Ayo risks being arrested if he leaves his village, nestled in the gentle slopes along Thailand's hilly northern border, for a visit south, say to the capital Bangkok.

His crime? Being a member of a hill tribe, the Akha.

The same predicament awaits other members of the Akha, even though many of them, like the fair, slender-built Ayo, were born in Thailand. ''We live in fear of the police, so we have to be careful about our movements,'' says Ayo, who only has one name, like some of the other Akha.

The Akha are one among the four major ethnic groups among up to 20 in northern Thailand, the others being the Lahu, Lisu and Karen. Together, they make up close to a million hill tribe people.

Ayo, 20, is well aware that the predicament faced by his hill tribe  which lives close to the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai  stems from Bangkok's policies toward the hill tribes.

Yet it is also in Chiang Rai that Thailand's tourism authorities offer another face about the hill tribe people  that they are a welcome magnet to attract tourists who visit the northern reaches of this Southeast Asian country.

Be it at the airport or in some shops huddled along Chiang Rai's small streets, visitors come face to face with posters and post cards celebrating the colourful dress and culture of the hill tribes. The Akha, for instance, stand out for their headdress adorned with silver ornaments, while the Lahu women are known for their distinct black-and-red jackets.

Tourist attraction

Last year, the northern towns of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai attracted over 1.9 million tourists out of the record 10 million foreigners who visited Thailand. In 2000, the national tourism authority reports that 1.7 million tourists vacationed in the northern towns.

''The hill tribes are important for tourism in the north. They come second, after trekking and exploring nature, to draw visitors,'' says Smithseth Chantusen of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

These twin realities do not sit well with Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, ananthropologist at Chiang Mai University, since they reveal a glaring duplicity about the Thai government's attitude towards the hill tribe people.

Thailand comes out in poor light, he says, since the government's policy toward the hill tribes translates to them being acceptable to the country as a commodity but having little value as peoples.

And there is a little shift away from government policies that treat the hill tribes as ''aliens'', consequently denying them the rights guaranteed to Thais, he points out. ''Many of them have no legal status and can be arrested for a number of reasons, including moving out of the restricted areas for them in the north.''

At the same time, he adds, the hill tribes are increasingly being presented as an essential selling point to lure tourists to Thailand. ''For over two decades, the hill tribe people have been promoted by the tourism authorities and private travel agents as a colourful and exotic aspect of Thailand,'' he explains.

Exploitation

Activists campaigning for the rights of the hill tribe people are equally troubled at the scale of discrimination these ethnic groups are subject to. ''It is exploitation, because the governments are only interested in profiting from them,'' says Sombat Boongamanong, director of the Mirror Art Group, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with hill tribe children in Chiang Rai.

''They should be offered the right to stay, move around freely and to work, particularly the generations born in Thailand,'' he argues. ''As they are, they have little freedom and are vulnerable, with little protection.''

Often, members of the hill tribes are arrested and held in police custody for over 20 days. During this period, hardly any of them receive legal assistance, a reflection of how Thai society perceives these ethnic minorities.

According to rights activist Sunai Phasuk, even those who helped draft Thailand's 1997 Constitution, dubbed by many as the ''People's Constitution'' for guaranteeing and protecting many individual rights, dismissed the concerns of the hill tribes.

''The tribal people made representations about their rights, their need for citizenship during the public hearings for the current constitution,but their views were not incorporated,'' says Sunai, a political analyst at Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog.

Little wonder why what little support there is for the hill tribes comes up against public silence or ambivalence. Groups like the Assembly of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Thailand (AITT) attribute this to the way Thai governments have been projecting the hill tribes to the average person.

''The work and practice of the governments in the past has displayed a constant view of indigenous and tribal people as the source of problems for the government,'' AITT states in a petition this month to the government.

Hill tribes marginalised

During the Cold War, for instance, the hill tribes were welcomed by the Thai government during its battle with communist rebels. But since the early 1990s, the hill tribes have been marginalised. The reasons ranged from arguments that the customs and traditions of the hill tribes make them ''non-Thais'', to the push by some green activists to rid the forests of hill tribes that they said damaged the environment.

When it comes to deciding who among the hill tribes could stay or should leave, the current Thai government is no different from its predecessors. ''If they come illegally, we ask them to go back to their homes,'' says an official from the ministry of the interior. ''If they come legally there is a process to follow.''

Moving across borders from northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia to even southern China is common for hill tribe people, given their nomadic origins and their movement in the region even before political boundaries were put in place.

Among the one million hill tribe people in northern Thailand are some 300,000 who have legal papers, enabling them to stay in the country. The rest live in a state of limbo, even though they have been born here.

Ayo is doing his bit to increase that number by securing legal residency for his community of 76 families. ''I have been reading about our rights and helping families fill the papers, but it is not easy,'' he says.

But despite the odds he faces, he is determined to make a case for his people. ''If I don't do this no one will. I want to fight for my village, for us to be Thais.''