In mid 1994 my wife and I set off north on the road that ran between Houayxai and Luang Namtha (northern Laos). Our objective was modest. We wanted to go to a weekly market held in a village just an hour or so along the road. The trip was uneventful. An hour was optimistic, but three hours was not unreasonable given the road conditions. Standing in the back of a truck with local villagers clutching home-made rifles (which reached to just beneath my chin) was disconcerting on a bumpy road, but we reached our destination without mishap.
The market was a small and desultory affair, selling mainly local forest products and dry goods from the stores on Houayxai. We spent a while wandering around the picturesque village (my memory is a bit vague on this and I can’t lay my hands on my notes right now – I think it was Ban Pong, a Lu village). We then asked when the truck would be returning, only to find that it had returned only 5 minutes after arriving. There would be another the next day.
Sleeping at the market was fine (but bathing in the river was not a pretty sight). The stall keepers were friendly and set us up with a mosquito net in one of the small bamboo shops. They fed us fried birds and sticky rice. And when we went to bed they regaled each other with funny stories about the odd questions and strange habits of the falang. The rats were noisy. All good fun.
Well, things are now changing along the road from Houayxai to Luangnamtha. (For some previous New Mandala commentary on this route see here and here.) In a recent contribution to Mekong Currents, Rosalia Sciortino provides a useful profile of recent developments and discusses some of the key social impacts occurring along the route. Here is an extract.
AH3 in Laos traverses a mountainous, predominantly ethnic, area characterised by severe poverty. Still, there are significant gaps between the extremely poor ‘highland’ minorities and the better-off ‘lowland’ communities, the degree of their poverty correlating with degree of benefit from improved transportation. It is the poorest communities — mainly non-Tai villages far from the towns of Namtha and Houayxay – that encounter the greatest challenges, being precluded from new market opportunities by socio-cultural and financial constraints. In the competitive, commercial environment unleashed by the highways, they are posed to lose out to better-equipped newcomers and more privileged local groups, while experiencing a loss of habitat and livelihoods that threaten their very existence.
One of the most direct impacts of road construction is the resettlement of communities to make way for it. For AH3, an Asian Development Bank report estimated in 2002 that some 2,500 people or 502 households may have to lose houses, rice granaries, small shops and land. Resettlement plans have been carefully drafted, but past experiences warn that they may not be sufficient to ensure adequate compensation as agreed-upon standards are rarely applied, regulation on land tenure and titling is unclear, and malpractice in disbursements is rampant.
Affected households too often become worse off in the process, with assigned locations lacking services and being smaller in size and with land for less fertile than in the original places. Displacement also occurs with land grabbing – a growing phenomena resulting from speculation for growing value land adjacent to the road. Once resettled or displaced, communities will have to undergo dramatic changes, having to adjust to new surroundings, occupations, lifestyles, social norms and economic systems, under the prospect of an uncertain future.
3 responses so far ↓
1 jonfernquest // Jul 26, 2007 at 11:00 pm
“Resettlement plans have been carefully drafted, but past experiences warn that they may not be sufficient to ensure adequate compensation as agreed-upon standards are rarely applied, regulation on land tenure and titling is unclear, and malpractice in disbursements is rampant.”
In the age of the blog software, RSS news feeds, and news aggregators, there should be someway of getting locals to monitor incidents locally, and have reports with photos feed into and be integrated with larger-scale world human rights news feeds, so people can see the injustice and exploitation going on, if and when it happens.
Given that the these incidents are documented and made publicly available, there seem to be other issues: First, authorities in Laos being sufficiently responsive to these incidents and issues when they arise, assuming that they can, assuming that it isn’t some local power lord mafia like figure that the government has cut a deal to keep law and order in exchange for autonomy. The center doesn’t necessarily have control of abusive peripheries.
All of Matthew McDaniel’s old material, journals, logs, drill pretty deep into what was going on in Chiang Rai’s hinterland and are a good case study.
In Burma, Soros funding makes sure incidents make it to the media, but media overload is the result. Have you ever tried to wade through and make sense of the massive amounts of information coming out of all these grassroots organisations?
Also media overload breeds authorities unwilling to respond because they see external NGO monitoring as a usurpation of sovereignty. Isn’t the World Bank funding the roads? I don’t suppose human rights impact issues are be channeled through them as they arise. Seems like road building should have convenants in this respect with the government receiving the funding. But on the other hand, I remember how long (and the abandoned projects) it took to get a successful road from Mae Sai to Keng Tung (oral history of that road building project worth recording), and that road used to look like the road you’ve shown in the photo in places. I wonder how comparable the before and after situations will be along this new road?
2 John Roberts // Jul 30, 2007 at 11:50 am
…I heard a rumour that this route was recently closed for several days following the arrest of some Hmong in Huay Xai.
This has not filtered down into any of the back-packer blogs and we heard nothing in the Golden Triangle but does anyone know more?
3 Melody Kemp // Aug 21, 2007 at 3:06 pm
John,
I was in Luang Prabang attending the cremation of Phra Khamchanh at the end of July. Everyone was very jumpy as we had heard that Hmongs had killed and been killed in Bokeo an there were rumours of a revenge attack on the cremation. So that when the Govt let off fireworks a lot of people jumped out of their sinhs. mind you ther are times when I think the world Hmong is synonynmous in usage here with the use of terrorist in Australia..
I work with a Lao writer editing and teaching rwiting to Lao. Story telling is a great medium. We have a great collection of stories recording the aftermath (which by the writing, is a contemporaneous aftermath ) of the Nam Ngum dam.. We hope to get funding to collect, edit other stories to do with the chnages you mention, but funding is hard to come by. Dev agencies focus on the pragamatic and not the cultural.
Other Jon…I can give you photos of Gamuda Berhad’s destructive forays into the Nam Kading protected Area . this before STEA had given the go ahead for the dam they will build that will effectively stop fish migration up the Kading.
Melody
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