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In the north live some 250,000 nomadic hill tribesmen who have migrated into Thai territory from Burma and China over the past century, have little allegiance to anything beyond the profitable art of growing opium poppies. Helping them move the illegal raw opium are some 3,500 Chinese Nationalist soldiers, aging remnants of the Kuomintang's 93rd Division who fled from Yunnan into Burma in 1949. With tacit approval of the Thais, the heavily armed old soldiers maintain camps above Chiang Mai, work closely with Shan rebels, a Burmese tribe in revolt against Rangoon, who swap opium for food and weapons.
Far to the south, amid the fertile plantations of pineapple, sugar cane and tapioca, lurks another band of old soldiers. Thailand's four provinces bordering Malaysia harbor more than 500 Communist guerrillas, remnants of the war that the Reds lost in Malaya. Though they claim that their enemy is still Malaysia and the British, the superannuated rebels harass the Moslem Thais who live in the south for "taxes," and lately have turned up with the same propaganda leaflets as the terrorists in the northeast.
Alphabet Soup. Though in the northeast the Thais have found it necessary, as Thanom says, "to meet force with force," essentially, in all its backward regions, the government, with U.S. aid and advice, is attempting a far more ambitious solution. Its aim is nothing less than to transform the traditional pattern of Southeast Asian government, which is strong enough in the capital but hardly exists at the remote town and village level. "The villagers are often frightened," says one U.S. observer in Nakhon Phanom, "of what both the government and roving Communist bands will do to them." Since Thailand's burgeoning economy hardly requires the sort of pump priming typical of most aid programs, much of the $400 million that the U.S. has given Thailand since 1951 has been targeted to fill two loopholes: the lack of police and civil authorities in the countryside.
The result of the joint U.S.-Thai effort is an alphabet soup of crash programs to bring Bangkok's concern for its "outlanders" to life. MDUs (Mobile Development Units), 100-man teams of health workers, road builders and education officials directed by the military, are operating in nine provinces, and are out to make quick impact in the most threatened areas, then move on, building roads, schools, dispensaries—whatever most needs to be done. ARD (Accelerated Rural Development) teams do the same sort of work under provincial authority but move in to stay. Their goals range from providing rural electrification to potable-water systems for 1,000 communities within three years, to establishing community-development projects in 6,700 villages by 1968. One key ARD program: an academy for local government opened last year for district chiefs.
Bawdy Refrains. MIT (Mobile Information Teams) spreads the government message among the peasants. One popular means: sandwiching the anti-Communist word among the bawdy lyrics of the popular mohlam minstrels of