Bunlert Lekkiew can’t wait for Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to visit Udon Thani later this month.

The farmer says the price of the land he has owned for more than 50 years has plunged to less than one-third of what it was five years ago, and he wants Thaksin to do something about it.

Land that used to sell for from Bt30,000-Bt40,000 a rai now goes for just Bt10,000, he says. The reason, he suspects, is that his farm is near land destined to house a processing plant for ore from a potash mine.

Its excavation will cause the ground to sink under the villages in the 25-square-kilometre mining area south of the provincial capital. The environmental impact assessment (EIA) estimates the subsidence at up to 70 centimetres over the 25-year life of the mine.

However, some independent geologists and environmentalists say the estimate is too low and the EIA does not take into account the subsidence that is likely to continue after mining operations finish. The ground could drop a metre or more, they say. Moreover, they warn that salt waste from the mine could irreparably damage farmland and water supplies over a vast area.

“Thaksin promised to meet us,” Bunlert insists, referring to the pledge extracted from the premier after the Udon Conservation Group blocked Thaksin’s exit from the airport in Roi Et province last month. Bunlert wants the project to be shelved, but suspects the government is “trying to buy time” and “avoid losing face”.

He and other villagers have been protesting against the mine for almost five years. “The company keeps telling lies,” Bunlert fumes. Many are still seething over the way some were allegedly duped into selling land to the company via agents who did not reveal who the buyers were.

When Bunlert hears that politicians are about to discuss the project, protesters pile into rented vans and drive overnight to knock on doors in Bangkok. When they visited the capital last month they met with the chair of the Senate’s environmental committee, protested outside Government House and paid visits to the National Human Rights Commission and the agriculture, health and industry ministries. Earlier this month they also visited the Canadian ambassador.

“We’re tired, but if we let this happen it will ruin our community,” says Somyot Nikam one of the group’s leaders.

But they are losing patience with their politicians.

“We can’t find the words to describe how sick of Thai Rak Thai we are,” exclaims La-iad Onsa-aad, another leader of the group. “We will not take compensation [for our land] . . . We are not dogs. If we wanted compensation we would have asked for it.”

La-iad also has a warning: “If you build, we burn.” It’s a slogan that elicits applause from the 20 or so conservation group members gathered to meet reporters from Bangkok.

“She’s one of the more militant activists,” explains Ida Aroonwong, an environmentalist who has been working with the group for the past three months. Ida says they chose the slogan used by villagers who succeeded in blocking the construction of the Bo Nok coal-fired power plant in Prachuab Khiri Khan.

“At the time it was a slogan that was considered shocking in Thailand,” Ida says. “Isaan people are more peaceful [than villagers in Prachuab]. It’s unusual to hear them say this.”

La-iad, though, goes further: “If you stay, we shoot.”

Ida smiles. The villagers in Prachuab Khiri Khan have been running workshops and their defiant tactics are spreading nationwide, even though their leader – Charoen Wattaksorn – was murdered, she explains.

The death-threat game

On the morning of the conservation group’s annual merit making and fundraising ceremony late last month, villagers woke to find flyers headlined Who Is Rich? littering their roads. They had been tossed from vehicles some time the night before.

Under the headline, six paragraphs warned villagers to think carefully before attending the event. Who is benefiting . . . where is the money going . . . is it being spent for the benefit of all . . . are traditions and Buddhism being respected . . . who is rich are the kind of questions it asked.

There is no signature, address or contact number save for the name Rights Protection Group.

Members of the conservation group suspect the company – Asia Pacific Potash Corp (APPC) – is funding the pro-mining group, but they have no proof. APPC insists that its activities are above board and has persistently claimed that the conservation group pays villagers to join rallies.

Executives have said the group pays villagers from Bt20-Bt100 to join a rally.

On the other hand the conservation group responds by saying that those who join the pro-mining rallies are paid Bt200-Bt300 each.

John Bovard, the chief executive of Asia Pacific Resources (APR), APPC’s parent company, says the protests started shortly before he took the helm in 2003.

“There’s an unusual correlation between the project looking like it’s going ahead and village protests,” he said in an interview last year. “One interpretation . . . is that the protests have financial backing.”

He declined to say where the backing was coming from. “That’s something I’m not going to go into, but it’s worth thinking about,” he said.

He added that some of the project’s opponents had tried to blackmail the company. “I’m quite happy to quote this. I am told by former management that two of the people who cause a lot of the ruckus asked for US$2 million (Bt78.8 million) each.

“One of those people we’ve since got on video saying, ‘If you pay a bit of money there wouldn’t be a problem’.”

He went on to dismiss as a ploy allegations from leaders of the conservation group that they had received death threats.

“You’ve obviously seen this before – the death threat is a very clever game to play,” he said. “Allege [a] death threat the same as you allege violence and then you go and cause violence . . . and [say] ‘See, we told you there was going to be violence’,” he said.

Bovard was appointed CEO shortly after Olympus Capital, an investment fund registered in the Cayman Islands, took it over. Olympus was set up by Ziff Bro-thers Investments, a $6-billion-$7-billion hedge fund. The fund manages the inheritance of, according to Forbes list of billionaires, America’s richest trio of bro-thers, Daniel, Dirk and Robert Ziff.

Olympus took over APR – partly by converting bonds it had held in the company since 1998 into equity – shortly after Thailand’s Mining Act was amended to allow mines to be dug without the permission of surface-land owners.

Once it became APR’s majority shareholder it switched the company’s registration to New Brunswick – the only province in Canada where it is legal to appoint an entirely non-Canadian board of directors.

Neither APR nor its Thai unit APPC haveoperated a mine before. The latter’s principal appeal is the two concessions it holds to mine potash in Udon Thani.

“We are talking of probably 50 years of potash at the rate of 2 million tonnes a year,” Bovard said.

Rising demand from China has pushed the price of potash to historic highs of close to $200 a tonne.

‘Potash from the heart’

Somporn Pengkam, a researcher with the Health System Reform Office, has just completed a two-year health impact assessment (HIA) for the planned mine.

“It’s the first HIA for an industrial project in Thailand,” she says proudly. Her report will be submitted to the health minister this month with a warning.

“This project will cause violence if it is approved without genuine local participation,” she says.

So far, villagers have only been allowed to listen to the process not participate in it, she adds.

Her team’s research is based on interviews in 40 villages in and around the mining-concession area and was conducted because the topic of health was inadequately addressed in the EIA, she explains.

The study found that along with heightened anxiety, villagers are becoming increasingly aggressive. Some of those who oppose the mine will no longer work with those who support it, and vice versa, she says. Most of those surveyed are opposed to the project and said they would rather farm elsewhere than work in a mine.

APPC’s public relations campaign has failed at the grassroots level.

Its newsletter, Potash from the Heart, has increased anxiety because it gives the impression the mine is inevitable. Moreover, the top-down approach of wooing village leaders had merely made many people distrust them.

The biggest fear for villagers is subsidence and the possible loss of water supplies. They are afraid water will either be diverted for industrial use or contaminated by the massive amount of salt waste the mine will produce, Somporn said.

Villagers, she found, trusted the conservation group more than APPC because it brought in academics and experts to talk about mining and environmental risks, while APPC promoted its ties with powerful figures and glossed over potential problems.

Vanishing villagers

The conservation group’s annual fundraising event was a low-key, almost carefree affair this year. It included a village pot luck, plenty of dancing, a bit of theatre and blessings from monks.

The youth group built a 20-metre long mine shaft from black plastic and turned it into a museum, detailing the mining process and the danger salt contamination poses to rice paddies. They charged visitors Bt2 admission.

But what was striking about the group assembled amid a grove of pradu trees in the grounds around Wat Arundhamma Rangsee (Radiance of dhamma temple) was that it was mostly grandparents and children. The generation in between was missing, because most have left to work in other parts of Thailand or overseas.

Although the offer of jobs that could bring their children back to the villages is appealing, the grandparents who run the group say they don’t want to risk their way of life or their land.

They’re taking a long-term view.

They say they are protecting their land to ensure that the generation who left to work in Bangkok will have something to return to. “I don’t want my grandchildren to be forced to the city,” Bunlert says.

He was among those who visited the Canadian ambassador. For some of those who joined him, the ascent to the 15th floor of Abdulrahim Place on Rama IV Road, Bangkok, was the highest they’d ever been.

It may have been a futile gesture.

A few floors above the embassy, in an APPC conference room, Bovard slides a paper across the table. It contains a government census of the number of villagers living in the mining concession area. The number is less than half the figure – about 25,000 – the company used two years previously.

“That was the published government figure at the time,” Bovard explains. If you drive around in a truck and count the people, the latest census –about 12,000 – seems high, he adds.

In a presentation prepared for executives in mainland China, where Bovard is seeking a joint venture partner, the number of villagers living in the mining area plummets to 4,500. 

Vincent MacIsaac

The Nation