The Abhisit government wants to be a "land reform hero" by making communal land ownership part of its political platform, to fix the country's outrageous economic disparity.
But its pioneers are ending up in jail.What is going on here?
Last week, a group of nine villagers at Ban Pae Tai in Lamphun province were sentenced to two-year jail terms by the Court of Appeal for trespassing into others' lands.
The verdict took them by surprise. They had been freed by the First Court because the land used to be the village commons.
How it ended up in private hands is no different from what has been happening throughout the country - through corruption within officialdom.
For the Pae Tai villagers, the decision to take over their old commons was to offer a policy alternative on how to solve the problem of landlessness and uncontrolled land speculation at the same time.
The ill-gotten lands must be returned to the communities and communally managed to help the landless, they insist. The farmers can use the land, but they cannot sell it.
Their effort to undo corrupt land deals, reclaim the commons, and manage them under the communal ownership system created a panic among land speculators nationwide.
To kill the land reform "germ" from spreading further, the Pae Tai villagers were quickly arrested and sent to court.
It was too late. The communal land ownership idea had spread like wildfire among the landless and forest communities in conflict with forest authorities.
We are talking here of about nearly 5 million farmers who are landless and some 2,700 communities nationwide which have been outlawed by forestry regulations, while 70 % of land sits idle in the hands of speculators.
The communal land ownership policy eventually got a break when the Abhisit government endorsed it as part of its land reform package.
Out of hundreds of forest villages, only 35 with a proven record of strong community management have been selected as pioneers to receive community land title deeds.
So far, however, only one community has received the communal land ownership papers.
Why? Because officialdom is fighting tooth and nail to preserve its power turf, and the Abhisit government can do nothing about it.
Some of the forest communities are in degraded areas which have been leased out cheaply to tree farm plantations. Others are old communities that have been outlawed by relatively recent national park laws.
When the tree farm concessions expire, the degraded land should be rented out to the landless, insists the land rights movement. Meanwhile, old forest communities want to have land security in exchange for forest conservation, a win-win proposal, so they think.
Wrong. For the centralised bureaucracy at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, it can compromise with politicians and investors for mutual benefit. But with the poor? To let farmers tell the mandarins what to do? No way.
The 1997 People's Charter told the bureaucracy to amend all laws that violate community rights. Nothing happened. The 2007 charter re-emphasised the villagers' community rights to manage and protect their natural resources. Nothing moved.
For them, governments come and go, but officialdom stays put, to run the country as it sees fit.
This is why the land rights movement refuses to join the colour-coded politics of the yellow and the red.
"Theirs is a power fight at the top for total control," said land reform activist Paijit Silarak. "Whoever wins, the bureaucracy will still remain centralised to resist our demands for equitable land ownership and political decentralisation."
Whoever wins, the powers-that-be will also carry on the same economic and development policies that destroy nature and the locals' sources of livelihood.
Unless the autocratic bureaucracy gives way to political decentralisation via community rights, the reds' call for the end of disparity will not happen, he said. Nor will the yellows' demand for moral leadership.
"That's why we're here," he said, referring to the street protest of the land rights movement at the Royal Plaza. "For justice is difficult when unbalanced development still rules and the top-down bureaucracy still resists the needs of people on the ground."
