Vietnam asserting greater control over Laos
WASHINGTON - Vietnam’s communist regime is tightening its control of neighboring Laos by exploiting its economy and looting natural resources, dissident Lao groups in the United States charged on Monday.“The (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) regime has reduced Laos to a de facto and de jure colonial possession and vassal state,” said a joint statement at the end of a meeting of 15 ethnic Lao and Hmong human rights groups in Washington.
Delegates to the meeting charged that state- and military-owned Vietnamese companies were “exploiting Laos’s economy and looting its natural resources and treasury in an environment of systemic corruption and lack of transparency,” the statement said. Wang Yee Vang, secretary general of the Lao National Federation, said he received reports from home that Vietnamese were flooding his country, occupying vast tracts of land and displacing natives.
“Many Laotians were promised better returns and asked to move out of their farmlands to new areas but they end up being unemployed,” he told AFP after the meeting. “When they return to their original farmlands, they see the Vietnamese have taken them over.” Vang urged the US Congress to live up to legislation that it had passed in May seeking to stop the Lao regime’s “oppression and killing of its own people and egregious human rights violations.”
Vietnam still has considerable political influence in Laos, where it had kept an official military presence until 1989. It has repeatedly denied its troops are still active across the border. Troops from the Lao regime, backed by Vietnamese aircraft and weapons and in some cases soldiers, have launched a campaign to wipe out the Hmong tribe in Laos, conference participants said.
The Hmong people were hired by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War to fight North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops. The North Vietnamese eventually gained control of Vietnam and helped the Pathet Lao to occupy the neighboring state.“SRV Vietnamese military generals, officials and advisors clandestinely, directly and indirectly control all government ministries in Laos through various state organs, committees, agents and agents of influence,” the joint statement said.
Philip Smith, Washington director of the Lao Veterans of America, said the World Bank should not approve financing for a 1.2 billion dollar proposed dam project in Laos “because if it is implemented, revenue may end up in the private bank accounts of some of the generals in Hanoi.” “We also believe the dam will be a disaster both economically and ecologically and will not better the plate of ordinary Laotians and likely enrich the governing elite in Laos,” he said.
The World Bank has just started an appraisal process for the hydroelectric dam project, to be undertaken by the global arm of French state-owned Electricite de France and other groups. Smith said the United States should lead international pressure to push for democracy and other fundamental rights in Laos, which would be hosting an annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in July.
Foreign ministers from the 10 ASEAN states as well as their key trading partners, including the United States, European Union, Japan and China, would participate in the talks in the Laotian capital. “If the US considers ASEAN significant, one would hope for accountability and positive change in Laos,” he said.
Agence France Presse - February 8, 2005
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