World Food Policy Volume 3, No. 2/Volume 4, No. 1, Fall16/Spring17 | Page 95
Land, State, and Society in Laos: Ethnographies of Land Policies
Figure 9: The Hmong Leader Showing his Documents (Thongnamy)
© P. Petit 2006
from their agency regarding land, but
has transformed the whole framing of
negotiation for access and use.
They settled in Paksong, but in
July 2001, the army came quite unex-
pectedly to expel them from their new
village. According to the Hmong lead-
er, this decision was motivated by the
“confusion” of the Hmong community
for spies working for the insurgency. 7
Soldiers came and ordered them leave
at gunpoint. The leader said he told the
soldiers to kill him if they dared, as the
disruption was totally illegal. During
our interview, he clutched administra-
tive documents and law books. When
he told us about his confrontation with
the soldiers, he held up a booklet and
proclaimed, as if he was reliving the
scene, “It is not your law, it is not my
law: this is our law and you have to re-
spect it” (Fig. 9).
The story of a Hmong leader
born in Louang Prabang Province and
presently living in Thongnamy, Bo-
likhamxay Province, is a revealing ex-
ample of the ways people can call on
the law to protect their rights when they
have been scorned. In 2000, he learned
that shifting agriculture would soon
be prohibited and that villagers would
need to vacate their land. He and his
fellows looked for a place to stay, and
chose a plateau area in Paksong Dis-
trict, Champasak Province, in the south
of the country. They eventually received
legal documents and a map of their new
fields issued by the district authorities
of Paksong.
7
The Hmong managed to suspend
In that decade, there were still small groups of insurgent Hmong, mostly descendants of the Secret
Army soldiers trained by the CIA during the civil war in Laos.
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