The Migrants of the Mekong

Pattana Kitiarsa [1]

I wish to thank Khun Trasvin Jittidecharak and Prof. Maria Diokno, as well as the staff of both Mekong Press and the SEASREP Foundation, for their invitation and generosity. I am deeply honored to share with you a few extended points that I think are relevant to the themes presented in this book.

The book we are launching tonight is organized around the theme that, throughout its modern biographies, the Mekong has been arranged and rearranged by successive forces and generations of actors. The contributors cover the historical, political, and economic efforts to arrange and rearrange the Mekong basin, from the French geographies of power project and “civilizing mission” (Osborne 1996, 20) in colonial Indochina in the second half of the nineteenth century to the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) master plan during the cold war era and the post-Communist, Asian Development Bank (ADB)-initiated development schemes for the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). The book seems to imply that for millions of people living in the GMS areas—from the upstream areas of Yunnan province in the People’s Republic of China to Cambodia and southern Vietnam downstream—their present and future lives depend on how the Mekong, as a regional construct and collective resource regime, is rearranged and transformed by the realities of development.

The book covers the GMS at the regional and structural levels. It puts first and foremost the international efforts to arrange and rearrange the Mekong as the border for zones of development. Somewhere, somehow, the Mekong’s common people and their poverty-stricken communities, which are both targets of development, are relegated to secondary concern. Since 1975 the Mekong people have no longer been rooted peasants or villagers who make their living in self-sufficient economies confined to national borders. The point I would like to add to the book’s strengths is that in the “age of migration” (Castles and Miller 1998) the migrants of the Mekong—whether legal or illegal, regular or irregular—must not be excluded from development paradigms and schemes. Mekong rulers, colonizers, cold war strategists, international donors, and local bureaucrats have long set their premises and promises of delivering “the harnessing of the mighty Mekong” (Liss 1967, 106).

Generations of these Mekong arrangers have shared one common goal in the name of developing this “river of extraordinary size” (Osborne 1996, 14)—that is, to exploit it as both economic commodity and strategic political frontier. The “Mother of the Waters” (Osborne 1996, 32) has been there for ages past, and will still be there for ages to come. Given appropriate time, development plans, and international cooperation, its almost unlimited natural resources are ready to be exploited for prosperity and peace. Fish, borders, hydropower, navigation, water, and other surrounding resources have been the perennial centers of attention for the so-called Mekong developers, at least since the French colonial dream of making the Mekong “the river road to China” (Osborne 1996). In his book The Mighty Mekong, written under the influence of cold war anti-Communist propaganda, Howard Liss made the following optimistic prediction: “The United Nations has called the mighty Mekong ‘a sleeping giant’. Someday, very soon, the sleeping giant of Indochina will awaken” (Liss 1967, 106). “Someday very soon” indeed, but when? When will the days of the Mekong’s awakening arrive? Writing almost forty years after Liss, Milton Osborne, the Mekong’s authoritative biographer, thought it necessary to warn that “the Mekong is not only a great river with a turbulent, if largely unknown, past. Increasingly, there seems every reason to fear that it is a river with an endangered future” (Osborne 2006, 5).

Rethinking development in the GMS is impossible if one ignores the domestic and cross-border forms of mobility, migration, and trafficking in persons, labor, goods, information, finance, and ideology. People everywhere move about, and those of the Mekong region are no exception. They have always become “moving targets” (Appadurai 1999) translocally as well as transnationally. I suggest that taking the Mekong from a resource-centered perspective exposes its blind side, as that approach tends to overlook the existence of people in mobile situations that are, increasingly, part of the realities of everyday life in a world of globalization and transnationalization.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Mekong has been producing all kinds of displaced persons and migrants. Successive rounds of Indochinese wars sent millions of refugees to neighboring countries, and some moved on to resettle eventually in a third country, especially in the United States, Canada, France, and Australia. However, the current waves of labor movements within the region and beyond have accelerated in the post-1975 era and the early 1980s. International labor migration could be the result of either underdevelopment or the conditions of development. After the political turbulence of the 1970s, all the GMS countries produced displaced expatiate refugees as well as overseas migrant workers. Thailand, which survived the cold war in much better shape than its Indochinese neighbors, witnessed intensive labor migration as one of the consequences of development in the 1960s and 1970s (Keyes 2002). The country began to export male workers to the Middle East, a few decades after internal labor movements from the countryside had begun. In 1982, at the peak of this export of labor, there were 104,824 Thai workmen in the Middle East countries (Suphang and Germershausen 2000, 9; table 1). Most of these workers came from the northern and northeastern regions of the country. In the 1990s, Thai workers changed destinations to East and Southeast Asian countries, along with Israel. There were 191,188 Thai workers in these destinations in 1995 (Suphang Chantavanich and Germershausen 2000, 9; table 1). The number of Thai overseas workers in 2004 was 148,600.[2]

Recent statistics provided by the Southeast Asia Office of the International Organization for Migration show that border crossings within and beyond the GMS have been intensive and diversified. In 2002 there were 46,200 Vietnamese workers in countries like Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. In the same period 27,862 workers from Myanmar went to Malaysia, and in 2004 more than 905,881 migrants registered in Thailand. There were also 181,614 migrant workers from Laos and 181,579 from Cambodia registered by Thailand’s Bureau of Migrant Worker Administration.[3] Thailand nowadays finds itself both importing and exporting labor. It is home to border migrants from the GMS countries, with 1,284,920 male and female workers reported as of September 2005.[4] The Asia Research Center for Migration, at Chulalongkorn University, estimates that in Thailand there are currently more than 2.3 million legal and illegal migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia (Thet Mong Thai 2006, 102). Of course, these high rates of border crossing in the GMS have made irregular migrants prone to becoming victims of the trafficking in drugs, children, and women. Labor migration in the region is also increasingly feminized (International Labor Organization 2001; Piper 2002).

What are the cultural, economic, political significances of the increasing “tides of diaspora” (Pillai 2005) from the GMS? Can the image of people on the move across borders and making a living in transit alter the ways in which we figure and reconfigure the Mekong? Why is it that the river, not the commoners and ordinary villagers, is so fixed and thick in the Mekong development narratives? Asking silly questions, you will surely get silly answers. My questions appear not only stupid, but obviously and naively romantic. Nonetheless, I still hope that by putting the migrants of the Mekong at the forefront of our knowledge-producing enterprises and policy-influencing businesses we can challenge the dominant development discourses adopted by international development agencies and the energy-hungry and market-oriented governments of the Greater Mekong Subregion. After more than half a century of Mekong development under the leadership of organizations like the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE), the Environmental Cooperation with Asia Program (ECAP), the Mekong River Commission (MRC), and of course the Asian Development Bank (ADB), we have witnessed more and more displaced children within the region, the depletion and degradation of resources, and conflicts of interest among the countries involved. What do Mekong development efforts mean when millions of people desert the Mother River and their homelands for low-paid and dehumanized employment overseas? Is it possible to integrate the human capital flows of mobility, migration, and trafficking into the focal themes of the Mekong development schemes? For me, the migrants of the Mekong in the past thirty years stand as proof of the development crisis in the GMS region just as much as the people themselves have demonstrated their embrace of globalism and transnationalism from below.

Throughout its turbulent biographies, there are countless tales of human endeavors to conquer the Mekong. Some aimed to defeat it, other dreamed of ruling over it. Most of them paid a heavy price for their ambition, and none of them outlived this Mother of the Waters. In 1903, with the assistance of French Lao and local officials, Prince Damrong inspected the Mekong between Nong Khai and Nakhon Phanom. He gained first-hand experience of the dangers of the rapids, underwater rocks, and flowing sands that obstruct navigation along the Mekong. With fresh memories of how Siam was forced to give up territory to the French, and of how some of the eastern provinces were put under the French protectorate in 1893, he wrote that the Mekong “was fearful rather than amazing (na klua mak kwa na chom). If someone asked me if the Mekong is worthy of a trip, I would tell that person that you should go for a once-in-a-lifetime visit. It was rather strange comparing to other rivers. It was no fun to make a trip down the Mekong, unlike Mae Nam Ping, Mae Nam Sak, or Mae Nam Saiyok. I have been there once and I have never wished to take another trip along the Mekong again” (Damrong Rajanuphap 2002, 279). The strangeness and the wildness remain the mantra of the Mekong just as much in our times as in the days of the prominent prince.

References Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1999. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, edited by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 463–483. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller. 1998. The Age of Migration. London: Macmillan Press.

Diokno, Maria Serena I., and Nuyen Van Chinh, eds. 2006. The Mekong Arranged and Rearranged. Chiang Mai: Mekong Press.

International Labour Organization. 2001. “Labour Migration and Trafficking within the Greater Mekong Sub-region.” Proceedings of Mekong sub-regional experts meeting and exploratory policy paper. Bangkok: International Labour Office.

Liss, Howard. 1967. The Mighty Mekong. New York: Hawthorn Books Publishers.

Keyes, Charles F. 2002. “Migrants and Protestors: ‘Development’ in Northeastern Thailand,” Keynote address to the Eighth International Thai Studies Conference, Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, January 2002.

Osborne, Milton. 1996. The River Road to China: The Search for the Source of the Mekong, 1966–1873. Singapore: Archipelago Press. (Orig. pub. 1975.)

Osborne, Milton. 2006. The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

Pillai, Shanthini. 2005. “The Tides of Diaspora in the Works of Amitav Ghosh.” In Asian Migrations: Sojourning, Displacement, Homecoming and Other Travels, edited by Beatriz P. Lorente, Nicola Piper, Shen Hsiu-Hua, and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, 7–22. Singapore: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Piper, Nicola. 2002. “Gender and Migration Policies in Southeast Asia: Preliminary Observations from the Mekong Region.” Paper presented in the IUSSP Conference on “Southeast Asia’s Population in a Changing Asian Context,” Siam City Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand, June 10–13.

Somdet Phrachao Borommawongthoe Krom Phrya Damrong Rajanuphap. 2002. “Ruang Mae Nam Khong” [The Mekong Story]. In Nithan Boran Khadi [Historical Anecdotes], 266–279. Bangkok: Dokya Press (Orig. pub. 1944.)

Supang Chantavanich and Andreas Germershausen. 2000. “Introduction: Research on Thai Migrant Workers in East and Southeast Asia.” In Thai Migrant Workers in East and Southeast Asia 1996–1997, edited by Supang Chantavanich, Andreas Germershausen, and Allan Beesey, 1–9. Bangkok: The Asian Research Center for Migration, Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University.

 “Thet Mong Thai” [The Foreigners’ Gaze on Thailand]. 2006. Matichon Weekly 27, 1370 (17–23 November 2006): 102.

Notes