Govt urged to be lenient with innocent intruders

The ombudsman suggested that officials be lenient with those who are honest and strict with those who are deliberately encroaching upon state property. According to the recommendations, people who were living in national forests well before the land law took effect on December 1, 1954 should not be seen as encroaching.
“They should be allowed to continue living there,” Ombudsman Siracha Charoenpanij said yesterday.
He was disclosing details of the recommendations submitted to the Cabinet on April 27. The Office of the Ombudsman has spent about eight months looking into the alleged encroachment on forest reserves as well as land plots allocated to landless farmers in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Wang Nam Kheow district.
Siracha said those who had unknowingly settled down in areas marked out as forests or farmers-only zones should be dealt with leniently.
“Give them time, perhaps 15 years, to adjust and relocate,” he said, adding that those who are allowed to stay should not encroach into other areas.
Siracha said the Office of the Ombudsman believed that people who started encroaching on forestland after the Cabinet issued a widely-publicised resolution barring encroachment on June 30, 1998 should be punished.
He said harsher punishment would be meted out to investors who had bought encroaching land because they clearly had a dishonest intent.
Siracha said the main principle was that the government should check on how people came to encroach upon state land.
“Launch an investigation to determine their intention,” he advised.
He said he had been asking chiefs of the Department of Special Investigation and the Royal Forest Department to suspend legal proceedings against those suspected of encroaching at least until the Cabinet takes a clear stance on his office’s recommendations. Though he admitted it was not mandatory for the Cabinet to follow the recommendations.