LUANG PRABANG, Laos - It is has been one
year since Sompawn Khantisouk was abducted by men
believed to be local police officers. The
whereabouts of the entrepreneur, the owner and
manager of a small eco-tourism lodge in northern
Laos, are still unknown - indeed, no one other
than his abductors even knows if he is still
alive.
Many at the time assumed he was
taken away as punishment for trying to mobilize
local villagers in the area against
Chinese-sponsored rubber plantation projects. Now
it seems more likely that Sompawn was victim to a
new and pressing dilemma facing one of the world's
last remaining communist-ruled countries: how to
balance rapid market-driven economic growth with
the strict
social controls that the Lao
People’s Revolutionary Party has kept in place
since it assumed power in 1975.
Sompawn
ran the famous Boat-Landing resort, which is
mentioned in most foreign guide books to Laos and
had won several awards for its contribution to
environmentally sound sustainable tourism.
Eco-tourism promotion is even listed as one of the
Lao government's five main development priorities,
along with hydroelectric power, construction
materials, agriculture and mining.
Last
July, Laos hosted an Ecotourism Forum, which
brought together tour operators, travel agents,
hoteliers, development agencies and government
authorities from throughout the Mekong river
region. Those efforts have won significant
international plaudits, including a New York Times
survey that recently ranked Laos as the world’s
top adventure tourism spot in 2008.
At the
same time, there are entrenched official fears
about growing foreign influence in the country,
particularly in remote rural areas. Sompawn's
partner was an American citizen and the country's
security agencies were reportedly not pleased to
see a foreigner help run the successful business.
At about the time Sompawn disappeared, his
American partner left the country and has not
since returned.
Soon thereafter, at least
two foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
were ordered out of Luang Nam Tha, the province
where the Boat-Landing is located. Other,
lesser-known operators of small local businesses
with foreign links were threatened with expulsion
or stricter supervision of their activities,
according to sources in northern Laos.
"On
the one hand, the government welcomes the foreign
revenue from tourism, while on the other it fears
the security implications of allowing tourists to
wonder at will around the country," wrote Song
Kinh, an article published in the Irrawaddy news
magazine. Officials overseeing the fast-growing
tourism sector tend to be somewhat more
accommodating to foreigners, while security
personnel are less so.
The latter are
particularly suspicious of foreign-run NGOs, many
of which work to empower local communities by
teaching them basic democratic principles and
which security officials see as a challenge to the
authority of the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary
Party, the country’s only political party. While
Sompawn's local business was not an NGO, many of
its tourism activities were done in close
consultation with local communities.
Foreign devils As a legacy of
wars in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, first against
the French and then against the US in what the Lao
government refers to as "the 30-year struggle",
the country's communist rulers remain wary of
foreign influences. For instance, some of the NGOs
that have been targeted for harassment are known
to have had Christian connections.
While
the vast majority of the country's lowlanders are
Buddhist, Christianity has made inroads in the
highlands, home of several ethnic minorities that
have a long history of resistance to integration
into mainstream Lao society. There are historical
reasons for their squeamishness. During the
Indochina conflict, thousands of Hmong tribesmen -
although ostensibly part of the then Royal Lao
Army - were armed and equipped by the American
Central Intelligence Agency to fight the communist
Pathet Lao, which, in the end, emerged victorious
in the war.
Then American Christian
missionaries worked more or less openly for the
CIA, among them the legendary Edgar "Pop" Buell,
an Indiana farmer who was assigned to the Xieng
Khouang area in and around the Plain of Jars,
where he came into contact with the Hmong. Later,
he became the principal contact man between the
CIA and the Hmong, working closely with the Hmong
warlord Vang Pao, who escaped to the US before the
communist takeover in 1975, and, despite his now
advanced age, has continued to campaign against
the country's communist rulers.
In June
last year, the authorities in California arrested
him on charges of masterminding a plot to
overthrow the Lao government with arms and
equipment that were ready to be shipped to
Thailand. Eight others were also arrested and
charged with violating the federal US Neutrality
Act, among them a former California National
Guard, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison Ulrich Jack, a
1968 West Point graduate who was involved in
covert operations during the Vietnam War.
The other seven were all Hmong from Laos
who had been resettled in the US after the end of
the war. The criminal complaint said Vang Pao and
the other defendants plotted an insurgent
campaign, "by violent means, including murder,
assaults on both military and civilian officials
in Laos and the destruction of buildings and
property". In July, he was released on bail.
However, the events in California had
repercussions in Thailand, where in a bid to ease
bilateral tensions the government announced that
it would repatriate thousands of Hmong refugees
back to Laos. Now totaling about 8,000, their
numbers have swelled in recent years due to fresh
arrivals, indicating that all is not well in the
Lao mountains. Although the Hmong insurgency,
which simmered on throughout the 1980s and into
the 1990s, is now more or less over, there are
reports of occasional skirmishes and ambushes
involving hill-tribe bands, mostly in the area
around Phou Bia mountains south of the Plain of
Jars, and near the town of Kasi on the main road
between Vientiane and Luang Prabang.
With
the revelations of a Vang Pao's latest plot, the
already paranoid security authorities in Laos may
have seen a broader US conspiracy in the
eco-tourism joint venture they broke up with
Sompawn's abduction and the US citizen fleeing the
country. They may also have read with some
suspicion the US State Department's International
Religious Freedom Reports, which frequently
mention "abuses of citizen's religious freedom" in
Laos, especially arrests of Christians and actions
taken against the independent Lao Evangelical
Church (LEC). The 2007 report mentions closure of
LEC-affiliated churches and the detention without
charges of local Christian community leaders.
Costly xenophobia With that bad
publicity, the security authorities seem to
believe that remote provinces such as Luang Nam
Tha are better cleansed of foreign, especially
Western, influences. Wealthy Chinese tourists to
the newly opened casino on the Lao side of the
frontier at Boten bring in only money, not new
potentially destabilizing ideas about human rights
and democracy, so they remain welcome. Aloon
Dalaloy, vice governor of Luang Nam Tha, is
reported to have told a public gathering in the
province last year that "we are still fighting the
revolution, not against the enemy's bombs and
guns, but the Americans and the Christians are
still our enemies."
Such rhetoric, of
course, overlooks the more pressing national
challenges the transition to a free-market economy
represents. As the Lao economy continues is rapid
expansion, with gross domestic product growth up
over 7% in the past two years, there is an acute
and growing shortage of skilled labor. And there
is no remedy in sight, unless the government moves
to employ more outside experts. In a paper dated
December 14, 2007, the Asia Foundation pointed out
that Laos has only one university, which opened
only 11 years ago. Prior to that, students were
sent to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland and
other Eastern Bloc countries for higher education,
but that training is often irrelevant to the
country’s current human needs.
When the
National University of Laos enrolled its first
class in 1996, there were just over 8,000
students. Today there are nearly 27,000 at the
university, but, the Asia Foundation says, the
shortage of human and economic resources poses
constant challenges and most faculty members have
no degree beyond bachelor's level. With the
country's few skilled professionals opting to work
in better-paying foreign-led private enterprises,
according to the Asia Foundation, it is hard "to
imagine how departments like engineering, natural
sciences and business will be able to keep their
best and brightest teachers, all but eliminating
the mechanism for building a future generation of
capable Lao professionals".
That means the
Lao government can either dramatically raise the
salaries of professors and technocrats, or employ
more foreigners to fill the gaps - and hope that
foreign donors will pay for their much higher
expatriate salaries. But that also means more
foreign influences, not only in sectors like
ecotourism and small-scale rural development
schemes but in central government institutions as
well. That arguably would pose an even graver
threat to central control than foreign-managed
eco-tourism resorts or NGO and missionary
activities in politically sensitive highland
areas.
The ruling Lao People's
Revolutionary Party has arrived at a crucial
crossroads and the direction pursued will likely
make or break its still tentative economic reform
experiment. Clearly there are still elements in
the party who are reluctant to change their
repressive ways, accept new social and economic
realities and move the country forward.
Sompawn’s arrest and disappearance is
testament to that inertia. But with the country's
greater integration into the global economy, party
officials will sooner or later have to face the
fact that even landlocked Laos cannot remain
insulated from foreign influences.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review, for which he wrote frequently on Lao
politics and economics. He is currently a writer
with Asia-Pacific Media Services.
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