[Tlc] L-ecology

Fri Feb 1 04:06:34 PST 2008

FYI.
Thanks,
justin

2008-0201 - Asia Times - Fear of foreigners in Laos

http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JB02Ae01.html

Asia Time Online - Daily News

Southeast Asia
Feb 2, 2008

Fear of foreigners in Laos
By Bertil Lintner

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.

© Copyright 1999 - 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd.
Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen
Street East, Central, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab
Kirikhan, Thailand 77110

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu