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Ornuch Phonpinyo (left) and her husband Pramote in Bo Kaew village in Chaiyaphum’s Khon San district. Photo: Luke Duggleby/HaRDstories
They met on the back of a chicken farmer’s pickup truck during a student protest in 1993. More than three decades on, Ornuch and Pramote Phonpinyo are married and lead one of Thailand’s most persistent voices for land reform.
On a rainy evening that greeted the monsoon season in Chaiyaphum province, land reform activist Ornuch Phonpinyo made her way home from a village embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with the authorities.
The villagers, who were accused of encroaching on protected forests, had recently won back the rights to live on their lands, and sought advice from Ornuch on rebuilding their lives – practical things like how to repair their homes, distribute the community funds, and set up basic utilities.
“Solving disputes is just a part of the saga,” Ornuch said as she drove through the night. “Once the villagers had their land back, we had to start at zero again. We had to find a way to help them survive on that land.”
At around the same time, another activist, Pramote Phonpinyo, was paying a visit to a trio of communities in Chaiyaphum that found themselves locked in a similar legal battle with forestry officials, offering advice, following up on their cases, and checking on those affected by the years of bitter court battles.
For many communities living on disputed lands throughout the Northeast, Ornuch and Pramote are a familiar – and comforting – presence. Together they lead the Isan Land Reform Network, an organisation they co-founded to serve as a platform for the embattled residents, many of whom hail from poor backgrounds, to seek dialogues and remedies from the central government.
Since its founding in 2006, the network has shaped the conversation around land rights and reforms in the northeastern region, by organising the aggrieved communities into a collective action, chairing negotiations with the officials, and even engaging in direct actions such as demonstrations and sit-ins.
But Ornuch and Pramote aren’t merely ideological compatriots. Away from the media spotlights, they are a married couple who first met as college students at the time when tales of cruelty and injustice faced by impoverished rural villagers were stirring reaction inside the campuses and beyond.
Like their relationship, the organisation they built together grew in steps with the larger movement that insists on the rights of forest communities to exist and live alongside nature, while pushing back against the official narrative that paints them as “encroachers” worthy of harsh punishments, evictions, and even violence.
“The tactics used by the state in their treatment of the people may change, but the heart of the issue has always remained the same,” Pramote said of the three decades he and Ornuch spent as witnesses to the different faces of suppression on land reforms, from military juntas to elected politicians.
Dove and hawk
Rain was still falling outside the home where Pramote and Ornuch lived and worked, a shaded refuge tucked inside a woodland grove, when the pair spoke to HaRDstories. Since the house doubles as the head office of the Isan Land Reform Network, the front door is left open throughout the day for the streams of visitors: mostly villagers, students, campaigners, and friends.
Although their roles in the network are full-time, limited funding means that the couple have to rely on farming to make a living.
“The works we do at the organisation are our lives and our dreams,” Pramote said.
But the demanding nature of their career also meant they were often away from their two sons, Ornuch said. Perhaps as a result of growing up so close to the reality of activism and its costs, the two children have no intention of taking over their parents’ role or becoming activists themselves.
“We prioritised the public interest over our own personal lives,” Ornuch said.
A glance at their backgrounds, Ornuch and Pramote may seem a world apart: he was the son of rural farmers, while she grew up in the city, the daughter of civil servants.
“We have our differences,” Pramote said. “But both of us share the same interest in the problems of our society.”
They are also known among their peers for their different characters: while Pramote prefers to assume the role of the calm and collected strategist, Ornuch always takes her place in the frontline whenever direct confrontation with the officials flares up.
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“Actually, we rarely see eye to eye on these things. She’s the tough one!” Pramote said of his wife with a laugh.
Ornuch conceded the point. “He’s the brain of the organisation, I’m the muscle.”
Due to her frontline roles, Ornuch was also subject to occasional harassment and intimidation, whether from law enforcement officials or litigious parties that she confronted in her campaigning on behalf of the communities.
Youthful years
Ornuch began her term at Maha Sarakham Teacher College – now known as Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University – just a few months after a military coup suspended Thailand’s fledgling democracy in February 1991.
Upon assuming power, the junta introduced Khor Jor Kor, a land redistribution scheme billed as reform but designed to move forest communities out of national park areas into new settlements chosen by the authorities. The northeastern region, where many lived in poverty, was to be the testing ground for this new policy.
The impacts of the supposed reform at first escaped Ornuch who, at 19, was largely ignorant of the issues of politics or governance. But she was soon drawn to a budding community of student activists. After attending their workshops and field trips, Ornuch started to hear tales of families being evicted from the lands they lived on for generations, which she initially regarded with some scepticism.
That changed when she and her friends decided to find out the truth for themselves. Together they hitchhiked to a community in Buriram’s Pakham district, the site of a rumoured conflict between local residents and the authorities.
There, Ornuch recalled, she encountered scenes of security officers driving out villagers to a temporary shelter inside a temple, where they languished without jobs or homes as they waited for a new land to settle. The evicted residents later linked up with a network of local leaders and scholars to demand a return to their forest homes.
“A conflict at a small village didn’t just happen on its own,” Ornuch said of her realisation that a larger underlying injustice was behind the incident.
A wave of protests soon rose up in other communities caught in the same ordeal, forcing the ruling regime to cancel the land requisition programme, though critics noted that subsequent policies adopted by the successive governments barely differed in their core elements.
Around the same time Ornuch made her life-changing discovery, an 18-year-old student was adjusting himself to a new life on the Maha Sarakham campus. Like many young people from rural backgrounds, Pramote saw his enrollment as a golden ticket to social mobility and advancement.
But any thoughts of pursuing a glamorous career Pramote might have harboured were put aside when he walked past a group of student campaigners at the campus and overheard parts of their conversation – villagers, forest, land rights. Pramote paused to listen for a moment, and soon became a regular guest at their group discussions.
At one such meeting, held at the house of an activist, he remembered sitting in the back and listening to the conversations on the dire costs of evictions, the root cause of the inequality plaguing the northeastern region, and so on.
Unbeknownst to him, the woman who would later become his wife was also in attendance. But before they got to know each other, Pramote would first find himself in one of the bloodiest episodes of Thailand’s modern history.
Black May
In May 1992, Pramote was in Bangkok to take up summer jobs, when tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to challenge the premiership of Gen. Suchinda Kraprayoon, who seized power in a coup the previous year. After days of escalating tensions, the military was deployed to crack down on the protests.
Although Pramote did not take part in the demonstration – he was there to observe the situation out of curiosity – he nevertheless witnessed the brutality meted out to the protesters by security forces. He recalled an image that stuck with him on the day after the crackdown – bloodstains and empty shoes scattered around Ratchadamnoen Avenue.
Official records say 44 people died and a further 46 went missing in the violence, which became known as the Black May incident.
Upon his return to Maha Sarakham, Pramote was invited to speak at a student rally and share his firsthand account of what he saw in Bangkok. It was his first public speaking experience, and he remembered it as a turning point in his life; political activism would be his chosen lifelong commitment.
Wind of change
In the wake of the Black May incident, which saw General Suchinda stepping down in disgrace, Thailand was swept by a fresh breeze of political awakening and passion for democracy.
Rights and freedom became popular catchphrases for the public, while students throughout the country joined hands with rural communities to escalate the fights for their homes; despite the junta’s demise, the legacy of its forcible land requisition programme still lingered in much of the countryside.
When another round of evictions hit a community in Buriram in 1993, students in the region coordinated a massive show of support. At the Maha Sarakham campus, Ornuch rallied fellow students and organised a trip to the village. Pramote tagged along with the group after reading about it on a campus bulletin.
Both Ornuch and Pramote still remember the trip: how the students hitchhiked on a chicken farmer’s pickup truck, how they huddled in misery atop the piles of chicken faeces in the load bed, which soon flooded after the rain started. But for Pramote, one sliver of brighter memory stood out: it was the first time he noticed Ornuch.
They would share a close space again several months later, when the students made their way to a village in Dong Khem Forest, Roi Et province. It would not be a brief expedition this time, but a prolonged siege. Hundreds of villagers, together with the students and other allies, would spend months camping out in a stubborn protest against a government plan to turn their homes into a commercial eucalyptus plantation.
The rally eventually ended in victory for the villagers and their supporters. The directive for the eucalyptus project was cancelled, with the lands restored to the villagers. That evening the protester encampment erupted in celebration. Many laughed, some cried – overwhelmed with hope that change from below was somehow possible.
Amid the celebration in the camp, Pramote handed a rose to Ornuch, a humble token of his affection.
“After he gave me that rose, our relationship started to grow, and we were inseparable,” Ornuch said with a wide smile.
Journeys and separations
Following the victory at Dong Khem Forest, the protesters returned to their hardwon homes, the eucalyptus trees were uprooted, and the students went on their separate ways.
Ornuch took up a job as a communications officer for a federation of farmers based in Khon Kaen province, while Pramote became a field researcher for a project that monitored the forest ecosystem in the northeastern region.
The region itself also entered a new phase of grassroots politics. Villages across the Northeast faced various problems, from dam construction and eucalyptus plantations to restrictive forestry laws and toxins from mining sites. Communities began to realise they shared a common cause with one another.
Their struggles accumulated into the forming of the Assembly of the Poor on 10 December 1995, at the height of a protest against the Pak Mun Dam, which posed serious threats to the local environment. The organisation grew into one of the most influential civic movements in recent decades.
Pramote later joined the Assembly of the Poor as one of its field coordinators. As the group took shape and expanded, he spent much of his time on the road throughout the region – attending meetings with villagers, surveying the lands, and keeping track of the creeping eucalyptus projects (a major cause of concern for biodiversity in Thailand’s Northeast).
Meanwhile, Ornuch documented the villagers’ plights under various faces of injustice and supplied them to the media. But she soon fostered a new ambition: Ornuch believed a career in journalism would help broadcast these local struggles directly to the national audience. The breakthrough came when her application to the Thai Post newspaper in Bangkok was accepted.
For her family, Ornuch securing such a prestigious job was the best kind of news they could ask for. “My parents immediately gave me money so I could buy nice clothes for going to Bangkok,” she said of their excitement.
For her partner, however, it came as a painful blow. In the age before affordable mobile phones and easy access to the internet, maintaining a long-distance relationship between the rural Isan and Bangkok entailed a formidable challenge, which could only be alleviated by calls from telephone boxes, letters, and patience for a long wait.
“Back then I went to seminars in Bangkok as often as I could. Basically, I just clutched at any excuse to go to Bangkok,” Pramote recalled with a laugh.
Tectonic shift
By 1997, Thailand was rocked by a series of major transformations, including the Asian economic crisis, the adoption of a new constitution, and a large-scale protest called by the Assembly of the Poor that saw thousands of protesters from all over the country descending on Bangkok.
Once in the capital, the demonstrators camped out in front of Government House and demanded concrete actions over a list of 56 different grievances – most of them originating in the northeast.
The protest ended up lasting for 99 days and briefly reunited the separated couple; Ornuch covered the demonstration for her newspaper while Pramote took part in negotiations with the government as one of the community leaders.
Ornuch also grappled with her growing disillusionment with the mainstream media establishments. While her writings on the environment and modern science were sometimes featured on the frontpage, her dispatches from the protest encampment were barely given any attention by the editors. Her belief in the press as a tool for change, as well as her sense of belonging in Bangkok, started to fade.
After clocking out from work on one fateful evening, Ornuch headed back to the encampment and sat among the groups of tired but determined protesters along the canal that girdled the Government House. The sounds of the villagers chatting with one another as they prepared food in the camp convinced her that she no longer wanted to stay in the capital.
Just as the protesters secured a victory in the form of promises from the government to address their complaints, Ornuch resigned from her job and joined the villagers in their long journey home to the Northeast. She returned to Pramote and the fight for local communities that she believed was far from over.
“We married that year [in 1997],” Ornuch said. “We talked about where we should pick as the strategic site for our work and where we can settle down. We wanted to start a family and start our own organisation.”
Birth of a sapling
Ornuch and Pramote tied the knot just as Thailand placed high hopes on the new constitution, regarded by many critics as the most democratising charter so far in its difficult and turbulent political history. It was a time of optimism and looking forward, coinciding with the couple’s search for the next chapter in their lives.
Pramote eventually turned his thoughts to a piece of land in Chaiyaphum’s Khon San district that he often passed by on his way to the many settlements and communities mired in legal disputes.
After surveying the land himself, Pramote knew it would no longer be just a dot on the map for him and Ornuch. The land sits on an unassuming yet striking landscape of hilly woodlands; it also borders multiple areas where struggles for land ownership of the poor were unfolding.
“We chose to live on the battlefield itself. We chose to spend our life there, so we can organise and make a change,” Pramote said.
The pair moved into their homestead in 2004 and founded a small non-profit that conducted research into local land disputes and assisted the residents in their legal battles. The first step quickly branched out and attracted support from communities near and far.
Two years later, in 2006, the Isan Land Reform Network was born – the same year as their eldest son, whom they named Tonkla, a Thai word for sapling.
A tree in the storm
The founding of the Isan Land Reform Network also came at a time when regional grassroots movements began to falter.
A major setback came in 1998 when the government rolled back a series of land reform policies, which campaigners had fought hard to obtain. Communities faced more restrictions on their access to the local forests and pathways to obtain land rights. Objections and protests raised by the members of the civil society were quickly brushed aside. Their political momentum, it seemed, had run its course.
Even as the bureaucracy further centralised its power, cracks began to appear among the grassroots movements themselves. Members of the bloc split to form separate organisations to focus on their own issues, while a number of farmers who managed to secure the legal ownership of their land saw little improvement or relief from their poverty, a cause of bitter disenchantment for many.
Like many other activists, Ornuch and Pramote struggled to find out what went wrong. In workshops and conversations, they sought inspiration from overseas – namely, the land reform movement in Brazil – and designed new approaches that would address the grievances faced by many rural communities.
One such solution centres on community land rights, which prioritises a collective management of communal lands by the community as a whole. The mechanism not only prevents wealthy developers from snapping up plots of land from individual landholders – a chronic issue in many areas – but also encourages democratic governance and a sense of autonomy in the communities. This vision remains central to the Isan Land Reform Network’s campaigning to this day.
However, just as these visionary seedlings were being sowed, new storms were already looming on the horizon; from Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s slide into autocracy following his landslide re-election in 2005 to the mass street protests that sought his ousting in 2006, unleashing a cycle of political unrest that witnessed two more military coups and yet another bloody crackdown.
Amid this backdrop, the grassroots and pro-democracy circles also descended into ideological squabbles as the Yellowshirt and Redshirts rivalry polarised the country, further weakening any potential counterweight to the increasing authoritarian streak in the halls of power.
“After 2005, political movements operated under an undemocratic context,” Pramote said, referring to the electoral victory that allowed Thaksin to consolidate his power, “The coups in 2006 and 2014 also caused so much political infighting and conflicts. And not to mention that these political strifes also caused division among the civil society. One group went to the Yellowshirts, the other went to the Redshirts. The division was everywhere.”
Despite these setbacks, Pramote and Ornuch said the ambitions for community land rights and land reforms that placed the people at the forefront still continued – largely thanks to the dogged determination in many rural communities who refused to let the authorities dictate their fate.
Retaliations
Since its founding in 2006, the Isan Land Reform Network has grown into a coalition of 35 member communities and organisations, covering nine provinces in the northeastern region.
“Our commitment remains the same. We want a fair redistribution of land ownership,” Pramote said.
A bulk of the network’s campaigning is dedicated to resolving legal disputes between communities and a variety of entities, whether they are forestry authorities, the central and local governments, or state enterprises. To achieve a satisfactory settlement, the network may choose to come to the negotiation table, organise protests, occupy the disputed land as a symbolic gesture, and launch legal challenges.
The pushbacks are inevitable. Hundreds of villagers and activists associated with the Isan Land Reform Network have been prosecuted in court, prompting the organisation to set up a legal team dedicated to assisting them in the trials. Security officers were also seen trailing and photographing key leaders like Ornuch and Pramote, who considered such action to be a form of harassment.
Due to their leadership roles, the pair were also the targets of frequent lawsuits for speaking out against abuses and mistreatment on behalf of the villagers. Ornuch herself is contesting a case of defamation in court after she called out employment agents who allegedly defrauded Thai migrant workers seeking work overseas.
Ornuch said land ownership alone does not guarantee security or liveable wages for rural residents, many of whom still live in poverty. Without access to capital, employment, and basic infrastructure, the villagers would only be driven into a vicious cycle of debt or forced to become migrant workers abroad – which exposes them to possible exploitation.
“Many [northeastern] people paid the agents to get them berry-picking jobs in Finland, but many ended up being the victims of human traffickers,” Ornuch said. “So it’s clear that these problems are all related. If the root of the problems isn’t addressed, the problems will keep showing up elsewhere.”
The only easy day was yesterday
Despite the nature of their relationship, Ornuch and Pramote said they have always viewed the organisation they founded together as a civic movement that answers to the public, and not just a mere personal project.
“Regardless of how people see us, we aren’t running a family business here. We are an organisation of the people,” Ornuch said. “Our stances are always clear. We have always separated our professional and personal issues. Even when there are problems or obstacles or disagreements, we take a step back and solve them first before talking [about work] again.
“We don’t mix up our personal lives with the public interests,” she added.
Ornuch also said she has no regrets for going down the path in the civic movement, even though it means they barely have time or energy for themselves – even their house, as noted by the pair, looks more like a busy office than a place of abode.
“To this day I still think I made the right decision to take up this career,” Ornuch said. “I feel proud wherever I go. I have respect for myself and what I do.”
Although the organisation has weathered different governments and political crises in the past two decades, Pramote said there is a long line of continuity that has never changed: those in power would always try to take advantage of the less fortunate and those without voices.
For instance, the “Reclaiming the Forest” operation launched by the military junta in the wake of the 2014 coup, which involved mass evictions across the country, barely differed from a forestry policy adopted back in 1985 in spite of the many years in between, Pramote said. “It shows that the state has never changed its way in how public resources are managed.”
The only changes, he noted, were in their tactics.
“In the past they might sue people en masse or employ very violent measures, but once the people resisted and campaigned against them, they learned the lesson and changed to something softer,” Pramote said.
Both Pramote and Ornuch acknowledged there would be no easy day ahead of them soon. Funding opportunities remain scarce, while the current sources of revenues are uncertain. Even as many members of the network are still contesting their charges in court, newer challenges and threats to the communities continue to surface. Training younger generations of land reform advocates also keeps the pair busy.
Three decades after Pramote and Ornuch first shared a ride on the back of a filthy pickup truck, it seemed the journey for a fair society was still no closer to its destination.
“The meanings of our lives and our work are forged into one, which is the fight for land rights,” Pramote said. “We’ve always been in this fight, and we have never stopped.”
Edited and translated by Teeranai Charuvastra
Veerapong Soontornchattrawat is a freelance writer who explores social issues through the experiences of individuals. He focuses on human interest stories, particularly the effects of historical and social conflicts.
Luke Duggleby is a long-time Thailand based photographer. He regularly works on stories related to human rights, the environment and the impact of pollution and development on local communities.
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