The Laos logos

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by Claire Berlinski

Since Britain's withdrawal east of the Suez, the United Nations Development Program is the world's largest source of development grants, with a budget of more than a billion dollars and offices in 150 countries and territories. "Development," the UNDP mission statement asserts, "is inseparable from the quest for peace and human security." In recent years, with UN peacekeeping missions ending in repeated embarrassment, senior UN officials, including UNDP administrator James Gustave Speth, have proposed that development should be the UN's primary goal.

The UNDP has been in the Lao Peoples' Democratic Republic since 1976. On the face of it, Laos is the archetypal candidate for development assistance; the country has been ravaged by centuries of invasions, indifferent colonial rule, hapless proximity to the strategic theaters of the Vietnam War, and ruinous socialist experiments. Independence from France, in 1949, inaugurated more than two decades of coups and civil infighting. In 1975, following the collapse of Phnom Penh and Saigon, the Pathet Lao seized control of Vientiane. Under the Party's administration, the economy has remained in shambles. One in five children dies in infancy; adult life expectancy is barely more than fifty years. Less than half the population is literate. Outside the capital, there is virtually no electricity, no railroads, or even roads; infrastructure is primitive, and crops are regularly wiped out by floods. The countryside is littered with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War. The media are controlled by the government, all independent political organization is banned, and dissenters are imprisoned.

The UNDP charter emphasizes what it calls "sustainable development" and "capacity building" -- the training of indigenous people in the skills necessary to design and manage their own social and economic transitions. To this end, the UN mission in Laos coordinates aid from donor countries and other organizations, participates in planning meetings with government officials, and aids the government in conducting studies and workshops, often sponsoring foreign technical consultants to supervise projects. It was in this last capacity that I had been hired, although it was not clear precisely what project I would supervise.

Because I had been a journalist, my supervisor at the UNDP, an affable American named Jeffrey, proposed on my arrival that I work as a consultant to the government's weekly English-language newspaper, the Vientiane Times. The paper had been founded as part of the opening of the country to foreign investors; its intended audience was not Laotians, but foreigners with capital. Yet among those foreigners, the paper was an object of mirth. It was a hopelessly unreadable rag, propaganda interrupted only by the occasional feature article about a villager who could play the Lao flute through his nostrils.

Jeffrey warned me that my predecessor, an Australian named Catherine, had found the Vientiane Times trying. The editor-in-chief was extremely sensitive to criticism from Westerners; Catherine had left the paper in a cloud of mutual recrimination. "She didn't understand that this is a Communist country," he told me. "They don't have freedom of the press here. But really, Claire, it's not such a bad job. You just have to do what they say and smile a lot."

The newspaper was in a dingy, decaying building in the center of Vientiane, with one overflowing toilet by the main door. It was windowless. In the corner sat a round-faced and expressionless Party official of middle years whose job was to supervise the ideological content of the newspaper. He sat solemnly at his desk, directly across from mine, reading contraband Thai newspapers. The staff were a group of university students, mostly children of Party members. The editor-in-chief, a senior Party apparatchik, was uncomfortable in English and explained my duties to me in French. The Lao staff would do research, and I was to help them make their stories raffinees.

That afternoon, the son of a prominent government official approached me with an article. He was, like many young Laotians, endearingly shy, and smiled nervously as he placed his article in my hands. "Yambean," it began, "is very popular food, and is good selling in the market, said Lakamsou, is gardener." The text continued in the same vein. As I soon established conclusively, none of the students had more than a rudimentary grasp of English. This should have been no surprise; the Pathet Lao had until recently imposed a regime of strict isolation from the West; no Laotian of his age would have studied English in school. I was nonetheless surprised to discover that no one on the staff spoke English even to the point necessary to have produced the issues I had read. Clearly, someone else -- a Westerner, probably -- had been writing the paper.

In fact, it had been another development worker, a gentle Canadian woman who had written the entire paper every week. Her eagerness to please had made her popular at the Vientiane Times; she had been rewarded with a desk job at the UN mission's Vientiane headquarters. She told me that the paper had been written, since its inception, entirely by foreigners; the government, finding this a convenient and economical arrangement, had not arranged for a single Lao national to be trained to do the job.