“YOU CANNOT SIMPLY CLOSE THE BORDER!”

Already before the victory of the Pathet Lao in December 1975, Thai-Lao relations deteriorated to the extent that the Thai government placed an economic embargo on Laos by banning 273 “strategic items” from being exported to Laos (Pheuiphanh 1990:

163). After the communist victory, Thailand not only continued its embargo but also accommodated and trained Lao reactionaries who defected to the Thai side (Stuart-Fox 1997). In doing so, the Thai side of the border became an ideological boundary that was highly regulated and that restricted movement to those with the “right” political views.

On the ground, this meant an increased military and state presence along the border.

According to a group of elderly border residents: “There were both Lao and Thai soldiers here during the revolution [the communist takeover in Laos]. The Thai soldiers would stay by the river and watch. They made sure that no one crosses the border anymore.” In addition to the already existing Border Defense Volunteers (Or Sor), the military was also deployed to the border during this time. Mayoury (1994) suggests that the decision to “close” the border with Laos in this way was a decision made by the Thai military in order to maintain its supremacy in domestic politics. The Thai military was dominating the government since shortly after the Second World War but after the student uprising of 1973 it was struggling to regain its power. From this perspective, the Thai-Lao border was not only an ideological boundary and an “economic and political weapon” (Rigg 1998: 168) against Laos, but also a tool for domestic power plays.

With Laos’ new regime in place, thousands of members of the old regime were dispatched to re-education camps, or so-called “seminars” (Evans 1998: 6). For many of these former state officials, insurgents, as well as for Lao intellectuals, the Hueang River turned into a viable escape route. According to the headman of Ban Sing, about 3-400 refugees fled to his small border village alone. Most of them had relatives on the Thai side whom they could stay with temporarily. They then continued their journey to the refugee camp in Ban Vinai in the north of Loei province where most of them were resettled in third countries such as USA, Canada, and France³⁸. Instead of fleeing to the refugee camp across the border, some former government officials and soldiers also formed resistance groups and continued to fight the Lao government from the Thai side (see also High 2009: 88). Several of my interlocutors remembered the Lao ku xat, a collective name for a number of resistance groups established by Lao refugees after 1975. These groups operated on a small-scale basis, launching hit-and-run attacks from the Thai side as well as armed propaganda (Stuart-Fox 2004). Several village headmen clearly positioned themselves in favour of these resistance groups and one of them explained the deceitfulness of the new Lao government towards these groups: “Back then, we were helping those persons [the Lao ku xat] but some of them were lured to cross back over. They [LPRP] said it’s going to be fine when they cross back over, that they could come back to see their family. And when they returned they arrested them and put them into jail until death.”

Another village headman said: “There was also a Thai man and he was a spy…his code was ‘33’. He worked together with the Lao ku xat. He met a Lao woman by the time he was already old, 60 or 70 years old, and not working as a spy anymore. When he and his girlfriend went to Laos, he was caught. I never saw him again since then. He got thrown away somewhere. We can’t find him.” The headman’s accounts demonstrate how the border in my research area became a line of safety for anti-communist defectors from Laos. For the Thai border population, these experiences and anecdotes created an image of the new Lao regime as unruly and deceitful. The distrust and fear of the Lao government contributed a layer of separation at the nation-state level to the becoming of the border in my research area. In fact, both Thai and Lao interlocutors distinguished between the Lao government on the one hand and local authorities on the other,

38 By 1986, the Ban Vinai refugee camp was accommodating 45,000 people, of which 43,000 belonged to the ethnic minority of the Hmong who had lived in the highlands of Sayaboury province and supported the US during the civil war (Long 1993).

attributing distrust and deceitfulness to the Lao government rather than to the local authorities whom they often knew well (Chapter 4). The owner of a small business in a Thai border village, for example, emphasised China’s influence on the new Lao government and clearly stated: “The Red Chinese are not the same as Lao policemen”³⁹. Such a distinction between the national and local level of the state highlights the multi-layered meanings of the nation-state border and the practices of the people who live along it. At the national level, the border became a separation line between the different ideologies and policies of the Thai and Lao governments while at the local level, the border population’s everyday activities that were regulated by local authorities continued to exist to a certain extent. In fact, Lao authorities had a personal interest in gaining access to Thai goods for their own survival and therefore contributed to the flourishing of the clandestine trade in daily necessities during this time.

In the context of Thai-Lao hostility and ideological conflict, restrictions on cross-border trade were implemented unilaterally by the Thai state. With 80% of Laos’ trade passing through Thailand in 1975, the restrictions were used as an economic and political weapon against the new Lao regime. However, while the export of “strategic” items was banned along the entire Thai-Lao border until 1989, restrictions on other kinds of cross-border flows varied over time and 20% of Lao trade was still passing through Thailand (Rigg 1995: 158). In fact, the complete “closure” of the border was actually an anomaly.

Rigg reports that between 1975 and 1989 the border was “closed” on only four occasions, each following a border incident such as shelling or direct encounters between Thai and Lao soldiers (1995: 159). While Rigg makes reference to the

“closure” of the Thai-Lao border as a whole, I further suggest that the complete restriction of cross-border movement during these periods was differently enforced along different parts of the 1,700km long Thai-Lao border. Where Rigg, for example, states that the periods of closure lasted for approximately one month, my interlocutors remembered such periods to last between four days and one month in my research area.

“The border was open or closed depending on Thai-Lao relations. It was open, closed, open, closed… When there was fighting in the area the border was usually closed”, one of the village headmen explained⁴⁰.

39 Historically, it was not the Red Chinese that took over Laos but the Communist party of Laos (the Pathet Lao), which was nevertheless influenced by the Communists in China (Hamilton-Merritt 1993).

40 Many of my interlocutors specifically remembered the border war between December 1987 and February 1988, which was carried out in the area of Ban Rom Klao, located in today’s Phitsanulok

In his own study on a Thai border town along the Mekong River, Walker found only one short period of prohibited cross-border movement in the late 1970s during which border-crossers were shot by Thai border guards (Walker 1999: 58, 2009: 110). In Walker’s study, the border-crossers who were shot were traders who delivered goods across the border for retail purposes. None of my interlocutors had memories of people being shot while crossing the river during the “closed” periods. But they did remember being threatened by Thai authorities. Phor Phapep, a Lao trader at the central market in Ban Sawan, for example, remembered: “The Lao officers didn’t have a problem with cross-border trade. It was the Thais who weren’t happy about it. They would sometimes shout at us: ‘You are not allowed to do that! You are not allowed to cross over!’ These were the soldiers who said this. So we would have to watch out for the soldiers and if there were none of them there, then we would quickly rush across the river [laughing].

We had to sneak over somewhere (lobkanthi) [laughing]. It was a lot of fun! We used a boat to cross over with all the goods.” Traders thus found ways of evading state authorities.

At the same time, the Lao side’s limited access to Thai goods and the dangers of smuggling “strategic items”, which included sugar and sewing needles (Pheuiphanh 1985: 1257), meant that the small-scale trade of daily necessities became a lucrative business for the Thai traders who engaged in it. A border resident who was an Or Sor during that time explained to me that Thai traders would buy something in Mueang Loei for 5 baht and sell it to Lao traders for 20 baht, making a profit of 300%. A female trader who sold blankets at one of the border markets during the time of my research, furthermore, said she was only selling daily necessities to Lao traders during the 1970s because it was very profitable. Her strategy of evading border authorities was to exchange goods with her customers in the Hueang River. They would bathe or swim in the river at the same time and when meeting each other she would provide her counterpart with the goods they ordered. With Lao villagers being cash-strapped during this time, she often received gold instead of money in exchange for the goods.

province. The conflict was based on the different interpretation of the treaty of 1907 by the Thai and Lao governments, which left the demarcation of the borderline between Sayaboury province and the adjoining Thai provinces unclear. Fighting only broke out however, after a Thai logging company stopped bribing the Lao militia in favour of the Thai paramilitary (Stuart-Fox 1989; Wijeyewardene 1990). My interlocutors remembered soldiers passing through the area and hearing the sounds of gunshots and bombs in the far distance. They emphasised that there was never any fighting in my research area though.

When traders did encounter Thai authorities, the outcome varied according to the individual state actor and the types and amount of goods traded. The former Or Sor in my research area, for example, recalled intercepting many traders when crossing the border: “If we caught them then they couldn’t make any money because we would seize all their goods. They had to pay a fine as well. The situation was like this for many years”. But not all encounters ended like this. An argument I heard several times from both state and non-state actors on the Thai side was that if cross-border trade discontinued, the population on the Lao side (including the Thai population’s kin) would have nothing to eat and die, so trade had to continue to some extent. As described in the last chapter, the population in southern Sayaboury and Loei had established strong kinship relations and trading networks with each other. The Lao side was dependent on the direct link to the Thai side across the Hueang River for access to consumer goods and daily necessities.

The argument that trade had to continue on humanitarian grounds was most strongly emphasised by a former Or Sor who, during my fieldwork, was regularly transporting people and goods across an unmarked border-crossing site near Ban Donmai. When asked whether the border was actually closed after 1975 he exclaimed: “You cannot simply close the border, Sarah! You have to smuggle (laklob) goods across the border then. If you don’t smuggle goods across the border then they [Lao villagers] have nothing to eat.” When recalling this time, the Or Sor expressed the moral dilemma of performing his duties as a border guard while at the same time empathising with the cross-border activities of the border population he himself was embedded in. He thus justified his personal strategy of patrolling the border as follows: “They are all relatives on both sides of the border so you can’t be so strict. But sometimes you had to catch people; you can’t just let everyone go.” He would arrest drug smugglers as well as traders with large amounts of fresh foods such as chicken, pork and corn. With regard to other daily necessities he only arrested those who had more goods than they could carry themselves: “If you had too many goods then you had to smuggle them across in secret places. But you could also just go across three times to get all the stuff across. No problem! If you wanted to smuggle things across you just had to watch out for the authorities and then go across when they weren’t there.”

It thus becomes clear how at the local level, the implementation of the Thai government’s policies to restrict cross-border flows not only varied but was also

influenced by the authorities’ embeddedness in the local border community. The border thus became an ideological boundary between the territories of the Thai and Lao governments, which resulted in the militarisation of the border area and increased regulations on cross-border movement. From the perspective of trade, the border became a barrier for many traders and an opportunity for smuggling practices with high profit margins.