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. 95