Laos Bulldozed By Progress, Dams, Drug Trafficking

[hatrack]

LUANG PRABANG, Laos — "Camera-wielding Western tourists ambush a dawn procession of monks in this once tranquil royal capital. Chinese engineers erect huge dams and blow up rapids on one of the world's last great untamed rivers.

Bulldozers are churning up jungled hillsides to lay roads into tribal villages of "Asia's last frontier." It's the basin of the mighty Mekong River, a culturally diverse, environmentally rich, but economically impoverished region that is poised for vast transformation. On the planning boards for these borderlands between China and the bulk of Southeast Asia are extensive road networks, electric power grids, tourism infrastructure, and dozens of other projects totaling some $100 billion. But opinions vary starkly about how such 21st century inputs — together with China's heavy hand — will affect the isolated rice-growing villages, fishing hamlets, and little market towns still living by ancient modes and rhythms.

EDIT

Meeting with fellow Lahu tribesmen near the Thailand-Myanmar border, Japhet Jakui is highly skeptical. He decries blasting of Mekong rapids by the Chinese and the increasingly easy, rapid river transport that allows amphetamine traffickers to reach tribal children as young as 4. "All Lahu people love this river, but they will be hurt and they won't be able to do anything about it," said Japhet, head of the Lahu National Development Organization, one of many nongovernmental groups that fear voices of the region's 60 million inhabitants, many of them from ethnic minorities, won't be heard.

David Hubble of the Bangkok-based Project for Ecological Recovery has similar worries. "It's all imposed from above: by the Asian Development Bank, the Mekong River Commission, the governments, big business," he said. "I don't think the people in the Mekong Basin will have any say in what happens to them in the future."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-13/s_23673.asp

[gulfcoastliberal]

1. Ah, the Industrial Revolution

Finally reaches ancient asian villages. No need for them to farm and fish to live, now they can subsist on .30/day toiling in wonderful modern sweatshops. Goodbye agrarian life, hello wage slavery!