ANNIVERSARY OF ACTIVIST'S DEATH 

'Dear brothers, sisters and friends who are gathered here to witness the erection of Charoen Wat-aksorn's Monument, which is named by Acharn Naowarat Pongpaibool (the SeaWrite laureate) as Thoranong na Thoranee (Pride of our land).

Originally, the artists who built this statue wanted to honour Charoen Wat-aksorn, the head of the Bo Nok-Kuiburi Rak Thongthin (Love our community) group, who was murdered on June 21, 2004. But the real meaning of the statue, as everybody here agrees and which is why we have come from different parts of the country to declare our common will today, is that it is a symbol of the struggle of commoners like us, those who fight because they love their homeland, those who selflessly chip in to build strong communities.

Why do we need an 'ideology' of loving and protecting our communities?

Throughout the long history of this country, a number of communities have stood up to fight for the right to determine their own future. Numerous struggles have been witnessed. Countless amounts of blood and the lives of faceless people have been sacrificed. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won. But they have always fought with dignity.

They fight simply because sheer common sense says that we have lived for years on this land. Good or bad, we have lived here from the times of our ancestors. We have brought up our families thanks to the land, river, forest, and the sea. We have always lived together as a community, as kindred families. Sometimes we live in harmony, other times we quarrel. But we still belong to the same communities. We have to depend on one another.

So if one day, someone or some groups threaten to break our rice bowl and tear apart our communities, we can do nothing but fight. This is our basic instinct. This is pure common sense. We have a clear-cut goal that we fight for in order to save our lives, our rice pot, the pots where we buried our umbilical cords.

Don't just toss words like 'the national interest' or 'the interest of the majority' at us, to tell us that we must sacrifice.

The majority is indeed an aggregation of the so-called minorities, the scattering of ordinary folks. How can the majority have pride if the minorities continue to be oppressed?

How can the interest of the majority be real if it comes from theft, destruction, and exploitation of the minorities?

The nation consists of numerous small communities.

When the communities are strong, a nation becomes strong. We know the colours of the national flag.

But when we stand up to protect our community, we sew our own flags. We cut the sticks to make our own flagpoles. We ourselves select what colours we want to use.

When we raise the green or red flags, this is not to deny the national flag.

On the contrary, this is to reconfirm our identity as one of the communities that build up a nation.

If we do not survive, the nation will not survive, either.

The movements of local peoples may appear to be specific to a certain issue or area. But it is within such small-scale movements that we know what is happening. We can see through every single part, every single component of a movement. Because it is our movement. It is under our eyes, our control and our joint decision. Even the core leaders cannot make any decision, or conduct any act without monitoring and evaluation by our own people.

It is such a small field like this that trains us to be ready for bigger fields.

From the ideology of loving our communities, we can keep up with the traps and the real meanings of the bigger ideologies.

For us, the genuine structural and policy change must start from the small feet of people who have walked together, who have been through the ups and downs to push for the change together, pace by pace, step by step.

As long as each step forward is on our own feet, by a decision of our own making.

Whether it is slow, or even sometimes broken by a fall, we can still take pride in the fact that these are our steps.

Our friends from the Assembly of the Poor once told us that the constitution must be written by our own feet.

So we do believe that we have to become active to shape the constitution together _ so that the country's highest law will become what we want.

Brothers and sisters, you may not be aware that in preparation for this gathering, many of us here have been depriving themselves of sleep. They took turns carrying the stones, sand, and concrete to build the platform of this monument.

Any monument, however big or important, cannot stand without a platform.

The ideology of loving our communities is an ideology of people who believe in working to build the platform grounds _ to serve the monument or a historic upheaval that is to arise.

It is our belief that the strength of local communities is key to the change, so we plan to turn this ground where the monument stands into a school. This will be a forum for the exchange of experiences among people who struggle to protect their communities. There will be a collection of stories of people who have fought to protect their land. This will serve to keep the records of history by the local people, people who have taken part in rewriting their own history.

This "school" will house the histories of movements by people in Prachuap Khiri Khan and from other communities around the country. It will serve as a hub of villagers who believe in the need to fight to protect their homes.

They can come to meet, exchange and work together to give moral support to one another.

We would like to see numerous communities stand up to build their own history, to fight to protect their homes with strength, to carry and pass on the ideology of loving their communities to other places.

After all, keeping up the strength and ideology of the locals here has not been easy. Our fight is far from over. The Bo Nok-Hin Krut power plants may have been scrapped. But new power plant projects, be they coal, gas, or nuclear-fuelled, are waiting to get in at any time. Mega-industrial plants like Sahaviriya's are eyeing the expansion of their empires to usurp the resources and threaten the health of people of Prachuap. The public land at Khlong Chaithong is still in the hands of local influential groups.

If and when our communities are not aware of the importance of uniting ourselves, of standing on our own feet, past victories will become only mere legends, stories of yore that will eventually be forgotten and destroyed, along with our way of life and the resources of the community.

Then we will only have this bronze monument left, nothing else. We will become a community that has lost its dignity, being dissolved; a community of slaves in a nation that calls itself Thailand."

This is a translation of a speech delivered by Korn-uma Pongnoi on June 21 on the occasion of the third anniversary of the death of Charoen Wat-aksorn, her husband. On that day, a monument of Thailand's first commoner was unveiled on the spot where Charoen was gunned down.

Note: This speech is also available in Thai at: ???????? ??????? : ??????????????? ?????????? ‘?????????' ?'