Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik Third World: Thailand, the new Siam, included. As we all know, it is all in the Westphalia-styled arrangement forcefully and arbitrarily imposed by the imperial West. There followed the regime of nation state, sovereignty, and the “mapping” of state boundaries. Historically, all this was instrumental in establishing peace and order in disorderly and anarchical Europe. But also significantly, it comes to serve as the sole criterion lawfully set for membership status in the so-called community of nations. It means that only the voice of entity as nation states could be effectively heard in all international dealings, such as in day-to-day activities under the current United Nations. In actuality, it is the exclusive voice of the powerful, and more often than not anathema to the minorities’ rights to exert their selfidentity and self-determination. This is indeed the crux of the whole matter, in spite of all the talk about democratic process. Indeed, in spite of all the international Declarations. As has been observed nowadays, there is a kind of built-in exclusiveness and absolutism in the concept and practice of state sovereignty itself that needs to be looked into. While it has been serving the purpose of state security fairly well, perhaps all too well, it has obviously become one most serious threat to human rights and security. Minorities, among all other under-privileged peoples the world over, become the exclusive victims. In fact, quite a few of them could very well be qualified as nations in terms of size, number, and social and political structure. Of course, all this does not at all mean that the state of human rights fared any better in the pre-modern Third World. In mainland Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, there were plenty of wars of aggression and all kinds of oppression, and even subjugation. But then at the very least, the indigenous peoples and communities were allowed to look after themselves and thus enjoy a degree of traditional autonomy. That was how their self-identities and ethnicity were preserved in practically all aspects of life: religions, beliefs, cultures, languages, as well as traditional knowledge and creativity. This last but not least, traditional knowledge and creativity, has particular 44 OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND