Joh Leh Beh and some 200 other Karen villagers are forest dwellers that live in Kanchanburi's Thung Yai forest.

Or rather they used to.

At the beginning of May, the start of the rainy season, Joh and other villagers were busy preparing their land for the coming planting season. One day forestry officials arrived at the villages of Pu Jue, Pu Mong, Suan Klay and Sam Lang.

They told the villagers that they had to leave.

The officials told Joh and his fellow Karen that they were a nuisance, because they lived scattered, and could not therefore be monitored and controlled. They also said that the Karen were destroying the environment, the forests that they were trying to protect. And yet the Thung Yai-Naresuan forest complex where these Karen lived is so pristine that it was recently declared a World Heritage site.

They offered the Karen relocation packages, but the Karen were wary, such promises had been made before and had proven to be empty. So the Karen refused and told the officials that they would stay where they were, and live the same way that they had for generations.

A few weeks laters the forestry officials returned. This time with 300 armed men.They burned the villages, destroyed their plantations and forcibly resettled the fearful Karen to a remoe area where there was nothing.

Many Karen do not have identity cards, they are regarded as sub-human by the Thai authorities.Those that couldn't provide identity cards were taken to the Burmese border and deposited in no mans land where they survive by begging from visitors through the thoroughfares. Husbands were seperated from their wives and children.

The brutality of the forestry officials is underscored by their hypocrisy. Claiming that the Karen were harming the environment, they themselves allow large scale mining in Thung-Yai, the release of its toxic waste into the rivers and allow the mine operators to cut roads like slashed throats through the forest. They also allow cash-crops to be grown, for a fee.

These Karen are now dispossesed, still awaiting the recompense from the government that never does come.They are meek, and they are a slight people.

They do not know what to do.

They do know that they have not inherited the earth that they once already owned.

yechydda,