Page 31 - Rights beautiful : collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik

Creating a sense of regional identity
That is why, in addressing ourselves to the concern for
indigenous knowledge and bio-diversity, it is vitally important for all of
us, to begin with, to take a fairly long range view of the whole matter.
That is to say, a certain perspective beyond the immediate needs of
making a living and day-to-day resource management. If I am not mistaken,
at least from our own empirical research evidence, we have quite a good
number of exemplary cases of ethnic and rural communities with well
established traditional practices for sustainable livelihoods and resource
management. And of course we can take the relevant individual cases for
appropriate application elsewhere, as we have been doing nowadays.
But that is actually only part of the whole story. The real and long-term
problem is how a sense of commonality, inter-relatedness and solidarity
could be instilled into the people’s mind, and where to start. In fact, if
one may say so, the very title of this conference already suggests itself:
Montane Mainland Southeast Asia. Here is the key to further understanding
of what we have been trying to do and to achieve - the holistic dimension
of Southeast Asia as tropical resource base and its integrity. That is to say,
not just pieces of bio-diversity and indigenous knowledge in isolation
from one another.
As we all know, Southeast Asia constitutes both as the strategic
sea route from the middle east to the Pacific coast, and as one among
the world’s most tropical resource-rich regions. As such, it has always been
subject to the Western powers’ rivalry and domination ever since after
the Industrial Revolution and imperialism that followed. The achievement
of national independence and so-called self-determination after the World
War II does not help much in actuality. It only brings about forces that
accelerate and intensify divisiveness and resource exploitation even
further in the course of nation building, modernization and then misdirected
development. All along, Southeast Asia’s precious biological resources,
indigenous knowledge, and thus local communities, constantly fall prey

OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 25