Laos stonewalls on disappearances

 

Laos stonewalls on disappearances

• Published: 19 Mar 2013 at 09.36
• Online news: Asia

 Click on the link to get more news and video from original source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/asia/341286/laos-stonewalls-on-disappearances

A US-based human rights coalition has strongly condemned Laos for obstructing attempts to find three Hmong-Americans missing since early January.

The case of the three Hmong-Americans missing in southern Laos has been linked to the equally mysterious disappearance of civic activist Sombath Somphone, whose case also has been stonewalled by the entire Lao government and security apparatus.

“Brutal and corrupt elements of the Lao security services, including the secret police, military and communist party apparatus, appear to be seeking to cover-up what has happened to these three Americans,” said the statement, issued on Tuesday and posted on the CCPA website.

The US State Department said it had sent three embassy officials to Savannakhet to investigate the disappearances, but they were assaulted by Lao security forces.

“Local Lao officials refused to provide any information or assistance in determining the welfare and whereabouts of the missing men, and physically prevented the Embassy officials from entering an incident site which may be related to the case,” a US Embassy spokesman in Vientiane said.

The human rights group Center for Public Policy Analysis (CPPA) on Tuesday charged that Laos was obstructing attempts to learn the fates of the three missing men.

The ethnic men were last seen in Savannakhet province in southern Laos.

Souli Kongmalavong, Bounma Phannhotha and Bounthie Insixiengmai, all from Minnesota state, “appear to have gone missing under mysterious circumstance involving the Lao secret police and military,” Tuesday’s statement said.

The activists linked the disappearance of the three US citizens to the case of civic activist Sombath Somphone.

Mr Sombath, a Lao citizen, disappeared in Vientiane on Dec 15. The government has stonewalled all information about his disappearance.

The CPPA’s statement came with support from United Lao for Democracy and Human Rights (ULDHR), the Lao Human Rights Council (LHRC), the United League for Democracy in Laos, Inc. (ULDL), the Laos Institute for Democracy (LIFD), and a coalition of non-governmental organisations.

The Vientiane embassy’s statement on Sunday said the US government had received information the three Americans died in a traffic accident.

But when consular officials tried to get information on the scene, Lao security stopped them.

“We will continue to vigorously press the Lao government for information and assistance with this case,” it said.

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jacksprat

Post : 2,254

Discussion 1 : 19 Mar 2013 at 11.081

A Lao refugee colleague told me that bad things can happen to those who go back. She did pay a visit, until her uncle advised her to leave for her safety. Those who fled are still referred to as “traitors” by the government, even though she was only a child at the time.

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Laos stonewalls on disappearances

“Here in Laos,” she said, “the past is always with us.”

Clinton, in historic visit to Laos, touches on toll of Vietnam War

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/clinton-in-historic-visit-to-laos-touches-on-toll-of-vietnam-war/2012/07/11/gJQAClPFdW_story.html

Click on picture

By Stephanie McCrummen, Published: July 11

VIENTIANE, Laos — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday became the first high-ranking U.S. official to visit Laos since the Vietnam War era, when the United States dropped some 260 million cluster bombs across the countryside in a nine-year campaign to crush North Vietnamese supply lines and bases. Clinton met with Laotian Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong and other officials for talks that centered mostly on addressing the lingering effects of that war — including a sense of mutual estrangement — and then toured a small museum devoted to its human toll.

In the sweltering afternoon, Clinton walked through an exhibit of dangling cluster bombs and crude wooden artificial legs made by villagers whose limbs had been blown off by unexploded ordnance, the legacy of a war that Clinton had protested as a college student in the 1960s.

Then she met Phongsavath Souliyalat, who had been blinded by and lost both hands to a cluster bomb. He told her he hoped governments would ban the weapon.

“We have to do more,” Clinton responded. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.”

The stop in Vientiane, Laos’s capital, was a brief but symbolically significant part of a longer trip that has also taken Clinton to Mongolia, Vietnam and, later Wednesday, to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, where she was expected to attend Thursday’s regional meeting of the ASEAN group of 10 Southeast Asian nations.

The trip is intended to underline the Obama administration’s much-promoted strategic pivot toward Asia, and more particularly to convince ASEAN nations that U.S. interests in the region are not just security-based, but economic as well. Clinton is unveiling a range of economic initiatives and private-sector business deals during the trip.

At the same time, the United States is trying to encourage ASEAN nations to assert themselves in a simmering territorial dispute with China over the South China Sea, which analysts view as a test case for how a rising China will deal with the world — through threats and coercion or according to international legal norms.

China claims most of the South China Sea, including portions also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, and the resolution of those disputes will determine not only fishing rights but the rights to potentially large reserves of oil and natural gas.

The United States has been pushing the ASEAN nations to unify around a legally binding code of conduct based on international maritime law as a means of managing the disputes and as a way of cultivating ASEAN as a partner in the larger mission of engaging China.

China essentially wants the United States to stay out of it, and it is unclear which way ASEAN nations will bend.Even if they do come up with a tough code of conduct, analysts say the Chinese are unlikely to sign on to it.

Finessing such complexities of the so-called Asia pivot has been Clinton’s job, and she has carried it out partly by showing up: She has attended every ASEAN regional conference, and with her trip to Laos on Wednesday, she has visited all of the 10 ASEAN nations except Brunei, many of them multiple times.

As her term as secretary of state winds down, analysts say, many Asian leaders wonder whether U.S. engagement will last.

“She’s carrying a lot of the water herself,” said Ernest Z. Bower, a senior adviser and director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But when Asia looks at the U.S., they wonder if she has the support of the White House, of the political system, and that is a big question mark.”

After Clinton met here with Thongsing, her motorcade sped along bumpy, palm-tree lined roads, past people on sidewalks who stopped to stare. Later, she addressed U.S. and Laotian employees of the U.S. Embassy.

“Here in Laos,” she said, “the past is always with us.”

China-invested project to modernize Vientiane

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-05/22/content_15357505.htm

Updated: 2012-05-22 13:47

( Xinhua)

VIENTIANE – A reception was held in Vientiane Monday night to commemorate the launching of CAMCE Investment (Lao) Company’s major commercial real estate project, Vientiane New World.

Laos Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Thongloun Sisoulith and CAMCE General Manager and Board Chairwoman Luo Yan were among some 200 officials, diplomats and local and foreign business people who attended the reception in downtown Vientiane.

CAMCE Investment (Lao) Company is a joint venture between the Chinese state-owned enterprise CAMC Engineering (CAMCE) and Lao Krittaphong Group.

Vientiane New World is a multi-phase project to develop a large strip alongside the Mekong riverbank in central Vientiane. Covering a space of 42 hectares, the first phase of the project includes fifty stylish villas which will be completed in October.

It will serve as accommodation for the 48 heads of state visiting the capital to attend the upcoming 9th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in November. After the ASEM, the villas will be put on the market.

“CAMCE want to try its best to make this project based on traditional Lao culture, but meeting international standards. We want to make the Lao people proud of our product, while making something that international guests can be more than satisfied with,” Luo Yan said.

In the two later phases, an International Cultural and Tourist Center and International Business Center will be built. The facilities will include shopping malls, cinemas, offices and hotels. The project is expected to be completed in six to eight years.

Tourism, hydropower and mining, in particular, are growing industries in Laos, one of Southeast Asia’s poorest and most underdeveloped nations. CAMCE and the Lao government hope that major construction projects can help promote development in Laos, as the country is aiming to shake off its Least Developed Nation status by 2020.

• Chinese investors biggest foreign group in Lao stock market 2012-05-04 13:27

Vientiane Land Prices Soar

Click on the link to get more news and video from original source:  http://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/vientiane-05142012181937.html

2012-05-14

Real estate in the Lao capital explodes in value.

Motorcyclists ride through downtown Vientiane, Feb. 29, 2008.

Real estate prices are soaring in Laos’s capital, Vientiane, residents say, as the city develops at a rapid pace.

Land prices in Vientiane, the country’s economic center, have risen to over U.S. $2,500 per square meter in some areas, up to two hundred times the price in areas in the outskirts of the city.

Residents said prices in prime business areas of the capital were around U.S. $2,500 to $3,000 per square meter in January, but now they have climbed even higher.

The price per square meter is about the same as annual income of the average city resident, which city officials in April said was $2,750, according to the Vientiane Times newspaper.

By comparison, in residential areas of Vientiane, one square meter goes for between $500 and $700, and in rural areas nearby, between $15 and $50, sources said.

One city official said the prices are expected to keep rising.

“Due to economic growth, it is certain that the prices of land will not stop rising,” a land management official in Vientiane told RFA.

The swift increase in the value of real estate comes amid a new city development plan that officials outlined last year.

According to the plan, several new sub-centers will be created to expand the town and reduce traffic congestion in the city center, the Vientiane Times reported.

The plan will also help accommodate the city’s expanding population, currently at about 700,000 and expected to double by 2030, the paper said.

The city is on track to see economic growth of 12 percent this year—compared to 7.8 percent in the rest of the country—driven mostly by industrial development projects, Laos’s Planning and Investment Department said in April, according to the Vientiane Times.

Anticipating higher values, investors are scrambling to buy land for resale in areas where the government has planned to build new road and satellite cities, residents said.

Compensation

But some people are being left behind in the real estate boom as they are pushed out of their homes to make room for development projects.

Since all land in Laos is owned by the state,  some are left with little choice when the government chooses to use their land for a development project.

One resident of Vientiane prefecture’s Sikhottabong district, not far from the capital center, said that when she was told she had to move for a development project, the compensation she received from the state was inadequate.

“The appraisal committee estimate of the price of my land was too low,” she said.

“My land, I think it should have cost between U.S. $100 and $200 per square meter, [since] it is along the road, but they give me only 300 Thai baht [U.S. $10] per square meter,” she said.

Her compensation was also slow in coming, she said.

“I did not receive the compensation yet… They said they will look for new piece of land for me somewhere else to exchange mine, but so far I have not received yet,” she said.

Reported by Krongkran Koyanakkul and Waroonsiri Sungsuwan for RFA’s Lao service. Translated by Somnet Inthapannha. Written in English by Rachel Vandenbrink.

Copyright © 1998-2011 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.

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Golf and the great Lao land grab

VIENTIANE – It is easy to be seduced by the peaceful rural scenes, punctuated by rice fields, vegetable patches and reed-filled wetlands. But behind the natural tapestry, tension and anger are brimming over in the local communities near the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge outside of the Lao capital.

The communal complaint: their long self-sustaining community will on government orders soon be converted into an 18-hole golf course, luxury hotel and top-end residential developments, and the compensation on offer to relocate is well below going market land prices.

As in many traditional societies, land in Laos is often held by tacit agreement rather than legal deeds. In some cases land was given by the state to those deemed worthy, like soldiers. Now that land is becoming a highly prized commodity, traditional land rights are being overturned by state power.

The people living on the 557 hectare proposed site are poor and live off the land. Some are retired soldiers, who like Khampheng have lived here since hostilities ended in the 1970s. A few are civil servants. “I can’t live on my government salary,” one said in passable English. “I have to grow food; my wife sells any surplus. The money they’re offering is not enough to buy land like this and there is none nearby that we can afford.”

Read more