To the indigenous peoples of North and South America, Columbus’s discovery was a historic disaster leading to the loss of their traditional freedoms and livelihoods, the devastation of their lands and the destruction of their cultures. That story continues today … for other non-European peoples all over the planet. For them Columbus’s discovery in 1492, and Vasco da Gama’s sailing to India in 1498, signify the beginning of half a millennium of European world domination – at first Christian and latterly secular.
James Robertson, 1990
Marie wrote to me in July 1998.
Dear Dervla,
At last the ‘Asian crisis’ has reached Laos, maybe a long-term good thing. Quite a few predators have taken fright and pulled out including Phu Bia Mining, Mansfield, Svenska, Sweco. Best of all, Nam Theun II dam is looking less attractive with some Thai investors selling some of their shares, though our government is still pushing for it. But Thailand won’t be buying as much electricity as planned before and won’t be paying such a high price, so conditions for the World Bank loan will be harder. Forget biodiversity, just from the economic angle Nam Theun II now looks stupid.
But this recession is a short-term bad thing. When you left four months ago the kip was 4,100 to the dollar, now it’s 5,400. Meat costs four times more than six months ago, rice has gone from 450 a kilo to 1,600. Many Vientiane families are hungry, government employees worst hit. Before, most city families were self-sufficient in food, growing rice and veg. on the plain around, keeping poultry and fish-ponds near their homes. That’s changed, very quickly, with more and more common land leased out by the government for commercial farming. Lao people working with international NGOs on a dollar wage are not so desperate even if they’re paid in kip. But my friends running small businesses can’t buy imported raw materials or spare parts and have sacked most workers. Two Lao Aviation planes were seized because the company couldn’t pay the leasing rates. So we have no more flights to Bangkok and domestic flights are much reduced and falangs advised to avoid them. In May the morning flight to Phonsavanh crashed, some spare part had been improvised. Lao friends of mine going to an environmental conference in Bokeo province were advised by the Prime Minister’s office not to take the scheduled flight but go by road via Thailand – a two-day journey! It’s said the Lao Tourism Authority is rethinking its plans for 1999 – supposed to be the ‘Visit Laos Year’! If so, that would be another good long-term outcome. Here expats have always forecast, ‘If the Thai economy coughs the Lao economy will die of pneumonia.’
The city streets are in such a state I can’t describe them, the construction teams seem to make no progress – why? There are many rumoured reasons but as usual no facts available. A few weeks ago the Lao Pako manager rode his motorbike into a big new hole six metres deep and unmarked – broke his shoulder and his head and lost his memory.
In May and June the Poo Khor Khain mountain, a so-called ‘protected area’ about 60 km from Vientiane, had extensive forest fires doing sickening damage. It was (still is) being logged by BPKP and repeatedly the workers’ fag-ends set things alight. So what’s new?!
I’m sorry Dervla this is all so grim but you wouldn’t want me to write you fairy-tales.
In December 1998 Marie wrote again, enclosing a cutting from the Vientiane Times. I read the cutting first.
NAM THEUN II TAKES MAJOR STEP FORWARD
Completion of the proposed Nam Theun II hydropower project, which has been disputed for years between the developers and environmentalists, took a major step forward on November 16 when a ‘Heads of Agreement’ was signed between the government of the Lao PDR and the Nam Theun II Electricity Consortium (NTEC). Although negotiations regarding impacts of the giant dam, to inundate 450 square km, are still going on, many construction activities have already been carried out by NTEC. Its Director, M. Jean-Christophe Delvallet, said, ‘The very large revenues of Nam Theun II for the government will without any doubt greatly benefit Laos, its economy and people.’
This project has been the subject of an extensive series of environmental, social, financial and economic assessments by the developers and many independent experts working on behalf of the Lao government and the World Bank. One of the project’s very important consequences will be assured funding for thirty years of the management of the Conservation Area which forms the greater part of the project’s catchment area. Adequate funding should preserve it from the stress of population pressures. Studies have estimated that the people to be resettled would enjoy new livelihoods and live in project-funded housing at over triple their present income levels.
The Lao government will receive about half of all project-related revenues in the first twenty-five years. Ownership of Nam Theum II will then be passed over, debt-free, to the Lao PDR with annual sales revenues of about US$250 million. These benefits will be used by the government to help construct poverty-alleviating infrastructure projects. However, problems still facing the developers and the government could conceivably alter some of the projections. The biggest problem is the current pricing negotiations with the main buyer of electricity, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT). Officials say they are also waiting for World Bank support to act as financial supporter and guarantor of the project. Subject to gaining World Bank approval, construction could begin at the beginning of 1999.
Dear Dervla,
Do you remember the first draft I showed you of the ‘Social Status’ for Nam Theun II? The first two anthropologists appointed to do the job were too humanistic for everybody’s liking and the final report has been doctored considerably and contradicts a lot of the research done. Dervla, these gentle nomadic people have literally been ethnically cleansed from the Nam Theun area – resettlement amounts to that. It is a terrible tragedy that none of the NGOs is addressing. And none of the reports are truthful and accurate. IUCN funds all these reports, then makes it very difficult for the general public to get hold of the sensitive ones. Yet they are all supposed to be Discussion Papers, like the one you had at Lao Pako, to stimulate honest debate. Last June fourteen Thai NGOs sent a letter to Thailand’s Prime Minister urging their government not to buy power from Nam Theun II, which will force the relocation of more than 5,000 people from twenty-eight different ethnic groups. They said, ‘Our ailing economy has resulted in a negative growth rate in electricity demand and large reserves of existing generation capacity, which becomes a burden on the investment costs for EGAT, and eventually on consumers. Nam Theun II is highly risky for Thailand and Laos. In the years since it was proposed, the dam’s cost has risen from $800 million to $1.5 billion, while its expected returns have fallen from $250 million to $38 million.’ All this was published in the Bangkok Post, it would never get into the Vientiane Times.
Unpleasant progress has been made on many other dam proposals. Massive road building projects are happening all over the country, often linked to those proposals. Now the Norwegian government is giving us a present of US$1.84 million to fund an economic, technical and environmental analysis for the Seset II dam project – only 12 miles north of Seset I! Four Norwegian consultant companies are competing for the feasibility study and I’m told the evaluation of their bids is under way. This is the first benefit the international community gets from all these dams, mountains of work for consultants charging a thousand dollars a day. The study is to be carried out between now and November ’99 so we have time to campaign against Seset II. As we must do, we must never despair and give up and let them get on with it. That’s what they want, they’re very afraid of publicity so please discuss this in your book! Near the site proposed for Seset II a pair of Giant Ibis were spotted recently, the first sighting of these birds, anywhere, for over thirty years. Also White-winged Wood-duck babies were seen in that area, plus nesting Sarus Cranes and three rare species of stork, all globally threatened.
Although Laos is now the darling of the aid and development industries (as you say Rwanda was in the ’70s and ’80s), very few expats attend to any of the real issues. People on such high salaries and so disconnected from ordinary Laotians are useless. UNDP is a quagmire of corruption just because people earning that much are not prepared to risk their jobs by entering even the tiniest of controversies. They end up acting a part and saying nothing about anything. Meanwhile the government (which needs no encouragement) picks up from them on the latest development fashions of the day and copies them and also manipulates the UNDP to its own advantage.
Despite rumours of total economic collapse a big building boom goes on in Vientiane. Trees are being cut down everywhere and in a couple of months five-storey apartment blocks or silly vulgar mansions have taken their place. They have felled a lot of those ancient and magnificent trees along the Mekong, to make way for a wide concrete walkway by the riverfront. The process of hacking them down was horrific and from our house I could see and hear it. They were much too hard and wide for even the latest type of chain-saws. It took weeks of mangling at them, then their root networks were left like tortured remnants – they were political prisoners holding out to the very last! It has all been so sad, you would weep with me.
Crime in Vientiane has really gathered momentum. Very violent motorbike thieves patrol the night streets – so safe when you were here! They are all the sons of senior military personnel and government ministers, running riot, so there is nothing the police can do. Jaques got mugged last week and his motorbike stolen. This was not a particularly brutal attack but recently several Lao have been stabbed or shot dead when attempting to hold on to their motorbikes. Some stories have been exaggerated because this is all so very new and frightening for Lao people but the fact remains these crimes are happening and not being committed by the destitute poor but by arrogant and well-connected youth.
The rains never really came, there has been a drought in the midlands, people say the Indonesian smoke-blanket had a lot to do with it. If ever I have good news I’ll send it at once!
15 January 1999
Dear Marie,
It’s frightening that a country can be changed so quickly – what you say about crime in Vientiane, the Mekong embankment trees and so on. I’ve just come across John Pilger’s definition of what you called ‘the ’90s’ most irritating buzz-phrase’. He wrote in the Irish Times, ‘The international community is not “international” at all; it is the Western establishment whose will is sometimes expressed through the Security Council, at other times through NATO, generally unilaterally. At all times it is dominated by the US. It is a new order with an old meaning: imperialism.’ This definition should perhaps be expanded to include those Asian, African and South American predators who, in collusion with Rich World consortia, exploit the Poor World – their own peoples and natural resources.
Last week I met, through a mutual friend, a Swedish ‘economic adviser’ (Karl) who knows Laos well, speaks the language, claims to love the people, yet is passionately pro-dam and every sort of macro-development. My first impression was of someone glowing with kindness who saw helping Laos as his vocation; he seemed the antithesis of the typical band-wagoneering expat ‘expert’. Believing in the absolute superiority of the contemporary Western way of life, he can conceive of no reason for not sharing our ‘advantages’ with the rest of the world. He spoke with missionary zeal of bringing ‘academic centres of excellence’ to Laos to enable the leadership to become ‘politically mature’ so that they could ‘form a modern nation-state and get democracy off the ground’.
There followed some bare-knuckle stuff – the fact that we were total strangers, meeting on neutral ground in a Dublin hotel, freed our confrontation from any hostess/guest constraints. Why, Karl demanded, should interfering foreigners oppose any project, hydropower or otherwise, that the Lao government has decided it urgently needs? Why should paternalistic outsiders claim to know best and try to deny to others the goods and services they themselves enjoy? My attitude, he argued, was patronizing and racist, wanting to keep Lao peasants as quaint relics of times past, living in squalor as ignorant impoverished subsistence farmers. He can only see the rural Lao as ‘primitive’, not yet living in what he calls the ‘real world’ and unable to get there without our assistance. I see them as civilized, well-balanced people, immensely knowledgeable about their own environment – and what right have we to disrupt their small, sustainable, independent communities? In my exasperation I accused Karl of being a cultural imperialist which I now realize was too glib and unfair to him as an individual. James Robertson, in one of his several inspiring books on the need for radical change, sums up the Karl type:
Owing to the pressures of professional groupthink and the over-riding imperatives of career survival and success, most mainstream practitioners in all walks of life – including politics and the communications media – become prisoners of the existing systems of organisation and perception in which they operate, and lose the capacity to do more than tinker with them.
Apart from ‘professional groupthink’ (splendid phrase!) what we are also confronting here is a total incomprehension of peoples who live by other standards, who differ from us on every level: spiritual, emotional, intellectual. Inevitably this leads to a gross lack of respect, a failure to appreciate the worth of those peoples’ own traditions and wisdom and sensibilities. Karl could not see how profoundly insulting it is for outsiders to tell the Lao (or whoever) that their way of life is inferior and they must be remoulded in our image and likeness – which means making them as dependent on remote institutions beyond their control as we are. Neither could he see what James Robertson – amidst thousands of others – has pointed out: ‘Already, the present human population is consuming and polluting more than the Earth can sustain. That all people could ever attain the high-consuming and high-polluting ways of life of today’s rich countries, is a sheer impossibility. A change of direction to progress of a different kind is bound to come, either through purposeful endeavour or as the aftermath of global catastrophe.’
Most of us ‘green radicals’ merely wring our hands, gnash our teeth, foam at our mouths – and feel helpless. Yet we do have thinking leaders like James Robertson who offer practical alternatives to the present mad way of running the world. And more and more people are listening to them. Nil desperandum!