Laos in 2013: International Controversies, Economic Concerns and the Post-Socialist Rhetoric of Rule

Laos

In 2013, after several years of basking in the glow of strong economic growth and prominent international events, the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) faced an International Monetary Fund (IMF)-prescribed “overheating economy” and a number of international controversies. Under the glare of uncharacteristic scrutiny, the regime was unable or unwilling to explain how a prominent community leader could disappear in the company of police. Then, in order to circumvent regulatory processes, it insisted that a planned hydroelectric project damming part of the Mekong River was not a “mainstream” dam (i.e. on the main stem of the river). In some ways, these responses recalled an earlier period of LPRP rule when the regime would routinely deny, obfuscate and stonewall in the face of external criticism. But as the leaders’ more sophisticated response to its budgetary woes indicated, Laos has changed profoundly in the past two decades, including in the ways the LPRP utilizes language, rhetoric and other forms of communication in reinforcing state power. In surveying the events of the past year in Laos, this article considers the rhetoric of rule in contemporary post-socialist Laos.

Political language and rhetoric are critical in any political setting but play an especially important role in revolutionary regimes, which use language to produce new cosmologies of rule, and in one-party systems, where in the absence of open democratic elections, state rhetoric plays a key role in mobilizing legitimacy.¹ In Laos, although the most turgid expressions of revolutionary socialist rhetoric have long been forgotten, many of its keywords — solidarity, progress, discipline, patience, consensus and so on — continue to structure state pronouncements, political actions and public grievances.² These have been coupled with the pervasive rhetoric of international development, with its alluring argot of projects, growth, sustainability and good governance, together with promissory slogans like those that guide state development policies around the world. None is more ubiquitous in Laos than “graduating from least developed country status by 2020”. Although this hybrid language has emerged over a period of two decades or more, the Lao government has become more adroit at deploying it. While state- and donorfunded projects disseminate much of the hegemonic rhetoric, keystones of the socialist era such as meetings and mobilization campaigns remain crucial tools of propagation. Despite the pervasively political nature of this rhetoric, it continues to depoliticize public political space by defining acceptable limits of discourse.

The Sombath Somphone Case

While one-party Laos has largely escaped the negative international scrutiny meted out to its larger authoritarian neighbours, notably Myanmar, the country’s image took a battering throughout much of 2013. The first and most apparent cause was the government’s failure to satisfactorily investigate the disappearance of Sombath Somphone, a prominent development worker and community leader last seen on 15 December 2012 at a police box on a busy road in Vientiane.³ Thanks to Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage, bootlegged by his family and shared around the world via YouTube, the known details of Sombath’s alleged abduction were widely reported in late 2012.⁴ More than a year later, little of certainty can be added to these details and the man’s fate remains unknown.⁵ Yet Sombath’s disappearance was just the beginning of a sorry saga that has drawn uncustomary attention to the Lao regime.

In a series of statements between December 2012 and June 2013, officials struggled between the need to address the matter, given its rapid international exposure, and the difficulty of explaining how a community leader could disappear from police company on a busy road at rush hour. Faced with this dilemma, authorities floated a baseless theory that he may have been kidnapped due to a personal or business dispute. In subsequent updates, a police spokesman suggested Sombath could not be identified among those entering the alleged abductors’ car as seen on the CCTV footage, or that those who entered the car did so by their own free will, neither of which addressed...