should have been asked why
the stream looked so red and muddy.

The community’s luck was about to turn just as the manager of the mine was deceiving some
villagers into signing his letter with their names. Around that same time, the Director of the Karen
Studies and Development Centre, an NGO concerned with Thai Karen affairs and culture, was
visiting the village to make a cultural study of the settlement. The director, Ajan N, was not
expecting to find a community suffering from industrial pollution. Being well-versed in Thai civil
rights procedures he made common cause with the villagers, taking up their environmental and
medical complaints, which had previously been falling on deaf ears, and turning them into a quest
for environmental justice.
Ajan N invited journalists who were interested in a good story to cover the Karen case. The
NGO also helped the Karen develop a letter campaign and encouraged the villagers to fight for
justice and their rights regarding the protection of their village and surrounding environment. Once
the story became public, a provincial official from the Department of Natural Resources visited the
village in 1998 and on seeing a pipe emptying into the stream he ordered the closure of the mine.
Later, two boulders were erected to serve as dams for blocking the flow of lead sediment down-
stream, but no further action was taken. The Pollution Control Department (PCD) later adopted a
policy of ‘natural remediation’. It was estimated that to clean Klity stream over 13,000 tons of lead
sediment would have to be dredged from the riverbed within a 20 kilometre stretch, which could
also cause the pollutants to spread further. It was therefore decided that the stream would be left to
recover naturally over a period of time (Human Rights Watch, 2014: 11). This decision was made
without consulting the local inhabitants of the area, as it was hoped that they would eventually
relocate elsewhere.
When the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) organized a series of blood screening tests for the
first time in 1999, it disclosed to the Karen and the public that the villagers’ blood was severely
polluted with lead. The blood-lead level of the children was far above 10 mg/dl (micrograms of lead
in a tenth of a litre of blood) and that of the adults was between 30 and 50 mg/dl. In addition, the
stream’s water and its riverine animals were declared unsuitable for human consumption. Results
also showed that the environment itself was not contaminated with lead, only the stream and its
immediate vicinity south of the mine where the downstream Karen lived. The villagers now
believed that the MOPH would take them seriously and provide them with pharmacological
treatment. However, the local health practitioners at Kanchanaburi, who were using a statistical
epidemiological approach to the lead pollution, placed the lead-threshold level for pharmacolo-
gical intervention rather high. For health surveillance it was put at 25 mg/dl for children and above
65 mg/dl for adults to receive chelation drug intervention. Compared to the threshold level used in
the United States at the time (which was set at 10 mg/dl but later reduced further to 5 mg/dl),5 this
was rather high. They therefore concluded that, even though the villagers’ bodies were polluted
with lead, there was no evidence of a connection between the lead levels and the illnesses, and that
most of the villagers as well as the children were not high-risk sufferers (Matichon July 6, 1999).

5. ASTDR. See also Millstone (1997: 17).

Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 147

The MOPH decided to approach the situation through health surveillance by providing blood tests
and health behavioural advice. The villagers were expected to give their blood regularly for
screening and to adjust their behaviour in relation to the environment. The rationale for this was
that since the mine had been closed for some time and the villagers now had another water source
from a distant mountain tap, their blood-lead levels should reduce over time.
The villagers and their supporters took this as a further sign of neglect. The Karen Studies and
Development Center demanded total pharmacological intervention for the villagers and not only
health surveillance, arguing that children were highly vulnerable to lead poisoning, while adults in
the area were suffering from over 20 years of chronic exposure (Krungthep turakij May 13, 1999).
In 2000 there were a number of deaths in the village, which the supportive NGO and Thai
newspapers publicized with the suggestion that they were lead-related (Bangkok Post August 3,
2000; Matichon August 5, 2000). A great deal of public pressure was placed on the MOPH,
leading to a public protest demanding that the MOPH provide immediate pharmacological
intervention. With the help of the supporting NGO, some villagers embarked on a letter-writing
campaign to the MOPH, demanding chelation therapy. When this was not forthcoming the vil-
lagers tried to delegitimize the local medical establishment by placing a placard outside the village
claiming that they had shares in the mining industry and therefore were biased in their approach to
the problem. Finally in 2001 the MOPH caved in somewhat to their demands for chelation
medicine and provided the villagers with limited courses of tablets, but with no accompanying
medical supervision.6

A quest for justice in the courts of law: Taking industry and the
pollution control department to court
In September 2000 the supporting NGO brought a number of Karen representatives to attend a
national seminar focusing on the effects of lead pollution in the upper Mekong region. One notable
speaker at the conference was Prawese Wasi, a well-known medical doctor and human rights
activist who was involved in the writing of the 1997 ‘people’s constitution’ and who is considered
to be the architect of the health reform movement in Thailand (Komatra, 2008). Prawese Wasi
proposed that the villagers be introduced to the Law Society of Thailand and through it they should
file a legal suit against Lead Concentrates (Thailand). The village representatives asked the sup-
porting NGO to introduce them to the Law Society of Thailand and their complaints were finally
filed at the provincial court on 30 January 2003.
One villager explained to the author (Malee) in no uncertain terms why she wanted to sue:

I have to sue. They [the mine] have caused us much pain for a long time. If we fight, we may lose; so be
it. I will be satisfied that we fought for our rights.

So far there have been three waves of Karen villagers taking up legal action. The first action was
taken by eight villagers who prosecuted Lead Concentrates as the first defendant and ‘KK’ as the
second defendant for transgressing the Enhancement and Conservation of the National Environ-
ment Quality Act of 1992. The eight plaintiffs sued for compensation that would cover their

6. Chelation drugs can cause severe side effects and therefore should only be administered under supervision.
The MOPH did not want to treat the villagers with chelation therapy but were forced to concede to the
public outcry.
148 South East Asia Research 25(2)

medical treatment, interruption of work and other interruptions caused by the mine, and the death
of livestock. The claim sought both compensation and a commitment from Lead Concentrates to
clean up the polluted stream at Klity Ta.
In the court hearing, which started in August 2005, the defendants argued that the contamination
was caused by the impact of heavy rain, which had broken the dyke of the tailings pond, allowing
waste to leach into the stream. They also argued that the villagers’ high blood-lead levels were due
to them living in a lead-rich environment, rather than a result of lead specifically in the stream.
Two witnesses gave important evidence against the defendants’ first claim. One was a former
head of the provincial mineral resource department who inspected the mine during the late 1990s.
He testified that there was a waste release pipe connected to the stream and that it was due to his
inspection that the mine was shut down in 1998 (Mathichon August 11, 2005). The second witness,
a former engineer for Lead Concentrates, also gave evidence that the mine had released waste
water, including chemical substances and sediments from the tailings pond, into the stream in the
process of floatation (Mathichon August 6, 2005).
The defense’s second argument was easily countered by the fact that the upstream Klity vil-
lagers also lived in the same area but did not suffer from high blood-lead levels. On the basis of
such evidence, in addition to medical evidence showing that their bodies were contaminated with
lead, the court ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, awarding them compensation for medical treatment
and for the disruption of their ability to work. However, the court turned down their claim for
compensation for the death of domestic livestock due to a lack of evidence that could prove they
died due to lead poisoning. Finally, the court did not judge the defendants as being liable to clean
the stream.
The success of this first test case gave courage to the rest of the village, and a second group of
151 villagers subsequently filed a civil law suit against Lead Concentrates for violating the 1992
Environmental Protection Act.
The third law suit was presented on behalf of a small group of 22 villagers who were dismayed
that the initial group had lost their claim for restoration of the stream. They sought remedial justice
for the stream itself. After all, far away from the modern courts of justice and civic activism, there
was a patron spirit-deity whose property and gifts had been profaned by human indulgences. They
had performed ceremonies for him, but to no avail. Somehow the stream would have to be cleaned
as an apology to him and the original human/environment balance restored. The villagers’ primary
aim in seeking justice was for the restoration of the creek.
In 2005 the group of 22 villagers took up legal action against the Pollution Control Department
(PCD) for negligence. As news broke out that more villagers were going to file a case against the
PCD, a high-ranking government minister from Bangkok visited them. In a friendly manner he
tried to discourage them from pursuing further legal action against a government ministry,
claiming that they would only lose the case. He told them that the government had already made a
site ready for their relocation and that they should accept the offer. The minister seemed to suggest
that their suffering was due to the whole area being polluted with lead. However, the villagers
knew that the cause of pollution was not in the air or the soil but in the stream. One woman who
was present at the meeting told the author the next day that she wanted to offer the minister two
cups of water, one from the mountain tap and another from the stream, and ask him which one he
would drink. Her rhetorical point was that, as they would not be moved, it was therefore a con-
cerned government’s responsibility to clean the stream. The visit was reported the next day with
the minister stressing that although the PCD had not been negligent, the villagers themselves were
taking risks with their children by staying put (Bangkok Post August 7, 2005). What the PCD failed
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 149

to recognize was that in trying to persuade the Karen villagers to relocate elsewhere they were
asking them to risk total community dissolution by giving up on their cultural way of life and
values that are embedded in the Klity environment.
In late 2008 the court ruled in the villagers’ favour and found the PCD guilty of negligence for
failing to protect the rights of the villagers to live in a healthy environment (The Nation May 7,
2009). The 22 villagers were to receive 743,226 Baht in compensation within 90 days. This was the
first time that a government agency had been found liable under the 1992 Environmental Pro-
tection Act (The Nation, December 2007). The plaintiffs were not entirely pleased with this verdict
though, as it was not money they had wanted but for the PCD to clean the stream. Finally, and after
further litigation, in 2013 the Supreme Administrative Court ordered the PCD to pay a further 3.8
million Baht to the 22 villagers who would use a large part of the money for the construction of
water pipes from a more distant mountain water source to the rest of the village. The court also
ordered the PCD to rehabilitate the environment and to write up a rehabilitation plan and send it to
the judiciary board before a certain date. The PCD promised that the plan would be implemented
within three years (The Nation, August 17, 2014). In December 2014 the supporting NGO made a
public announcement that the PCD had violated this court order by failing to lay out a plan of
rehabilitation within the specified time—a claim that the PCD publicly denied (The Nation,
December 13, 2014).

The backdrop of Thai-Karen/Thai civil engagement

A number of scholars writing about the upland dwelling peoples of Thailand in the late 1990s and
early millennium have pointed out that communities here learnt to make use of civic institutions
and NGOs for their various issues during that period (Buergin, 2003: 59; Jonsson, 2005: 129;
McKinnon, 2003: 83). The NGOs that made common cause with the upland dwelling peoples were
those concerned with human rights issues and with the effects of development and technology on
the environment in Thailand. Gillogly (2004: 123) notes that many of the Thais concerned with the
upland dwelling peoples during this period were middle-class college graduates, teachers and
students, as well as liberals active in Thailand’s democracy movement. She sees in this an irony, as
these social reformers were in fact pursuing the state’s original nationalistic policy of assimilation
of the upland dwelling peoples. During this civically vibrant period, the Karen communities were
placed within a ‘tribal slot’ (Trouillot, 1991) that viewed them as ‘tribal environmentalists’ living
in harmony with nature (Pinkaew, 2001; Walker, 2001). Walker characterized the extension of
Thai ecological citizenry to the Karen as being carried through what he calls the ‘Karen Con-
sensus’. This consensus provides an image of them as being idyllic forest resource managers, an
image that he believes hegemonically delimits Karen people to very specific roles and economic
possibilities. Yet Yos Santasombat (2004) reminds us that the image itself was initially generated
by the Karen elders as part of their modern identity work and has given the Karen peoples certain
social capital against nationalist claims of environmental exclusion. Hence the ‘Karen Consensus’
could be viewed as a civic consensus between the Karen uplanders and democratic civil society,
rather than a Thai hegemonic imposition on them. Under this understanding, these civic formations
were not about civilizing the upland peoples, but civically engaging them in a way that, for many
reasons, had not previously been possible. Firstly, in earlier years the social and cultural parity
between the upland dwelling peoples and the lowlanders was not conducive for civic engagement.
Secondly, the civic authoritarian nature of Thai society was one of civic totalism, which did not
really give room for a vibrant civil society. Thirdly, by the 1990s Thailand had entered an age of
150 South East Asia Research 25(2)

environmental citizenry and environmental issues were on the national agenda, as reflected in the
Environmental Protection Act of 1992 and in the incorporation of environmental issues within the
government’s five-year development plans. The uplanders’ plight also coincided with other
developments in Thai civil society in that period, such as demands for greater public participation
in government decision-making in relation to the environment, as well as demands for public
health reforms (Komatra, 2008). Fourthly, the new political conditions at the time allowed many
Thais to view their society beyond the monolithic ethno-nation that characterized the national
ideology for much of the middle of the 20th century. Instead, activists became guided by a multi-
social model of Thai society and its public beyond an ethnic definition. In this civic model the Klity
Creek problem was not just a Karen problem but an exemplary problem of other general failings
within greater Thai society.

The guiding moral ‘rhetoric of exposure’

With these social and political developments in Thailand, the Karen villagers of Klity Creek were
able to jump into the pool of Thai civil society as a symbol of an environmentally suffering
community within the brachachon Thai (Thai public) whose misery was caused by earlier
authoritarian decision-making and the callous management of powerful industry. Ecological
citizenship was easily extendible to them, and with the help of a vibrant civil society the villagers’
experience of toxic exposure entered into what Čapek (1993) calls the ‘environment justice frame’.
This particular civic frame of environmental activism helps provide marginal and disenfranchised
groups with a semiotic master-frame for a cognitive re-indexing of the nature of suffering while
validating their legal rights (Čapek, 1993: 7).
Schwarze (2003) argues that in their attempt to influence meaning and action and the making of
moral judgments, a specific ‘rhetoric of exposure’ emerges in the environmental justice seekers’
discourse (regardless of background or nation). He points out that the discourse of those activists
seeking environmental justice sometimes demands a provocative moral rhetoric to garner public
attention, civic empathy and moral support as well as to contest the assumption that no real
problem exists (Schwarze, 2003: 323). The rhetoric is constructed around certain dichotomous
images of an idyllic pre-contamination period and a post-exposure fall in which life had become
unmanageable due to the pollution as well as feelings of betrayal (Čapek, 1993: 9). The song by
Paug Pa Pia with which we opened this article reflects well this ‘rhetoric of exposure’. It portrays a
self-sufficient idyllic past when all needs were satisfied (an image reflecting Walker’s ‘Karen
Consensus’ model), and a post-exposure period of total social, economic and health degradation as
well as government neglect and civil deceit.
The ‘rhetoric of exposure’ also naturally dichotomizes an ‘us as suffers’ and everybody else,
defining the sufferers as a contaminated community looking in on a healthy society that does not
understand their predicaments. Further, in the face of indifference or rejections of claims due to
medical uncertainty, the rhetoric gives out messages such as ‘I live here I know what is going on’
(Tesh and Willaiams, 1996: 297) or poses rhetorical questions such as ‘Would you drink the
water?’ (the Karen villager mentioned above did not ask the visiting minster this, but she was
nevertheless thinking it as the next day she told the researcher that this is what she had wanted to
say to him!). The seekers of justice come to semiotically ‘pool’ their individual illnesses as signs of
the ‘community’s illness’ and as evidence of exposure during the civic interchange. The varied
illnesses experienced are presented with the morally-inflected rhetorical plea to ‘Look at what
industry has done to us!’. When Malee first visited the Karen of Klity Creek in 2002 with a group of
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 151

student activists who wanted to understand the effects of the pollution on the Karen community,
the villagers talked openly to them about the contamination of their environment, their misery and
health problems, as they wanted people to listen to their suffering. As villagers showed them
around, children with deformities were presented to them. People’s narratives were centered on
pain, numbness and family conflict. A common refrain was that ‘the Karen of downstream Klity
were never like this, they were changed by ‘nam rae’ (water polluted by lead ore’). The ultimate
rhetorical move though in this guiding moral ‘scream for justice’ was to cry ‘murder’ (Freudenberg
and Golubi, 1987: 389) by publicly announcing the deaths of people, with the clear suggestion that
the cause was related to the toxic pollution. The NGO and the media loudened this call by publicly
announcing the deaths at Klity Creek, forcing the MOPH to hold a public seminar and medically
contest the accusatory public outcry (Malee, 2007).

When civic altruism begins to strain the civic alliance

The moral rhetoric of exposure was harnessed by the Karen Studies and Development Center to
gain public backing, lending increased support to the NGO’s efforts to bring the villagers’ case to
trial. Following this civil commotion, tag-on groups with their own agendas also rallied around the
villagers’ predicaments. Many NGOs of all persuasions visited Klity Creek and pronounced their
dismay at how the villagers had been neglected. Some visited as a show of solidarity and support,
while others tried to use the situation to further their own agendas. For example, the Thailand
World Heritage Committee used the Klity Creek case as an argument to stop all mining conces-
sions in the Thung Yai Sanctuary. Other NGOs played their environmentally-friendly tribal image
against industry in order to persuade the government to allow citizens greater access to the forests
(Forsyth 2004: 429). By contrast there were also those who wanted to keep the National Park
human-free and tried to use the Klity Creek predicament as an excuse to evict the villagers.
The principle researcher (Malee) recorded how a Bangkok charity arranged for 200 people to
visit the village at Klity Creek to make merit by giving them food and clothes in 2003. They also
held a party for the Karen in the evening. Although younger Karen enjoyed the party and played
along with the fun activities that were devised for the event, the village elders sitting on the side
were repulsed by the charity which they saw as reducing villagers to a community of beggars.
More recently, after the villagers had won some financial reparations from the court to develop
a water pipe system, it became apparent that the money was insufficient. Some major companies
(including one well-known beverage company) saw the advertising potential in donating funds to
complete the project. More recently, environmental NGOs, whose members profess ‘good eco-
logical citizenship’, have been publicly demanding the rehabilitation of the stream and have urged
and convinced some of the villagers that the quickest way for this to be done is for them to supply
the labour for its dredging under strictly professional expert guidance. It is interesting that those
putting forward this middle-class environmental agenda (based on the idea of ecological self-
responsibility) cannot see that shifting the responsibility for cleaning the stream onto the victims
(whose demands for environmental justice have still not been fully answered) will make toiling
labourers out of them and implicitly exonerate those who should be held accountable. The moral
call of ‘ecological citizenry’ will only serve to perpetuate environmental injustice at Klity Creek.
For the villagers, these intrusions by fellow ‘ecological citizens’ can be seen as further violations
against their ability to cope and sustain their original way of life. In the words of one elder who
revealed his feelings to the researcher about the intrusion of the 200 charity members, ‘since Klity
152 South East Asia Research 25(2)

stream has changed, we have lost everything, we have lost Tep-Pao-Lau-Ku, we have lost our
traditional way of life, not even our dignity is left’.

Conclusion
It has generally now been acknowledged that industrial sites are placed where they will encounter
the least resistance. This allows for (industrial) structures of violence to develop and perpetuate
what Nixon (2011) calls ‘a slow violence’, which stays below the radar while its effects accumulate
with time. Structures of violence are implemented and maintained where there is a social situation
of ongoing inequality, featuring a lack of deliberation with members of the community, deliberate
disacknowledgement or disinterest and even denials and deceptions about the effects of industry on
a population. Structural violence degrades a community’s total well-being through the ensuing loss
of physical health and the normative disruption that prevents its members from achieving their
fullest human potential (Farmer, 2009; Galtung, 1969). Even scientists and medical practitioners
who resist being brought into the environmental justice frame due to scientific uncertainties have
been accused of supporting the status quo that allows for the perpetuation of structured violence
(Wing, 2000: 40).
Structural violence can also be perpetuated by empathetic civic forces. Marginal peoples’
access to law and the concerns of civil society would seem to march hand in hand. If there is civic
interest in the affair, then people who would not otherwise take up legal action may be encouraged
to sue. Marginal groups become dependent on the altruistic forces of civil society. There is,
however, a fine line between altruistic civic activism and hegemony that could hinder the
implementation of environmental justice. Environmental justice cases such as that of the Karen
bring to the foreground the importance of place in the geography of pollution, as well as the broken
relationship between individuals and community and that place, as wrought by structural violence
(Groves, 2015: 854). Although the Karen villagers did gain reparations from the courts for their
damaged health, what they received in monetary terms was insufficient to rehabilitate the stream.
The ongoing delays have left them exposed to the well-meaning but not always positive effects of
ecological citizenry. The more environmentally-focused NGOs and charities and all those trying to
express civic empathy and altruism can be seen as problematic. This is particularly so when their
concerns wittingly or unwittingly put part of the blame or responsibility on the community, or
when it is expressed as a fun outing at Klity Creek. ‘Ecological citizenry’, with its seemingly
concerned intrusions and expressions of values that have no real relevance for the Karen, could
prove to be a perpetuator of some form of environmental injustice. This is the case if such concerns
interfere with the villagers’ ability to restore their own lives to normal. Hence, winning reparations
in court is only one measure of environmental justice remediation. More comprehensive justice
requires social amendments to be carried out in relation to the community’s capacity to re-
negotiate and re-develop a future for itself within that place (Grooves, 2015: 851). Part of that
re-negotiation could entail taking Klity Creek off the middle-class environmental road map.
This raises the question of at what point ‘ecological citizenship’ becomes itself another per-
petuator of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice is perpetuated through the
‘unknowability’ (ignorance) of what Dobson and Whyte (2013) call the victims’ ‘moral terrain’.
According to them, moral terrains are cultural landscapes, which orient how living, non-living and
spiritual beings coexist through relations of reciprocity, responsibility and other ties and bonds that
indicate a community’s persisting values, normative practices, conditions of belonging and
emotions in space. Culture here does not refer to those shallow performances of difference
Sitthikriengkrai and Porath 153

produced before a passing middle-class audience, but environmental values and practices
embedded in place, which allow people to handle the risks of daily living. Outsiders’ ‘unknow-
ability’ of the cultural landscape’s moral terrain is based on their failure to detect the nuance of
moral wrongs that expose a community to risks in relation to those values, while at the same time
not listening to (or comprehending) local concerns when they are expressed. Based on fixed public
opinion or social imaginaries, ‘unknowability’ constructs certain aspects of a community’s social
existence as irrelevant or difficult to detect within more dominant social narratives (Dobson and
Whyte, 2013: 65). Dobson and Whyte call this the ‘abjection of difference’, in which willful
ignorance is sanctioned and fosters indifference, in one form or another, towards the others’ lives,
needs and claims. ‘Unknowability’ can refer to diverse situations: an industrial site manager
dismissing pollution claims, medical practitioners disacknowledging suffering in medical terms,
government agencies promoting policies that are not in the interests of the community or well-
meaning NGOs exploiting or unintentionally disparaging a community’s suffering. In turn, this
closes off entire dimensions of cultural citizenship that are not reducible to managerial and expert
discourses and problem-solving frameworks, and—we would add—to certain NGO interests
(Dotson and Whyte, 2013: 56). As a consequence, the victim population of environmental injustice
becomes both ecologically ‘present’ and ‘absent’ as discourses come to obscure what has been lost
for them. Ecological citizenship can be both inclusive and exclusive (Latta, 2007: 389). It can
perpetuate environmental injustices precisely at the moment it excludes the experience of those
who do not share the same moral values of the dominant group that is civically engaging them.
Thus, ecological citizenry should be premised on an acceptance of differences of moral and
experiential terrains.
Klity Creek is not merely an environmental space within Thailand, a natural reserve of out-
standing beauty and so on. It is a space inhabited by a Karen community whose members’ life
experiences, values and identities are embedded within it. It is where they live, work, play and
carry out rituals. The villagers’ concerns with justice are also concerns with the ongoing capability
of coping with everyday tasks that help the community to survive and flourish within the envi-
ronment that has sustained it for a hundred years. The fear of losing this capability is clearly present
in the quotes of Karen villagers given above. Their claims involve a broader struggle to preserve
their identity, community and traditional ways of life that are dependent on the stream. For vil-
lagers, the hope of community continuity lies in the remediation of the stream, which would allow
their cultural existence to regain a sense of normality. The stream of Klity Creek (be it clean or
toxic) ‘runs through’7 the people of the Karen community; only through its remediation by those
deemed responsible can full justice be accomplished against the excesses of the large ecological
footprint that the lead industry left on Klity’s environment and on the bodies of its inhabitants. True
environmental justice demands that an ecological citizenry is not only environmentally aware, but
also recognizes that those suffering from environmental injustice are victims of specific forms of
structural violence. As victims they deserve an empathetic understanding, which should be based
on sound research that can comprehend what it means for communities to suffer losses, ranging
from the loss of food to the loss of dignity, in their severed relationship with what was once their
life-sustaining environment.

7. We take this expression from Williams’ (2001) writing on another riverine environmental justice case.
154 South East Asia Research 25(2)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article: This paper was sponsored by the Research Unit (Chiang Mai University) and supported
by the Centre for Ethnic and Social Development (CESD, Chiang Mai University).

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