In a new strike on freedom of expression, Laos broadcasts a stark warning to social media users.
Soukan Chaithad and Somphone Phimmasone on Laos national TV [Preeti Jha/Al Jazeera]Vientiane, Laos – With their heads hung low, three Laos nationals quietly apologise on state TV for betraying the country through anti-government Facebook posts, a striking parade of apparent confessions in the communist regime’s latest crackdown on dissent.
The ominous broadcast in late May was the first news of the trio for families desperate to know their whereabouts since they were arrested in March.
“From now on I will behave well, change my attitude and stop all activities that betray the nation,” said 29-year-old Somphone Phimmasone on Lao National TV.
He sat between the two co-accused: his girlfriend, Lodkham Thammavong, 30, and another man, 32-year-old Soukan Chaithad, each wearing the trademark royal blue uniforms of prisoners.
Flanked by a row of straight-backed police officers, beneath a banner proclaiming “peace, independence, unity, prosperity” in Laos, Soukan stressed their confessions weren’t forced by the authorities. Continue reading “Laos cracks down on social media critics”
Two Lao nationals have been arrested upon returning home from Thailand where they were working, while a third has vanished, because they criticized the Lao government while abroad, their friends and relatives said.
Somphone Phimmasone, 29, his girlfriend Lod Thammavong, 30, and Soukane Chaithad, 32, returned to Laos in February to renew their passports, the sources said.
Police arrested Somphone and Lod at her home at Navatai village of Nongbok district in central Laos’ Khammouane province on March 5, said a relative of the couple, who declined to be named.
“At first, the police told us they had been arrested for possession of drugs, but two weeks later the policeman in charge of the jail informed us that they had been arrested for political campaigning,” he said. “[He] told us not to get involved if we didn’t want to get into trouble.”
In the second decade of the Asean civil society and people’s forum, the civic groups will meet not in the host country for the first time, but in non-Asean member East Timor instead. Every year before the Asean Summit, a conference known as the Asean Civil Society Conference/Asean People’s Forum (ACSC/APF), where hundreds of civil society activists from the Asean region gather to represent the voice of civil society, is held parallel to the official Asean Summit.
This year the theme of the conference, to be held in in August, is “Expanding People’s Solidarity for a Just and Inclusive Asean Community”. It will be held in East Timor’s Dili, according to Atnike Sigiro, a steering committee member of the Asean NGO mechanism created in 2005.
“It’s an effort by Asean civil society to reach out to people in Timor Leste, which soon will join Asean. The title also represents an expansion of solidarity among the people in the Asean region,” said Ms Sigiro from Forum-Asia. Continue reading “Asean civil society meet dodges Laos for E Timor”
Sombath Somphone était la figure la plus visible de la société civile laotienne. Il avait 60 ans lorsqu’il a disparu après avoir été arrêté par la police laotienne en 2012. Son amie suisse Anne-Sophie Gindroz (médaillon) raconte.
La république populaire du Laos ne tolère aucune protestation face à ses projets de barrages ou miniers . La coopérante Anne-Sophie Gindroz en a fait les frais en 2012. Elle signe un livre poignant.
Géographiquement pris en sandwich entre la Thaïlande et le Vietnam, le Laos est un pays qui fait peu parler de lui. Cette discrétion sur le plan international semble convenir au régime autoritaire en place qui continue à réprimer toute opposition impunément – notamment par des disparitions forcées.
Les simulacres d’élections législatives du 20 mars dernier n’ont trompé personne mais n’ont guère suscité de protestations de la part de la communauté internationale. Une situation qui a le don d’irriter Anne-Sophie Gindroz, ex-coopérante de l’œuvre d’entraide suisse Helvetas, qui a été expulsée du Laos en 2012. Un peu plus de trois ans après les faits, elle publie un livre1 qui retrace son travail sur place auprès des communautés locales chassées de leurs terres par le gouvernement «communiste» et relate les circonstances de son éviction. Continue reading “Une dictature pas très dérangeante”
BANGKOK: — The widow of missing Muslim lawyer Somchai Nilapaichit has launched a signature collection campaign to demand the revival of the enforced disappearance case of her husband.
Mrs Angkana Nilapaichit, a member of the human rights committee of the Law Council of Thailand, told Post Today Online that the campaign through the social media, www.change.org, which started a month ago has already collected about 17,000 signatures against her demand of at least 25,000 signatures.
Once the required signatures are collected, she said she would submit a petition accompanied by the list of signatures to Justice Minister Paiboon Kumchaya and six other persons to demand the revival of Mr Somchai’s case in an independent and transparent manner.
Somchai has disappeared without any traces about 12 years ago while he served as a defence lawyers for some of the suspected southern separatists. All the police officers charged with involvement in the lawyer’s disappearance have been acquitted.
Mrs Angkana said, besides the demand for the revival of the case, the signature campaign was intended to create public awareness about human rights, rights to safety and protection from enforced disappearance.
Sombath Somphone, seen in 2006 with Desmond Tutu. Wikimedia Commons
Laos is a country that is usually described in accordance with one of two narratives.
The first portrays a Buddhist Shangri-La — the ‘real,’ ‘hidden,’ and ‘untouched’ Indochina dreamed of in Western backpacker fantasies — while the second depicts a highly impoverished country in desperate need of foreign aid and technical assistance.
Both depictions have some merit. Laos is rich in Buddhist history and it is predominantly an agrarian-based society where the average life expectancy is just 66 years and Gross National Income per capita is under $5,000. But there is much more to Laos than Buddhism and poverty.
Anne-Sophie Gindroz, a former Swiss humanitarian worker in Laos, observed forced displacement and evictions of rural populations to make way for dams and other controversial infrastructure and plantation projects in the impoverished Southeast Asian country. Gindroz, who was the country director for Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, was expelled in 2012 for criticizing Laos in a letter to donors that said the country’s one-party regime stifles debate and creates a hostile environment for aid groups. She spoke to Ounkeo Souksavanh of RFA’s Lao Service about her new book, “Laos, The Silent Repression.”
RFA: Why did you write this book?
Gindroz: It is a testimony. After I was expelled, and especially after (civil society activist) Sombath Somphone was abducted (in 2012), it became urgent for me to share my experience in Laos, to tell about the repression and suppression of dissent. It is also a way to pay tribute to Sombath and the many wonderful people I had the privilege to work with in Laos. Continue reading “Interview: Lao People Fighting for Change ‘Deserve Better than Silence’”
Nothing will upset an Asian government more than comparisons with the heinous dictatorships and juntas of South America in the 1980s. Gun-toting soldiers sporting Ray-Ban aviators on deserted city streets, backed by tanks and a sinister security apparatus, is one common image.
The forced disappearance – a euphemism for state-sponsored kidnappings – of critics, political opposition or just plain irritants is another. Nor are those disappearances uncommon in Southeast Asia.
The disappearance of agriculturalist and reformer Sombath Somphone in Laos, labor protester Khem Sophathin Cambodia and lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit in Thailand are three of the more notable examples in a region mired in human rights abuses.
Now that practice seems to have been extended to nearby Hong Kong, where residents have for years believed that such dreadful things could never happen in the former British colony.
Five people who are linked to a Chinese book shop in the well-known Causeway Bay shopping precinct have gone missing amid speculation they have been taken by mainland authorities. One is a British citizen another is Swedish-Chinese.
Pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho recently said that he believed publisher Lee Bo had been taken against his will into the Chinese mainland because he planned a book about the love affairs of China’s President Xi Jinping and his exploits while working in the provinces.
“It’s a forced disappearance … all those who have disappeared are related to the Causeway Bay bookshop and this bookshop was famous, not only for the sale, but also for the publication and circulation of a series of sensitive books,” he said in a recent television interview.
The alleged kidnappings have also earned comparisons with North Korean tactics, although there the abductions took place outside the country. In Beijing, the government has said little, which is not unlike the response from authorities in countries south of the Chinese border.
The third anniversary marking the disappearance of Sombath Somphone was held in December, while the first anniversary of the disappearance of Khem Sophath – who was last seen with a gunshot wound to the chest – was held earlier this week.
Government friendly and state-controlled media ignored both anniversaries while journalists in both countries confided privately that local reporters were pressured by their editors not to run commemoration stories.
“We were ready to go out and do this story on Khem Sophath,” one Cambodian reporter told this journalist. “Then the editor walks in and yells wait, wait, no, no, we’re not doing that story.”
That came just two weeks after a Thai court upheld the acquittal of five police officers accused of abducting Somchai Neelapaijit, a prominent human rights lawyer who vanished in 2004 while he was defending suspected Islamic militants who had accused authorities of torturing them. Thailand is now controlled by the military.
Over the years, forced disappearances have, sadly, not been uncommon in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and the Philippines. Nor was mainland China an exception. If instigated by the government, then such practices do amount to one form of state-sponsored terrorism.
Hong Kong, however, was different. It had emerged as a vanguard for model behavior in a difficult part of the world during the 1990s and first decade of this century despite political dabbling by the communists in China and a fetish for pleasing Beijing among the ruling powers in the territory.
If allegations of kidnapping prove correct, then Beijing has failed in its obligation to ensure the security of its citizens and resentment among Hong Kongers will only build. And Xi will thoroughly deserve comparisons with the nastier leaders of Southeast Asia and those dictatorships of the 1980s in South America.
Not prepared to play the victim even after the recent ruling on the disappearance of her lawyer husband, Angkhana Neelapaijit is dedicating her life to helping others who suffer abuse of rights…
Angkhana was known in security quarters as a daring, stubborn and outspoken widow who has always reminded the world about Thailand’s chronic impunity. She strongly supported the wife of the missing Karen land rights activist Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen on her quest for justice. Angkhana is also a key member of The Sombath Initiative that is looking into the disappearance of Laos’ senior community development figure Sombath Somphone.
FILE – Sombath Somphone of Laos went missing in Vientiane, Laos, on December 15, 2012. Some rights groups believe he annoyed someone powerful within the government,
The United States on Wednesday called on Laos to resolve the mystery of the disappearance three years ago of prominent social activist Sombath Somphone, saying his abduction sent a “chilling message” on human rights.
Sombath went missing in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on December 15, 2012. A video previously released by authorities shows him being stopped at a police checkpoint and being led into a pickup truck.
“The United States remains deeply concerned over [Sombath’s] fate and the chilling message his abduction sends to members of civil society and the people of Laos more broadly,” the U.S. State Department said. “We are troubled by the fact that no progress has been made in locating Mr. Somphone and call on the Lao government to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation. The government should take measures to resolve this case immediately.” Continue reading “US to Laos: Step Up Probe of Activist Somphone’s Disappearance”
Not prepared to play the victim even after the recent ruling on the disappearance of her lawyer husband, Angkhana Neelapaijit is dedicating her life to helping others who suffer abuse of rights…
