FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2002
Laos goes to polls for one-party election
AFP
VIENTIANE: Unfazed by mounting pressure from Western democracy activists, Laos goes to the polls on Sunday for five-yearly elections, which are set to tighten the grip of one of the world's last ruling communist parties.
Just three months after detaining, trying and then deporting a European member of parliament for staging a democracy protest in the capital, the communist regime is to hold early elections to its single-party legislature which unashamedly boast the party's monopoly on power.
Only one candidate among the 166 standing for election to the 109-member national assembly this weekend is not a member of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party.
In the last elections in December 1997 to a smaller, 99-seat assembly, the authorities allowed four independents to stand.
Nor has the regime made any secret of the party's expanded role -- the curriculum vitae of all the candidates were carried by the English-language as well as Lao-language press.
In each the two key entries are the last -- "Date of joining revolution", and "Date of joining Party".
Diplomats say the move is part of a more general shift on the part of the Lao authorities towards being less embarrassed about the party's role.
In 1991, in the wake of the collapse of Laos's Eastern Bloc sponsors, the government dropped the communists' hammer and sickle emblem as the national flag and moved closer to its capitalist neighbour Thailand.
But the chaos wreaked here by the 1997 regional financial crisis prompted the authorities to diversify their international relations -- which, in Laos's case, has meant moving closer to communist giant China.
The result has been that hammer-and-sickle flags mothballed through the 1990s have been dusted off and are now increasingly in evidence on public buildings.
The change has not gone entirely smoothly. The runup to a five-yearly congress of the ruling party early in 2001 was overshadowed by a year-long spate of mystery bombings, which killed at least one person and wounded more than 50, threatening the country's biggest foreign exchange earner, tourism.
This time the government has been taking no chances.
The nightime patrols and roadblocks, which have become a regular feature of life here since the bombings began in 2000, have been sharply stepped in the weeks running up to polling day, residents and diplomats said.
One resident complained he had to run the gauntlet of no fewer than six different checkpoints just to get to work from his home in the suburbs.
Luxury hotels used by Westerners also reported that they had been ordered to tighten up their controls
Thus, far the precautions seem to have worked -- diplomats are not aware of a single new bombing since an attack on a Lao border post just before the party congress early 2001.
There has even been a decline in rebel activity in the northern mountains, where members of the Hmong minority have fought the government since the days of the Vietnam War.
A Western diplomat said he was aware of just two incidents of "banditry" in Xieng Khouang province this dry season, normally the peak period for rebel attacks.
The regime's opponents have certainly not let up their rhetoric -- a Congressional Forum in Washington earlier this month heard vocal condemnation of Sunday's elections from a string of US-based emigre groups, both Hmong and Lao.
But in the changed climate after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the opposition seems no longer to have translated into violence.
"The international coalition against terror has forced opposition groups across the world to rethink their strategies, and none less so than those with connections to the United States," a Western diplomat said.
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