My name is Michu Wurh Zurh. I am an Akha woman and I live in northern Thailand.

My husband helped the Akha people, that is all he did and the Thai government kicked him out of Thailand in April of 2004. They did not like that he helped my people. We are 70,000 in Thailand. He gave the Akha free medicine, milk for mother’s, vitamins, took people to the hospital. He did it all for free. He did not kill anyone, he did not sell drugs, so why has the Thai government kicked him out of Thailand?

When the Thai government kicked him out of Thailand they did not even let him say good-bye or come home to see his children. I was pregnant. I live in the jungle two hours from Chiangrai. I had three children to feed. No one came to help me or give me food. I did not see my husband again for one year. This is how the Thai government treated us. This is how the Thai government treats the Akha people.
Michu - Akha
Then the Thai army came to my parent’s house after I left and ransacked it. They took my father and mother’s hands and held them so that they could not move. They screamed at them, ¨Why do you make friends with foreigners? Why do you let them come to your house? Do you want to go to prison?¨

Why won’t the Thai government give my husband a visa so that we can go home to our house? The grandparents want to see their grand children.

Now the Thai government has taken our village rice land at Bpah Mah Hahn. My husband helped protect our land but after the Thai government kicked him out they took more and more of our rice land and planted their trees. They want to take all of our land and make our home into a park for themselves.

The Thai government, they also took all the land of Hooh Yoh Akha village near our village. 4500 acres. Every year the Thai government promises to investigate and fix this situation but they never give us back our land. At Hooh Yoh some of the women have to go and be prostitute because there is no food for their families now.

Every day Akha people came to our house to get help from my husband. The army and police kill their men, boys or wife. Near my village last year the Thai army killed Booh Joh’s wife. She was 6 months pregnant. She was walking in the jungle. The Thai army caught her and tortured her. They broke her arms and legs and then they killed her and buried her in the jungle. We deal with situations like this many decades now. No one control the Thai army. If my husband had been in the village there would have been hell to pay.

The missionaries come and lie to our people. They take Akha children. They take them to residential schools and convert them. They tell the donors that the children are orphans but they are not. The missionaries make a lot of money off the Akha children this way, build big houses, nice cars what Akha don’t have. The missionaries make the children abandon their traditional culture. The missionaries make genocide of my people. UNICEF said they would investigate but they never did.

We asked UNESCO to help us, help protect our language and culture. We talked to Mr. Smeets and David Feingold. They boast a lot about helping culture but would not help Akha people to protect Akha culture and language. UNESCO also make Eco Tourism to Akha villages that don’t have food or medicine or mosquito nets. But the tourists have all of these. They control the money, the talk about a fund, but they don’t give the % straight to the villagers. But they get their own money right away. This is very patronizing. We tell this to Mr. Tizard who work for UNESCO but he say nothing to us.

The NGO staff of Norwegian Church Aid and Action Contre Le Faim make sexual abuse of our women, they make the starving people kill every pig to feed them. The women and villagers can say nothing. The NGO’s make rape camps out of the villages. They want many girls every night for many nights.

We insist that the UN agencies must do their job. They must protect the Akha people, they must require correction of the Thai government, and investigation into these events and report this all to the Special Rapporteur Stavenhagen.

Thank You,

Michu Wurh Yurh
The Akha Heritage Foundation
akhalife@gmail.com
www.akha.org
Note: AKHA VOICES
5th Permanent Forum On Indigenous Issues
May 2006 New York City, The United Nations