2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) Figure 2: A Convener’s visit to a Lahu household. ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT TWO The second stop on our field visit was a small stateless Hmong community, whose life story complicates existing literature on the relationship between the Hmong and the Thai state and exemplifies state illegibility. During the Cold War, the Thai army and the United States of America Central Intelligence Agency recruited the Hmong communities to fight against the communist insurgents along the Thai– Laos borders through programmes that would ensure both legibility and loyalty to the state such as permanent settlement, military training and citizenship conferral. 89 These Hmong are officially referred to by the Thai state as ‘the Hmong of Wat Thamkrabok’ 90 (ม้งในที่พกั สงฆ์ถ้ าํ กระบอก), and also sometimes as ‘the Hmong who have contributed to Thailand’ (ม้งทําคุณประโยชน์). However, more than 40 years have passed and this family still is without the promised citizenship, affecting the lives of subsequent generations. A man in his 50s, whose father was part of the 89 90 John McKinnon and Bernard Vienne, Hill Tribes Today: Problems in Change (White LotusOrstom 1989), cited in Flaim (n 14) 154–5; See also William Leary, ‘CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974: Supporting the “Secret War”’, Central Intelligence Agency (Web Page, 14 April 2007) <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csipublications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html>. Wat Thamkrabok is a Thai Buddhist temple where many Hmong took refuge. Ian Baird explores the relationship between the temple and the Hmong people in details in Ian G Baird ‘The Monks and the Hmong: The Special Relationship between the Chao Fa and the Tham Krabok Buddhist Temple in Saraburi Province, Thailand’ in Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke (eds), Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia (Routledge 2013). 228