In recent months several cables have appeared in the Wikileaks files from the US Embassy in Vientiane. They offer little insight into the upper-level workings of the Lao party-state, as one might hope (but hardly expect). But there are other points of interest.
One cable, an assessment of Asian Development Bank’s Country Strategy and Program (2006), offers a stinging rebuke of bilateral and multilateral donors in Laos, particularly their failure to leverage reform in areas of governance. The criticisms (both of Lao governance and foreign aid) are familiar but the frankness is unusual, as the final “comment” makes clear:
It is a great pity that a half-century of aid and the GoL’s manifest dependence on it has not been translated into leverage for reform. This has not happened because neither the Japanese (the largest bilateral donor), nor ADB (the largest multilateral) have a sense of what such a fulcrum might be used for. Now that ADB is claiming to be re-thinking development priorities, those priorities should be reversed.
Two more cables deal with issues relating to the Hmong-American community. One of these, reported fairly widely in the US, describes the positive impact of Vang Pao’s 2007 arrest on Laos-US relations. Not only was the Lao government pleasantly surprised by the arrest, it seems, but so was the US embassy by the Lao government’s positive response to it. Perhaps this laid foundations for Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Thongloun Sisoulist’s unprecedented visit to Washington last year?
The second of these cables reports a speaking visit to Vientiane in 2008 by Blong Xiong, the Lao-Hmong president of Fresno City Council, and is also upbeat in tone. While the Americans had suggested “anodyne” speaking topics designed not to cause offence, Lao Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials surprised them by requesting a lecture on the more sensitive issue of “the role of overseas Lao [also referred to in the cable as “overseas Hmong”] in strengthening bilateral relations”. Xiong also had two “extremely positive” meetings with MFA officials, including the ethnic-Hmong head of the Overseas Lao department. Interestingly, in the latter meeting he spoke a mix of Lao (for the official bits) and Hmong (non-official parts), perhaps capturing the pragmatic basis of the visit and a more general moving on from past tensions.
[Image source]
7 responses so far ↓
1 john francis lee // Aug 26, 2011 at 9:23 am
‘ Asian Development Bank’s Country Strategy and Program (2006), offers a stinging rebuke of bilateral and multilateral donors in Laos, particularly their failure to leverage reform in areas of governance. ‘
‘Reform’ at the hands of this bunch!? Thank god the Lao’s have been spared that at least. The Chinese have unfortunately supplied similar ‘reforms’ in Lao.
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2 Eisel Mazard // Aug 27, 2011 at 12:44 pm
You’ve got to hand it to the diplomatic corps for taking the rhetoric up a notch from the usual feature section of The Economist; I can’t shake the sense that these guys are frustrated authors, yearning for an audience that could appreciate this kind of vitriol.
“Although GoL ministers and officials with salaries of less that 75 dollars per month sport villas and cars worthy of Monte Carlo, GDP
per capita is still officially less than $400 (probably a lot less – GoL figures have a good deal of wish fulfillment to them). Debt amounts to 80 percent of GDP. [...] The tiny banking sector is opaque and remains an non-performing loan (NPL) factory for SOEs and other forms of crony lending, despite IFI attempts to install reforms. [...] It’s no accident that these economic ills are not addressed. There is almost no rule of law or basic human freedom in Laos, and education is in the hands of a corrupt and ideologically hidebound ministry that uses ADB money to build a grandiose but unnecessary new ministry building while rural children sit on logs and try to remember what a teacher looked like.”
I really wasn’t expecting the cables to be this catty; it’s almost as if the bureaucratic context encourages them to step it up, in order not to be ignored amidst the pile of such reports that comes and goes with each season.
Another quote from the same cable:“[The new] ADB guidelines for continued assistance [have been imposed] following GoL recalcitrance in promised reforms over more than a decade of easy money.”
Of course… there have been sweeping reforms, both economic and political, and any history of Laos 1990-2010 would be preoccupied with describing those changes… this particular diplomatic cable, however, is just a review of the A.D.B.’s shifting priorities, and is not an evaluation of those reforms. I would be interested to see any cables broaching the current Lao mode of having elections: there’s only one party on the ballot, but they also allow “non-party” candidates to be elected to (hypothetically) oppose that one party… although a great many of them become members of the party soon after their election (and thus are de facto elected into the ruling party, not into the opposition… not that there is any opposition…).
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3 Paul Sidwell // Aug 27, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Only one strategy can help ordinary people – buying goods and services from businesses that employ people. How can ‘aid’ help Lao businesses to employ people? If one has an answer to that question, there is a basis for leveraging some benefit for aid dollars.
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4 It's Martino // Aug 28, 2011 at 11:24 am
Paul Sidwell, aid has sometimes been delivered to NGOs and local organisations to circumvent poor state governance. However, this is a grey area because aid organisations don’t want to be (or at least seen to be!) promoting political change in a sovereign state. NGOs can have positive impacts on employment with local businesses. At the same time NGOs can be very much poorly governed which results in greater corruption, so it’s incumbent on the donor to make sure that who they are providing aid to is worthwhile.
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5 Bill // Sep 18, 2011 at 2:18 am
As a longtime Vientiane resident, I’m mostly struck by the relative myopia of the cables. They cover a period of intense change in the country, and they are mostly saying nothing is changing, besides some material about their own relationships with the Lao government improving. Broadly they are far more about what Washington cares about (Hmong; money laundering; who the Lao government votes for at various UN meetings; limited progress on western style democratization) than what people in this country care about. The ADB piece is more about frustration that ADB is not pushing a different political system on the country than a critique of aid effectiveness per se. All in all, I came away with a sense of a parallel universe. Probably no different from other country’s cables if they leaked them all, but a little disturbing nevertheless.
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6 Laos According to Wikileaks · Global Voices // Sep 30, 2011 at 2:14 pm
[...] Walker thinks the cables “offer little insight into the upper-level workings of the Lao party-state” but there are other interesting revelations [...]
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7 Laos According to Wikileaks | Freedom Developers // Sep 30, 2011 at 7:31 pm
[...] Walker thinks the cables “offer little insight into the upper-level workings of the Lao party-state” but there are other interesting revelations [...]
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