“Thailand is for the first time hosting this grand annual New Year blessing ceremony,” Kittiphan Phansuwan, director of the ministry’s Religious Affairs Department, told The Nation Weekend.

“This example of religious cooperation will kick off a series of networking activities among Asean members.”

Artefacts are being transported from Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, and will be blessed alongside Thai pieces in the ceremony.

“Among other sacred sites, they’re coming from the Thai temple in Bodhagaya, India, Sri Lanka’s Asgiri Maha Viharaya and Malwathu Maha Viharaya, Myanmar’s Taiktaw Monastery and Thailand’s Wat Phra Kaew,” Kittiphan said.

“The event begins on New Year’s Eve with more than 60 monks from Asean countries and hundreds from Thailand conducting prayers at Sanam Luang.”

The blessing ceremony itself will begin on Saturday afternoon with a colourful cultural parade involving some 100 participants. Workpoint Entertainment is assembling the troupe that will carry the holy artefacts and models of each country’s landmark temples from the Maha Jesada Bordin Pavilion on Rachadamnoen Klang Avenue to Sanam Luang.

The artefacts will be on view at Sanam Luang until Tuesday and then be moved to the National Museum until January 15.

The ceremony is one of a dozen cultural activities scheduled for Sanam Luang and temples and museums across the country. More than 30,000 temples in Thailand and 500 overseas will host prayers on New Year’s Eve. The ministry will also host New Year prayers at Wat Arun on New Year’s Eve.

The National Museum will separately display nine prominent Buddha statues for blessing from December 29 to January 27, matched by activities at its branches across the Kingdom. The museums will be open without admission charge Saturday through Wednesday.

“More and more people are attending New Year prayers in Thailand,” Kittiphan said. “Last year more than 20 million people – many of them young people – participated in events held at 30,000 temples around the Kingdom. We hope there will be even more this year.”

Disdain for crowds needn’t bar anyone from joining in. The ministry has a “New Year Prayer” application for mobile phones with which you can pray along with everyone else.

“The idea is to help reduce the number of accidents occurring during the festive season.”

The ministry will provide free transportation tomorrow through Tuesday for devotees wishing to make merit. Shuttle buses will operate each day from 8am to 6.30pm, going to and from Wat Pho, Wat Arun, Wat Rachaoros, Wat Rachapradit, Wat Benjamaborphit, Wat Bovornives, Wat Rachaborpit, Wat Suthat, Wat Phraramkao and Wat Wachirathamsathit.

Kittiphan said monks and religious officials from across Southeast Asia, gathered in Bangkok, would discuss plans for further cooperative events next year, including for the annual Asean summit.

“We’re beginning with cooperation among the mainly Buddhist countries because of our shared beliefs,” Kittiphan said. “But other Asean members where other religions predominate will be involved in the near feature.

“The aim is to highlight the diversity of Asean culture at various events throughout next year.”

Thailand will again host the annual international conference on Vishakha Bucha Day. The ministry is also planning a series of seminars and workshops for Asean members.

“We will focus on the young generation by hosting cultural camps where we can share our diversity,” Kittiphan said.

“Although we follow different religions, we can still live in harmony. “Every religion teaches its devotees to be good. We hope to use religion as a cultural tool to bring peace to our region.”

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE – as we came to call the 18-day operation in July to rescue 12 young footballers and their coach trapped in a Chiang Rai cave – was perhaps most memorable for the help that poured in from all around the world.

It was the assistance from the international community that made the mission possible after all. Foreign attention began focusing on the plight of the Mu Pa (Wild Boars) Football Club members almost as soon as reports emerged on June 23 that they’d become trapped in the Tham Luang cave complex by flash floods.

With the danger waxing and waning daily and the outcome always in question, that attention gradually expanded to encompass the globe.

The intensive and highly dangerous search-and-rescue operation faced a series of formidable obstacles, including steady downpours that swelled the muddy floodwater in the cave, submerging whole sections of the narrow, jagged escape route, the thinning of the oxygen, the sheer darkness.

After nine days of worry, the lost 13 were found alive on July 2, on a dry perch five kilometres from the cave mouth. The desperate race to extricate them ahead of the gathering monsoon, which would bring further deluges, went on for another nine agonising days.

While the mission ultimately was a success, it was not accomplished without tragedy. Samarn Kunun, a former Thai Navy Seal known as “Sergeant Sam”, perished on July 6 while placing oxygen canisters along the rescue route for the divers who would bring the Wild Boars out.

He sacrificed his life to help save the boys and was duly honoured by the Kingdom and applauded by the world as a hero. In all, more than 10,000 people – Thais and foreigners – were involved in the operation, and The Nation wishes to pay tribute to them all as Persons of the Year for 2018 for their kindness and assistance.

First there was Sergeant Sam, who will never be forgotten, and then Narongsak Osottanakorn, who was governor of Chiang Rai at the time and played the crucial role of leading the mission right from Day 1.

Thailand’s deep gratitude goes to the expert cave divers, some of them among the world’s best in their field, who arrived from overseas to help.

Britons Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, probing ever deeper into the cave in search of the lost boys, were the ones who found them, to their own surprise and to the cheers of everyone tracking the effort on TV, online and in other media. Both vastly experienced in complex cave rescues, they gave the world reason to believe the risky mission still ahead would eventually succeed.

Dr Richard Harris, an Australian anaesthetist from Adelaide, donned air tanks to work a small miracle of his own. The evacuation route included submerged passages that narrowed to less than 40 centimetres.

The boys and their coach had strong swimmers all around to guide them along, and the journey was made easier by shots of anti-anxiety medication from Dr Harris, ensuring they wouldn’t panic during the ordeal and jeopardise their own safety.

The Mu Pa affair had after-effects that few people could have foreseen, not least a global outpouring of helpfulness. Reports came in from all corners of random acts of kindness inspired by the Thai drama.

Much more directly for the footballers, the three who had until then been stateless – born of foreign parents and thus denied Thai citizenship – were soon given that citizenship and all the benefits that accrue.

Ekkapol Chantawong, Phonchai Khamluang and Adul Sam-on inadvertently helped highlight a problem far too long overlooked – more than half a million people living in this country are officially stateless.

There was more to come for the rescued Wild Boars, who were now international celebrities, even if few foreigners knew them individually by name.

They were treated to a tour of the United States and attended the Youth Olympics in Argentina. With a slew of movies planned or in the making, their story will soon be retold onscreen, each one licensed so that they and their families will reap financial benefit.

There has lately been dispute over whether a Hollywood producer is proceeding without copyright, but Thai-Irish filmmaker Tom Waller has begun shooting his movie, “The Cave”, with a multinational cast.

Meanwhile sculptors and painters have been memorialising the rescue, with several prominent artists contributing pieces for a commemorative site at the mouth of the cave. And the cave itself, so little known before, is now a national landmark.

Tham Luang is being developed so that future explorations are safe. There were lessons learned. Thai rescue teams gained valuable experience in cave diving while working alongside world experts.

After some foreign news outlets were chastised for sensationalising the story, the local media came to appreciate the need to show sensitivity when reporting events involving imperilled youths.

At the same time, though, the domestic press wondered why it was barred from interviewing the individual footballers when foreign outlets had direct access. That debate is likely to continue. The Mu Pa story isn’t over yet.

Pang Kob is in fact located deep in the Khun Nan National Park, surrounded by the lush forest, where boundaries of the community and the park are hard to define. Neither, for that matter, are the rights over land of the eight households and 13 families there.

Pang Kob residents are not alone in having conflicting claims over land rights with the state. In Nan province, where only around 12 per cent of the province’s total area of 7 million rai (1.1 million hectares) is lowland, with the remainder forest, almost all of its communities are located in either forest reserves or national parks.

Nationwide, there are thousands of such communities with claims over land rights that have long conflicted with the state. As long as the claims are unresolved, the residents are deprived of their rights of access to basic needs and infrastructure, and more critically, to land security.

“Whenever we had conflicts with forest officials we lived in fear, because we didn’t know what we were allowed to do to make a living on our land,” said 37-year-old Somsak, the assistant village chief. “The fact is that we live among protected forestland and our land rights have come into question.”

The conflict

Conflicting claims over land rights between forest residents and the state have long simmered in Thailand. During the reign of King Rama V, land experts say the first land deeds were issued to ordinary people as well as laws promulgated concerning land rights.

The critical turning point followed the sixth land deed issuance law in 1936, when land occupation and utilisation by ordinary people nationwide received stronger recognition – including for indigenous people.

These people were able to turn that recognition into actual land ownership under the 1954 Land Code, under condition that they must notify the state and get Sor Kor 1 documents in order to secure a land deed.

But if the land was declared part of a reserved or protected forest area, those previously recognised rights would be nullified. This prompted debate, as some forest experts said they were born on the land, and their land rights were actually recognised, and therefore they continued to exist regardless of declarations.

A second wave of mass forest occupation occurred during the late 1970s, when the government was in an ideological battle against Communism, with many of its believers fleeing into the forests. The forest laws were relaxed in 1975 to allow those living in forests to remain, triggering an influx of occupation and forest clearance.

The rate of deforestation was then at its height, with around 2-million rai gone. From 138.5 million rai, or around 43 per cent of the nation, in 1973, the forests shrank after this directive to 38.6 per cent in 1976, and continued being lost, according to the National Reform Steering Assembly (NRSA)’s report last year. (As of reported in 2018, the country’s forest area is now around 32 per cent at 102-million rai.)

Since 1990s, the governments have attempted to address the conflict, but their efforts were seen as not comprehensive enough to succeed.

A 1998 push from the Assembly of the Poor resulted in a respected resolution requiring that conflicting claims over rights to any kind of forestland be resolved via examination and verification.

For protected areas like national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, those found to have lived there “before they were first declared protected” could stay, but live in a modest way. If the areas were found to be ecologically critical, the people would be relocated or “supported to a suitable degree”.

Those living there after the declaration would also be relocated.

The NRSA noted in its 2017 report that the 1998 Cabinet resolution fell short of finding a comprehensive approach to help resolve the issue. For instance, the resolution fell short of guided action concerning relocation and community management after relocation. The forest laws, the report noted, also had no clauses supporting such requirements under the resolution.

The issue was further complicated by the fact that those proved to have lived in the forests before they were declared forest reserves could be subject to land-use rights documents, the Sor Tor Kor 1. But the documents approved have sometimes been sold or changed hands, a critical problem that the current government has tried to address.

But there is a more critical problem from the 1998 resolution, in the view of practitioners like Theerayut Somton, director of Royal Forestry Department (RFD)’s forestland management office, and Weerayuth Wanalertsakul, director of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP)’s protected forest land and community management division.

The resolution had the status of a policy or administrative instruction, just like its previous rules. It failed to produce a change in law that could be strictly applied.

In practice, forest dwellers are not allowed to live in forests to which they have a historical claim unless that area first has its protected status annulled – and governments have generally avoided doing so from fear of being labelled as forest destroyers, Theerayut said.

As such, there has been little progress in either protected areas or forest reserves, and people have been left living in the areas unlawfully.

“It’s critically a problem of our forest policies. We are in a deadlock where the problem cannot be resolved,” Weerayuth said.

Recent years have seen a massive number of the disputed plots change hands, while forest clearance and encroachment continues, further complicating the problem and adding to the headaches of local officials.

According to the DNP, 5.9-million rai of its land is occupied. About 3.6 million-rai was occupied before the 1998 Cabinet resolution, with 2.3-million rai since, nearly doubling the figure.

The RFD, meanwhile, reports that its 6.4-million rai of forests within watershed classes of 1 to 5 were occupied before the resolution, with another 6.5 million added since.

Khor Tor Chor, a new hope?

In a move to resolve the dispute, the junta issued orders 64 and 66, under which those who encroached into forested land after 2014 would not be spared from the law, except for the poor. That left the government two groups of forest occupants to deal with – those making claims dated before the 1998 Cabinet resolution and those since.

In consultation with the national land policy committee and the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry, the Cabinet issued the resolution concerning Kor Tor Chor on November 26 to address conflicting claims. It is seen as a major shift in the concept and the directive.

Under the resolution, people living in all types of forests and for varying times would be “lawfully” allowed to remain, but with different conditions depending on the fragility of the forest ecosystem. Related laws would be amended to pave the way for enforcement.

As well, their land plots would be collectively managed as one large-scale plot or Plaeng Ruam, a concept borrowed by Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha from Israel’s kibbutzim farm communes, according to Theerayut, also a member of the national land policy committee’s land-acquisition sub panel.

This, he said, would help prevent land from changing hands and an endless cycle of new forest encroachment.

According to Threerayut, the RFD has proceeded with the first watershed classes 3 to 5 with people living before the 1998 Cabinet resolution. The target area is 3.9-million rai, and the RFD has managed to approve 446,000 rai in 100 areas in 52 provinces.

In contrast to past practices, residents will be supported by relevant officials to make a living in a sustainable way. Their land rights, he added, would clearly reflect that their use is authorised and so give them better land security.

Still outstanding is how to deal with plots that have changed hands. Theerayut conceded that the issue has caused officials headaches. His view is that stringent measures are needed to deal with people or their nominees seeking to grab land.

The number of land plots to have changed hands has so far not been calculated. Weerayuth of the DNP said the number would emerge during the process of initial screening by communities, in line with the officials setting clear records and boundaries between their properties and forests nearby.

“It’s our dream to see people working with us to help protect the forest. This is new forest management with participation from the people, and is a challenge to all of us to see whether people can fully live in the forest, the subject of long conflict in our society,” Weerayuth said.

Warangkana Rattanarat, from the Centre for People and Forests, sees progress in the government’s approach to policy. At least it is now clear what needs doing, she said.

The government has tried to solve the conflict by coming up with a clear directive and a system to manage the problem. However, she cautioned, the problem’s complexity calls for further widening public participation. The latest decision is viewed by forest groups as continuing the previous top-down approach.

As for those grabbing land plots, she agrees they must be squeezed out and stringent measures taken against them.

“Overall, Kor Tor Chor should not be just about distributing land. The challenge is what we are distributing the land for – that’s the goal that we set our eyes on. If people can join together despite their differences, and decide the best use of the land, and can stand on their own feet, the land would not be grabbed.

“The success of the story really depends on their survival,” she said.

Wearing a helmet, he entered the bank on Phattanakarn Road shortly after noon, walked over to the first counter and held out a plastic bag, demanding the teller fill it with cash. However, she refused.

He then walked over to the next counter and claimed he had an explosive, so the teller agreed to hand over the Bt105,320 she had.

The man then walked out the front door and rode off on a motorbike he had reportedly driven to the bank.

Police are checking all CCTV cameras in the area to work out his escape route.

The man, dressed in a dark long-sleeved shirt and jeans, was described to be between 35 and 40 years of age and about 180 centimetres tall. His motorcycle was a blue Honda Wave without a licence plate.

The PM’s deputy secretary, General Buddhipongse Punnakanta, said on Friday that General Prayut Chan-o-cha wanted to remind everyone of their right to Universal Coverage for Emergency Patients (Ucep).

Introduced during the Prayut administration, Ucep offers 72 hours of free medical services if their case is identified as life-threatening and in need of urgent help.

“The prime minister does not want to see anyone in medical emergency. But, of course, he wants to make sure everyone knows he or she has the right if a need arises,” Buddhipongse said.

He said people can call 1669 if they need urgent medical help and information about Ucep criteria.

Because millions hit the road for New Year holidays, the period running from December 27 to January 2 are described as the “Seven Dangerous Days” to remind people about road accident risks.