Palaung in Northern Thailand, The

Michael C. Howard and Wattana Wattanapun

Today over two thousand Palaung—a group of mountain peoples who speak Mon-Khmer—live in a handful of villages north of Chiang Mai in Thailand. They fled here from Burma in the 1980s to escape the fighting between communist insurgents and Burmese army troops. Though granted sanctuary, in the late 1990s many of the Palaung in Thailand found themselves involved in a new conflict over land use in northern Thailand's environmentally degraded highlands.