I am with the Akha Heritage Foundation. I have lived and worked with the Akha people of Thailand for 13 years. I am here to represent numerous Akha communities in northern Thailand who live in a defacto state of siege. Do the people of this Working Group know who the Akha are?

Numbering 70,000 people in Thailand, the Akha are some of the poorest in the region. In Myanmar, China and Laos the Akha number 400,000. But it is hard to discuss conflict resolution when conflict is resolved with gunfire, the Akha people ending up dead, their land taken, at the hands of Thai army, police and forestry departments.

The US sponsored drug war saw scores of the Akha murdered in 2003, during a purge in the country that is estimated to have murdered a minimum of 2274 people or many more that number. And this war is continuing.

I was deported from Thailand in April of this year by the Thai Government for my human rights activism on behalf of the Akha people. Since that time there have been numerous Thai activists murdered for opposing the government's will. How much more dangerous it is for the Akha to tend sessions like this one, or protest what is being done to them in Thailand!

The world is at war, for the indigenous the world has been at war for hundreds of years, yet the murder of indigenous people is hardly recognized unless they are dying in the way of an oil field.

There is the need for conflict to be resolved by mediation on the part of the United Nations before people are being killed. How many people came to the UN from Sudan, from Rwanda before the mass killings? Had there been effective mediation, these events would not have occurred.

The same goes for the Akha. Will the Akha of Thailand have to be starved to death before discussions can take place? Who should they go to in order to get mediation, protection?

Will the UN listen now, or will the Akha be ground into the sands of time, hardly noticed or known, while Thailand can sit on this and that Human Rights commission, with the UN being none the wiser what the government of Thailand has done to the Akha people in the north of the country. A trade partner with much of the world, while running programs against the Akha people, which are impossible for the Akha people to survive.