1 - Introduction

Summary

This book is my first research project on the Thai military. My interest began soon after the coup d’état mounted by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) on 22 May 2014 but my interest was not in the NCPO junta itself, but in the junta's non-military activities. One incident in particular piqued my curiosity: the forced eviction of thousands of families from the forest reserves. Less than a month after the coup d’état, on 14 June 2014, the junta leader General Prayut Chan-o-cha issued an order about encroachment and destruction of forest resources. Several thousand people were forcibly rooted out of forest reserve land immediately. Their crops were destroyed. Several hundred people faced charges. Then, in August, the junta introduced a master plan to resolve the problems of forest destruction, citing encroachment of forest land by small farmers as one of the major causes. The Internal Security Command Operations (ISOC), together with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, was entrusted with the task of determining and implementing a strategy in coordination with other state agencies. The master plan claimed that the principal objective of this effort was to increase the forest coverage in Thailand from 31.57 per cent of the country's total area to 40 per cent within ten years, which meant around 26 million rai of land (approximately 10.24 million acres or 4.16 million hectares) had to be expropriated (Internal Security Operations Command and Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment 2014, p. 2; Prachatai, 15 June 2014; 17 December 2014).

To begin with, it is intriguing that the management of natural resources would become one of the priorities of the military junta. Perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that the forced eviction took place so soon after the coup and that the junta was able to introduce the master plan within a few months, indicating that the military has been deeply involved in the management of forest reserves long before. The question is when and how did this begin and what was the source of the junta's legitimacy for claiming this role (Puangthong 2015b).