The village is about as remote as a village can be in Thailand. It lies on the bank of the Mekong river, and is therefore right on the Laos-Thailand border. They have very little interrelationship with anyone except for trade with other remote nearby villages up to 10 km away, without which, they could not continue to live in such a remote location. Their location on the Mekong allows them to produce enough to trade in this way. At night, a few lights can be seen across the Mekong, where there is a small Lao village, people whom they continue to perceive as their 'brothers', and with whom they have some contact, which is tolerated by both governments. Although there is a nearby village on the Thai side of the border, they have only limited contact with them, as this village is of an ethnic minority in Thailand, and there is a language and dialect barrier, which makes interaction far more difficult than with their 'brothers' across the border. Such a scenario helps to capture just how remote this area is.
The border here can be considered to be to a certain limited extent, somewhat porous; as both the Thai and Laos governments tolerate this kind of local, limited interaction, which pre-exists the formalized boundary that exists between the two countries. The local people share a common ancestry, language and culture, which is the primary reason for both governments’ level of tolerance in this regard. Of course, passing through official border crossings with passports are the technical requirements for moving between countries; yet in such limited cases, these requirements are overlooked. Should trade significantly increase, or smuggling take place between villages such as these, then of course, the informal tolerance of both governments in this regard would end, further isolating such communities.
Here then, exists a certain/ interesting paradox, whereby such local border communities have extra rights not available to the general populations of either of the two nations. In the context of the citizens’ rights within nation states, these communities enjoy a certain ‘privilege’. Connected to rights is the notion of entitlement, which such communities do feel. But if such scenarios are not consistent in relation to equality under the law, then what are the wider implications of these informal accepted negations of the law itself?
