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The Akha:
Matt's
Weekly AHF Journal: Jan 2001
AHF Weekly Journal
January 2001
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Jan 5, 2001
Dear Friends:
Happy New Year!
1. Our bakery is now complete, ready for placing assistance into
the villages that have the greatest nutritional problems due to
forced relocations and the taking of their farming lands by forestry.
Any donations to this project now go directly to buy flour and
other baking supplies.
2. Akha villagers near Fang on the road to Mae Suai are telling
that the Forestry department is arresting them for cutting brush
that has grown up on land that they paid for and which they cycle
every three to four years for growing rice. These villages are
quite isolated, and the forestry alternates the areas where it
applies this kind of pressure. Forestry people are armed with
M-16 machine guns while making these arrests of villagers who
are farming their own land.
3. Remaining Infrastructure Projects.
A. Pay off the printing press.
B. Finish the well and fish tank project.
C. Finish Repair on Truck.
All other costs now boil down to supplies needed for each project
once the initial investment for the equipment is completed.
Truck repair bill is down to $1000 now. The truck has been out
of service for two months.
Please help with this if you at all can.
4. We have an article in Tai Culture Journal Dec. 2000 Issue.
5. Meeh Paw was an Akha Baby Girl who was ill and mishandled by
medical people when she first arrived at the hospital in Maechan
and Chiangrai. She went unconscious and suffered severe brain
damage. I was able to move her to a better hospital within hours
when I discovered her condition and stabilize her. She became
physically healthy again, but brain damage made it so that she
barely tracked sound, could not track any object or movement with
her eyes and no longer developed any other motor skills. She also
had much trouble nursing and swallowing. She became easily frightened
but recognized her mother's touch and voice. She was just a little
less than a year old at that time. I had arranged for her care
for two years hoping that her conditions would improve, but in
the past six months it went steadily into decline.
On Jan first Meeh Paw passed away, three years old. It was a sad
conclusion to carelessness and disregard so common here for these
poor people.
Filing out of the village in a long line of men, climbing the
hill, we buried her quietly, with great care, in the jungle woods
just next to Meeh Sah who died some two years ago with her child.
As we walked down the mountain and out of the woods, the Akha
spoke that now she would at least be close to Meeh Sah and cared
for by her, a small company of companions staying together.
******
The Smallest amount of help on your part helps us a great deal
on this end.
Matthew McDaniel
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Jan 18, 2001
Ajax
Ethnic Cleasing
America's Drug War Against The Hilltribe of Thailand
*****
Admiral Fargo, Pacific Command, We're Talkin To You
Does anyone know an
Admiral Fargo?
Has Admiral Fargo ever
met a hilltribe?
*****
Admiral Fargo Spouts Drug War
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Akha Mah tells him what he can do with it!
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For decades now the hilltribe of Thailand and Burma have been
the slaves for the drug industry, ignored in favor of boycotts
against brass clowns and Nike types. Hardly able to stay alive
yet making billions of dollars for the drug barons and the military
hardware makers who supply the toys to fight them. Such a balanced
game, for it to stay on top the fence, would seem one and the
same.
High in the mountains, the US embassy gave the nod as hilltribe
villages were put on the march out of the valuable highlands to
low end canyons with fever and disease and death. From a splendid
view to a steamy graveyard they were made to march, leaving their
years of cultivation, water management and terracing behind along
with the cemetaries of their kin.
No mention of human rights was made then, despite the fact that
the US knew how illegal it was. Human rights is only something
you manipulate against your enemies, it has nothing to do with
the humans the laws were intended to protect.
In the present, years later, there is no end in sight of Americas
big mouthed drug war. Methamphetamine has replaced opium poppies
and opium tar as the drug of choice. Crop substitution could best
be described as starvation. The Wa, also a minority in the mountains,
were driven from their homes in the decades past and now return
in the thousands to the Thai border, hardly forgetful of when
they were purged out of the area.
Meanwhile tribes such as the Akha, Lahu, Lisaw and Hmong continue
to experience high arrest rates and imprisonment and all the associated
violence as the drugs and chemicals flow through their mountain
neighborhoods.
Maybe the Wa have seen what has been done to their less numerous
counterparts, what would have been done to them, and have learned
a lesson from it, promising no one any deals, surely not the drug
war bosses from the US.
The recent capture of Khun Sa's second man in Tachilek and Maesai
leads one to wonder if a criminal is being brought to American
for justice, or if a witness is being brought in from the cold.
Khun Sa offered to sell all of his opium crop to Clinton. Clinton
refused. Hardly because the US teams were inexperienced at buying
what they wanted. Missionaries from way back can testify to the
opium for guns and the guns for opium, all in the name of the
communist monster.
Meanwhile the criminalization of drugs delivers on its promises
of violence and destruction in the villages of the hill tribe
people.
Drugs become the justification for any kind of brutal treatment
at either the hands of renegades or the police. In the past when
opium was the American unpardonable offense, old women were arrested
for having a ball of opium in their house and are still doing
life.
Now speed pills are the replacement, for an insatiable demand
in Thailand it would seem, hill tribe people are arrested and
beaten, without partiality, the young, the old and the feeble
alike.
The brutalization started before the issue of drugs, the villages
relocated into poverty, and continues with the arrests and carries
on to trials without representation, conviction and incarceration
into big new prisons, just waiting, where the newcomers are once
again abused by the veteran prisoners, rapes and killings, all
within the walls.
All in the name of America's drug war.
But you won't find one single US government backed poverty reduction
program in any of these central and crucial border villages between
Thailand and Burma. 282 of them Akha. USAID cannot answer why,
nor can the Office of National Drug Policy in DC.
The lack of concern for the wellbeing of the villages in a most
crucial and pivotal location makes one question very seriously
what the hell is going on. No money for poverty reduction but
Admiral Fargo can promise all kinds of Drug War toys to the Thais?
Night vision equipment? Can that be any cheaper than day time
food?
Thaksin wins the election, and in line with the escalation that
was expected and occured since Admiral Fargo's visit to Thailand
last summer, the rhetoric increases as do the border incidents.
Thaksin is talking tough in the drug war too now, Bangkok Post
front page headlines, gonna show those mountain people, recklessly
jeapordizing the already fragile highland - lowland relationship
in Thailand.
In addition, along the Wa / Burmese / Thai border there has been
a significant increase in troups and shooting incidents, more
than I have ever witnessed in ten years of running these hills
to assist the Akha. Ngah Ngern Akha was forced to completely evactuate
their village for five days (who will make up their lost wages?)
while Thais and Burmese blasted back and forth at each other.
Course no one remembers the loyalty of these very same hilltribe
during the late wars. Now they are no longer needed and are the
enemy or the fodder at the border. Forestry and Petroleum Authority
of Thailand have already planted thousands of rai of inferno making
pine on what lands they used to farm. Now drugs are farmed. The
right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. Then drugs
were ok, now they aren't, before the Brits, now the Yanks.
Cobra Gold 2001 will be another escalation of the Drug War in
Thailand, as will the helo project out of Pai come August.
Yet still not a square meal to be found in a hill tribe village.
In one village over from mine night before last the village chief
was sitting in a friend's hut, his back against the wall, and
was shot from behind from through the wall, his face blown off,
his mouth and jaw gone, his heart shot out, two clips emptied
into him. He was buried today. Only a few hundred yards from where
another fellow was gunned some time back.
In my village, while I was gone, someone rides their motorbike
into the village late at night, parks it near a hut and walks
out of the village and onto the road. The cops on patrol from
Mae Chan spot him, catch him and ask him where his motorbike is.
He takes them to the hut where it sits out on the road, so in
the middle of the night they break into the hut, turn on the lights,
roust everyone, including all the women, go through all the bags,
clothes and household goods you can fit in a grass roofed hut,
and even so far as to make all the women take off their head dresses
just in case they are hiding a kilo or two of speed pills under
them in their hair somewhere.
This is your drug war, Admiral Fargo.
Do you know who a spirit woman is Admiral Fargo?
You don't come here and roust them, you or your boys.
You don't desecrate their houses, their bodies or their head dresses
in your rough handed searches.
From now on when the Akha ask me who is bringing this hell down
on them Admiral Fargo, I am going to tell them that YOU ARE. I
am going to get your picture and I am going to distribute it in
North Thailand and tell the Akha, this, this guy is who is killing
you. He doesn't have time to feed you or help your kids to school,
but he's got plenty of time to arrest you, pull off your head
dresses and pistol whip you. He's got time to beat your old people,
he's got time to hang your young men from the neck with electric
cords, and he's got time to lay a wet cloth over your face in
prison till you are dead, but he ain't got a clue who an Akha
is.
He left all his humvees runnin their wide asses on the roads,
big guns on top, soldiers at every checkpoint, searching vegetables
and skirts.
Meanwhile the Thai kids keep dying, the Akha keep starving, and
the environment is going to hell with all the roads needed to
make way for all the wide assed humvees from Drug War America.
And these American Drug Warriors expect us to believe that the
real drug barons who collect and launder all the money into green
backs are dressed in hand dyed cotton skirts and livin the high
life in a grass hut??
Isn't it time that Thailand stood up and put an end to this Second
American War being imposed on them?
Admiral Fargo, please go home and take your Humvees from AM General
with you.
Thank you very much,
The Akha Heritage Foundation
Maesai, Chiangrai, Thailand
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Jan 24, 2001
Maesai Thailand Update, The Akha Heritage
Foundation.
Dear Friends:
Well, it sure has been an exciting week.
My friend Karen came from the states to see the project. We
were able to get the Truck out of hock and start getting out
to the villages and taking a look at what was going on.
I haven't been in the villages much for two months, so my heart
leaped a little with this.
As mentioned, one of the local ner do wells, an American, with
nothing better to do, put sugar in the truck when it was parked
out in front here.
So we got a new engine now, still not enough power (as in hummer)
but we are rolling.
So that is fantastic, just absolutely fantastic, but not just
that, but because it just so happened that when it rains it
pours.
The ovens are turning out bread and have gotten two batches
out to the village children so far as I work out recipe sizes,
etc. One firing of the ovens makes over 200 loaves and I run
two firings in two hours for a single shift. So now I got to
get a roof rack to haul these bundles of loaves of bread to
the kids. Thai army take away rice land, well, we got news for
you.
The Bakery Video is at http://www.akha.org/akha_video.htm
2.4 meg I think.
And to make matters nearly unbareably joyous, the printing press
is coming this week, to its waiting berth, here at the building.
Well a few people still haven't paid their pledges on this baby
yet, but that's ok, I can wait, and since the other fellow said
he could too. (so come on now, lets not make this guy wait forever)
But the press is still coming.
But as if that was not enough, great joy, heaped on hope, and
then another load of joy dumped on top, well along came fantastic
news that the fish project pump and well work will soon be done
also, so that the test tanks can go into full cycle. They got
filled up with water by last years rain, have had catfish in
them since, and then a nice bloom of water hyacinth has kept
the fish cool. We wondered how long the catfish could survive
without changing the water, we found out, nearly a year. But
of course with the pump and fresh water coming in we will be
able to boost the count quite a bit.
So there ya got heart stopping hope and joy folks, Fish, Bread
and Books, rolling to the villages anytime now.
This year will be our no holds barred year, full on service
to all 282 Akha Villages in Thailand along with all the village
fragments and displaced Akha in the urban setting. We got into
250 Akha villages last year.
Karen was really cool, she brought vitamins for the villages,
went we me to Huuh Mah Akha to see how they were doing.
Been a real nasty case of scabies in all the villages of late.
By the way, in a continued focus of this project I am working
to put together a formidable effort to stop infant death in
the villages. Seeking one pediatrician with third world and
infant experience, with emergency care would be good and with
tropical disease experience would be good too.
This is really the greatest gap here in available services.
There are few doctors or clinics or hospitals with good infant
care capabilities. So even if I do find a sick infant in time,
getting them to the hospital guarantees a big bill, but not
always their life.
By the way, any of you who would like to help us and the Akha
by joining in our Anti Drug War effort and our Anti Militarization
of Akha environment and border villages, please contact us to
help support poverty alleviation, not guns.
We figure there is going to be enough war here this spring as
it is.
Now the final good news is that with the completion of all the
infrastructure projects, the smallest donation now goes directly
into fish, flour, paper, meds, vitamins, for all our projects.
Lots of bang for the buck folks.
Ok,
Happy Chinese New Year
Matthew McDaniel
From the Big Bubble Bread and Wide Eye Pie Publishing Company
Maesai
Yeah, we make some kick butt apple pie too!
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