Thank you for the opportunity to share with you information about the status of Hmong Americans. Let me begin by talking about the organization that I work for—Hmong National Development, Inc. (HND). HND is a national nonprofit organization with a mission of "developing capacity to ensure the full participation of Hmong in society." As an organization, we view "developing capacity" not just as developing our community’s capacity, but also developing capacity of all those who serve and work with the Hmong.
As you all know, Hmong and Laotian Americans came from the countries of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam after the Vietnam War, and were part of the largest group of refugees to ever resettle in America in modern history. Today our communities actively participate in building strong families and economies in the neighborhoods, cities and States that we call home. Current estimates place the total number of Hmong Americans between 300,000 and 350,000. California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have the highest Hmong populations. The Hmong help make up the 14% percent of Southeast Asians in the Asian Pacific American population, and is one the fastest growing groups in the United States.
As advocates, we are aware that our community does not fit the "model minority" image of Asian Americans. At HND, we have continuously worked with our national and local counterparts to ensure that the issues that impact the Hmong are not buried underneath the "model minority image." For example, according to 1990 Census data, while 10% of all Americans and 14% of all Asian Americans live in poverty, 65% of Hmong in this country live in poverty where the median income is $13,634. In addition, over 60% of Hmong Americans live in "linguistically isolated" households. This has meant that many in our community struggle to access services. The 2000 Census numbers should show improvements in the last 10 tens; however, the reality is that many continue to face challenges.
But let us not talk about these challenges without talking about the successes, and recognize that our community has embraced citizenship in this country. Just recently, we saw our first elected Hmong, Mee Moua, to a state senate seat in Minnesota. The first Hmong appointed by a President was Lee Pao Xiong, who was appointed as Commissioner to the White House Initiative on Asian American and Pacific Islanders. From California to Minnesota to Wisconsin, Hmong individuals are making their voices heard because of freedom and democracy. Additionally, we see small Hmong businesses helping to rebuild some of the poorest neighborhoods in America. We have Hmong lawyers, doctors, writers, the first news anchor etc. This list goes on, but the fact is that Hmong Americans are on an amazing journey, and we contribute to the vitality of this society.
Our organizational priority is on domestic issues that promote and increase the well being of all Hmong, but as talks about US-Laos relations continue, I urge you to increase your knowledge of who Hmong Americans are because of our historic tie to Laos, and our bond to many family members who remain in Laos. Many Hmong Americans are concern about the future of US-Laos relations, and its impact on the well being of the Hmong in Laos.
In history, we know that each wave of refugees brings different groups of people with different backgrounds, but these groups share one thing in common—they no longer felt safe in their homeland, and made the journey to be new Americans. In the case of the Hmong, many came with merely the shirt on their back. As Hmong Americans we want to see an increased in the health, safety, and social and economic well being of our fellow Hmong in Laos, and feel strongly that this must be a central issue, not an after thought.
Thank you.
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Remarks by Edward Gresser, Director
Project on Trade and Global Markets
Progressive Policy Institute
I joined USTR, which is the US Government’s trade negotiating agency, in the beginning of 1998. The trade agreement with Laos was negotiated in 1997, so I can’t take any personal credit for it.
I thought that instead of trying to make the case for this trade agreement or NTR or advocating a position, I would try to talk a little about what it actually is, and what are the types of obstacles that Laos faces without an NTR relationship or the ratification of this agreement. I think NTR is often considered in very general and very symbolic terms as a stamp of approval on the normalization of political relations, which is I think basically the case. It’s also a very practical issue that affects people who are interested in trade, investment or economic relationships.
NTR is an acronym standing for Normal Trade Relations. It is the short form for a long set of tariffs, or taxes on imports, that apply to almost all the countries in the world these days. We have on the official list 223 US trading partners. Of these, eight do not have NTR. In specific terms, they are Cuba and Libya, which are under a full trade embargo, Iran and Iraq, which are under partial trade embargoes, and four other countries: Afghanistan, Laos, North Korea and Yugoslavia, which are not under embargo but do not have NTR. Because they do not have NTR, they face the tariffs applied in 1930, under what was then infamous legislation called the Smoot-Hawley Act—very high tariffs applied worldwide. The US has been gradually negotiating all these tariffs down over 60 years or so, and it is only these four countries (Afghanistan, Laos, North Korea and Yugoslavia) that do not have modern tariffs but have tariffs established under the Herbert Hoover administration.
A couple of other examples: Belarus, Burma, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria—a fairly long list of countries with which the US has fraught political relationships all do have NTR status. It’s quite unusual not to have it. And given the list of eight countries above, with the exception of Laos, they all indicate to me either very recent or still unresolved political or security conflicts. So I do think it is anomalous that Laos should be in this list, and not in a list of countries where there may be a lot of outstanding issues, but not security issues.
I’d like to look a little more in detail at NTR…The average country that gets NTR, which is most of the 223, has about 2.4% tariffs on average. Some are higher than that, but if you average it all out it comes to 2.4%. The average for non-NTR countries is typically about 40%, meaning that over the years the US has reduced its tariffs by about 95%. Non-NTR countries don’t get the advantages of that. As a result, Laos faces higher tariffs in effective terms than any other country in the world. This is because for the other countries that don’t have NTR, trade with the US is very, very small—it’s almost nonexistent.
Laos now has about $4 million in exports to the United States—a couple of categories of shirts, and so on. Laotian exporters paid $1.8 million in tariffs last year, which is about a 45.3% effective tariff. The others in the top ten are Yugoslavia at 28%, Macau at 17%, Palau at 16%, Mongolia also at 16%, Cambodia 15.8%, and so on. So even in that list of countries, where their mix of products makes the tariff rate high, Laos is three time higher than most of the rest. If you look at all the ASEAN countries together, adding Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and so on, the average is 2.9%. So Laos at 45.3% is about 15 times higher.
If you look at some specific examples, there are about six types of goods that Laos is selling to the US now. There are men’s cotton shirts, women’s cotton shirts, T-shirts and tricycles. Whoever is making these things in Laos have to be admired, because they’re facing a pretty steep headwind. Every other country in the world sells tricycles with a 0% tariff. And this factory in Laos, wherever it is, is selling them at a 45% tariff, and managing to succeed nonetheless. For T-shirts, Lao factories sell them at a 90% tariff. For the rest of the world, it’s 17.4%. For women’s cotton shirts, 45% in Laos, 20% elsewhere.
This is a very sharp disparity, and extends across all the other goods Laos might sell. If you look at some of the other options, such as sericulture as a focus of the US foreign assistance program, if you had a business in Laos selling women’s traditional silk clothing, they would have a 76% tariff. For anywhere else in the world, if someone wants to make a knockoff of Lao women’s traditional silk clothing, it’s 11.4%. So about seven times higher for the Lao women than for anyone else. For rattan wicker baskets, there’s a 0% tariff generally but 50% for Laos. It’s quite hard to imagine developing a trading relationship between the US and Laos without ratification of the trade agreement.
Finally, comparing the treatment of Laos with Cambodia and Vietnam. The US began the process of normalizing trade with these three countries in the early 1990’s, lifting trade embargoes and allowing the three to sell at non-NTR rates. Cambodia was granted NTR in 1996. At that time, it was about at par with Laos as an exporter. Laos was exporting $16 million to the US, Cambodia about $4 million. Since then, Cambodia has been the fastest-growing exporter to the US in the world by a significant margin. Exports increased from $3.7 million in 1996 to $986 million last year. For Laos, probably partially because of Laos not having NTR, exports have declined instead, from $16 million down to $4 million.
It is probably reasonable to expect that if the trade agreement was ratified and NTR granted, trade with Laos would grow quite rapidly. It would remove a real sharp barrier to Lao businesses and to Americans who wanted to go over to Laos and open factories or small plants. And you could expect things would grow pretty quickly.
The final question is Vietnam, a very interesting case. Vietnam did not have NTR for a long time but was reasonably successful, much more so than any other non-NTR country, in going through the US tariff code and finding out what they could sell. Some of the lessons of the Vietnamese don’t translate very well, since two of the big products Vietnam sells are oil and shrimp, and in Laos you neither find an ocean or oil. The third, though, is coffee, and I am told Laos grows some coffee, and if they were interested they could probably sell that to the United States without much trouble.
The trade agreement has a lot on the Lao side as well: it asks Laos to remove some of its trade barriers, to open up some of its domestic industries to foreign participation, which would include Lao-American, Thai or others. It was a tough political decision on their part to sign it, and they’re no doubt a bit frustrated that it hasn’t been ratified here.
My own perspective is that in these sorts of agreements, the commercial effects are generally quite good. Politically, we often make the case that trade agreements have somewhat liberalizing effects. We get more foreigners running around the country, more ability for Lao men and women to open stores or buy their own homes, areas where the government has typically dominated. But I think it’s also fair to say the effects are mixed from one country to the next. You can’t really predict that it will have a deeply liberalizing effect. You can hope, and you can see that in most cases it does have some political benefits.
Those are really the basic facts about NTR. It is very anomalous that Laos does not have NTR. There are obviously very deep emotional and political issues, which I’m not really competent to speak to, involved in the decision as well for the Lao-American community, for American veterans, Congress and the Administration. But it did strike me pretty clearly when Mr. Antweiler was saying that we are supporting the development of the silk industry in Laos through foreign assistance, at the same time we make it very hard for the people who go into this industry to succeed, if they want to sell to the United States, because we have these high tariffs. And that unexploded ordnance is the biggest employer in Laos. The Cambodian experience is quite interesting in this regard. I have heard that before NTR, in the early 1990’s, these sorts of programs, basically foreign humanitarian assistance programs, were the biggest employers in Cambodia. With NTR, Cambodians have been able, with a lot of troubles, to create a real economy. There are about 150 garment factories in Cambodia that employ 160,000-200,000 people who really didn’t have anything before, who would be subsistence farming or going into the army, or trying to get government jobs, if not for the trade agreement.
You can’t really predict what would happen with Laos—would it have the same sort of experience? Probably being landlocked it would have a little tougher of a time. But personally I think the effect would be good. I’ll leave it there.
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Remarks by Paul Myers,
Executive Director
Ten Thousand Villages, Inc.
I think Mr. Gresser has eloquently made the case, at least in terms of numbers, of why the trade agreement is important. I’m not an expert on Laos; I’ve been there a couple of times, most recently in January. But I do know that if people have an income, it makes all the difference.
I want to start by telling you a brief story which illustrates this. In Laos, we visited a village about an hour and a half outside of Vientiane by the name of Nasai. It’s a place where they make model Lao houses that we use as a stable for nativity scenes at Christmastime. We’ve been selling these for ten years. As we arrived in this village, a family was sitting there—the grandmother, the father, the mother, making these stables. At one point in the conversation, I spoke to the daughter, who turned out to be 15, by the name of Tukta. I said, "Are you in school?" She said, "No, I’m not in school, but I want to be a nurse."
Then the father joined in the conversation, and he said that Tukta stopped school last fall at the end of grade eight, because the family didn’t have money to send her to high school, a couple of kilometers away. In the course of the conversation with the family and villagers there, I asked what it would cost for her to be in school here. They talked among themselves. They said, you need to have shoes to go to school, a uniform, books and so on. They thought $50 a year would cover it. In the meantime, Tukta interrupted again and said, "I want to be a nurse."
About this time, the mayor, I’m not sure what he’s called in Lao, came by down the road on his bicycle. He saw the foreigners there so he stopped and joined in the conversation. He said to us, after listening for a while, "I’m glad you people have come. In this village, there are 114 families. Eight of them are very poor families who don’t have an income of any kind. The group you work with here in Laos, Phontong Cooperative, has chosen these eight families to work with, and that’s who’s making these houses for you. We’re grateful to you as a village that you’ve come here. Can’t you sell more of them?"
I said to him, "We’re doing the best we can. I don’t know if you are aware or not, but we pay a lot of duty on these stables." And these baskets, and this silk weaving. We pay, on average, 53% for the things we import from Laos. We’re not a very large organization. Sales for us will be this year at retail value a little less than $20 million. We buy $20,000 from Laos. That’s all we can buy, because we have to pay another $12,000 to bring that into the country. You know that when a businessperson marks something up over landed cost, and that duty gets added to the landed cost. When you mark it up four times, in our case, or ten times in the cases of many other businesspeople, you price these things out of the market. No one is willing to pay that much. And so we can only provide work for Tukta and her family for three months out of the year.
I was very interested in Mr. Antweiler’s comments about silk production, because one of the groups that’s involved in this up in the Houaphan area is the Phontong Cooperative with whom we work. The person who heads this co-op is a woman by the name of Kommaly Chanthavong, who herself came down as a 12-year-old refugee girl from the hills during the war and has committed herself to serving the refugee community. I happened to be in Laos in 1994 and saw the beginning of this project. It’s amazing to see what’s happened since then. There are hundreds of villages that are involved.
One of the things I find interesting about Kommaly is that Kommaly’s grandfather and father were opium traders. She says, "I much prefer to grow silk. It’s better for our people, and the work is not as hard." Now the price isn’t very good, either, especially when we spend 53% duty on the average crafts we bring in. And I came away from there this last time saying to colleagues, the one thing which keeps this silk project from becoming something fantastic is the market.
I went to the city market in Vientiane on a Sunday morning. We saw busloads of Thai tourists who had come across the bridge and were buying wonderful silk weavings. I said to myself, how unfortunate that we don’t have the benefit of being able to buy these silk weavings. The other thing that is related to this is that the old designs and the old patterns are going to the neighbors and are being sold by the neighbors. And Laos is losing out. I think it’s important that Laos has an opportunity as soon as possible to market its own cultural crafts and heritage in the way that it would like to do that.
Most of the people we work with are women. Women, we find, make the best use of income that’s available to them. It goes for food and it goes for children’s education. I’ve been working on this kind of work for 25 years—I’m more familiar with South Asia than I am with East Asia. I had an interesting conversation with friends last fall that I used to work with in South Asia. I said to them, "Are you better off today than you were 25 years ago?" And they said, "Absolutely." Their children are better educated, and any number of things. And I said "Why?" They said, "Because we’ve had a consistent income."
I appreciated the examples Ed Gresser gave of what’s happening in Cambodia, I saw it beginning to happen in Vietnam now with some freeing-up of policies there, and NTR. Let’s give the Lao people an opportunity to feed their families, to send their children to school, and one of the easiest ways to do that with dignity is to open up trade relations. I don’t know how much more we can do as Ten Thousand Villages, but I know we can do a good bit more than what we are doing, and I would like for us to do that.
If we in any way can share our experience, we’re very happy to do that. We have a commitment to the Lao people. It would be a lot easier for us to buy other things—we don’t have to buy Lao products to make our business successful—but we feel like these people are already at a disadvantage because of being a landlocked country. I talked about customs; we also have to add a very substantial amount for freight, because we have to ship overland, unless you happen to do air freight. So the combination of freight costs, which are going to be there in any case, and customs make it a very difficult situation.
I’m going to pass around a couple of things—this elephant carving is a semi-hardwood in the mahogany family. Wood carving is done by a good many people in Laos, and these sell very well for us. Here’s a silk weaving that we’re going to introduce this fall as a table runner. I’d also like to pass this around, because it’s also new. You speak of agriculture—this is being produced with indigo, and we’re encouraging farmers to plant indigo in the country, which I think is also a source of income in and of itself.
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Remarks by Narin Sihavong
Thank you everyone for attending and the Fund for Reconciliation and Development for organizing this Forum. My name is Narin Sihavong and I am with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. But today I'm here as an individual to tell you about my personal experiences as a Laotian-American, the time that I have spent living and working in Laos, and to provide some
recommendations or suggestions for normalizing relations between the US and Laos.
From personal experience, there are many Laotian-Americans like myself who are professionals would like to see the Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) signed for the benefit of both the United States and Laos. I have friends such as economists, lawyers, accountants, health care workers who have worked or currently work in Laos or have expressed interest to work in Laos for a variety of reasons.
I came to the US in1978 as a refugee. My mother and six siblings spent nine months at a refugee
camp in Thailand, before resettling in Hawaii. Unfortunately my father, who worked for the royal Lao government prior to 1975, became a political prisoner and spent five years in a re-education camp. After his release from the re-education camp in 1980, he chose to rebuild his life in Laos, rather than join us in the United States.
Having fled Laos as a refugee and a father who was a political prisoner in Laos may shape a person's outlook with bitterness or resentment towards Laos. Yet on the other hand, I have held a desire to return to Laos for various reasons: one, the desire to rekindle a relationship with my father; second, to gain overseas working experience and contribute my personal knowledge and experience to the development of Laos; and to rediscover and learn about my cultural and social heritage. These are some of the reasons that I and some of my friends and colleagues are working in Laos or have expressed interests of working in Laos.
During my working experience in coffee and agriculture industry in Laos from 1992 to 1996, I have met Laotian expatriates from the US, Australia, France, and other parts of the world, such as accountants, economists, lawyers, restauranteurs, hoteliers, mechanics, and teachers.
From 1992 to 1996, I have seen Laos develop at an extremely slow pace compared to its neighbors, such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Much of the country still lack basic necessities or infrastructure such as access to modern medicine and education, potable water, electrical and telephone service, farming irrigation, and paved roads.
The normalization of trade relations between the United States and Laos is not a panacea for the economic development of Laos, but at least it will stimulate a hope to raise the standard of living in Laos. Thus I strongly recommend that the United States establish normalized trade relations with Laos and begin by signing the BTA with Laos. Normalizing trade relations will also promote cultural, social, and educational dialogue and exchanges between Laos and the US. Furthermore, the BTA will allow Laotian-Americans to contribute economically to the development of Laos through trade and commercial exchange and technical assistance. Normalized trade relations will reduce high export tariff barriers for Laos and promote foreign
investment in a country that lacks basic infrastructure and a seaport.
Lastly, I would like both the United States and Laos to encourage, promote, and build trust through more educational and social exchanges. I would like to recommend that young Laotian-professionals like myself and other Laotian-Americans serve as resources and contribute to the US Department of State and Mr. Phil Antweiler in forwarding normalized trade relations between the United States and Laos. In many ways Laotian-Americans have made and continue to make enormous contributions to this process by returning to work in Laos, visiting relatives and friends, and sending financial and other forms of aid to Laos. By signing the BTA with Laos, the US will help to legitimize Laotian-American contributions to Laos and bring hope for a better future in Laos.
Thank you very much for your time and allowing me to participate in this Forum.
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Remarks by John McAuliff, Executive Director
Fund for Reconciliation and Development
It is a pleasure to be here. It’s also to be on a panel with people who are old friends, with whom we’ve not always agreed but we’ve known that our hearts have gone in the right direction even if we haven’t agreed on every moment of policy. I was thinking in terms of this meeting that there is another way of looking of how bizarre and anomalous [US-Lao relations are]—I’m glad [Ed Gresser] used the word anomaly, because it’s the one I had come to too. We think, well, nobody cares very much about Laos, it’s a small country and there’s not a big interest. But there are lots of small countries that have little economic potential for the US that have normal trade relations. There’s still this special situation for the Lao that I think unfortunately, while Ann has been pushing very hard for years, a lot of us didn’t pay very close attention. We put a lot of attention into the Vietnam trade agreement and basically let the issue of the Lao trade agreement slide. We now need to put that more front and center.
I want to talk a little bit about history, but not the American history, though America was involved in it. What’s more important to think about is Laos as a country. Laos as a modern nation-state is young, even though its culture and other aspects of its history are very old. I keep thinking about two women that many of us work with, whether you have any real activities or business activities, who are adults now and have their own grown children, were children when their father was the Foreign Minister of the coalition government who was assassinated because he was neutralist. These things are part of the warp and the woof of Lao culture and history. The problem of how Laos defines itself has been an issue through different parts of the Lao body politic who all wanted independence, all wanted a nation-state but had different theories about how to get there. We still see that today. It’s been commented that Laos is landlocked or landlinked—it’s vulnerable to the interests of other countries, and how it juggles those interests [is an ongoing struggle].
Some of us who work with Vietnam or Cambodia sometimes feel frustrated with how impenetrable the Lao body politic is. We hear the gossip in Vietnam; in Cambodia we don’t have to hear the gossip, we can read the newspapers. We can know what’s going on in the political movements within those countries, but it’s very hard to know what’s happening in Laos. We still don’t know what happened in the Lao elections last weekend, what they may have signified in terms of a further movement within the governing party and in the state.
One of my theories about that is when you are surrounded as the Lao are surrounded, one of the ways you protect yourself is to keep everything inside. And you are especially sensitive to what is happening around you. The Lao have this peculiar problem that there are more ethnic Lao in Thailand than in Laos, because of the history of Thai-Lao relations. Anyone who’s been in Laos knows that what most Lao watch is Thai television, which hardly introduces Lao values and culture. This question is how you hold a country together in that environment. I know a lot of Lao-Americans or Hmong-Americans, judging from some of the juicy emails that we have received about this event, think that the primary problem with Laos is the dominance of its Vietnamese neighbor. "17 Vietnamese military bases"—I mean the fantasy world among these Hmong opposition groups in the US is even more bizarre than the fantasy world among the Rambo people. People feed on rumors and stories, and it’s almost impossible to persuade them otherwise. But at base they disagree with a calculation that the Lao party made that they could have relations with Vietnam and China at less risk to the Lao identity than if they simply allowed themselves to be enveloped in what would be the natural economic and cultural partner, which was Thailand.
I was interested in what [Paul Myers] was saying about the extent to which Lao products—not just the models but the products themselves—get taken out [and resold]—"This was made in Northeast Thailand, therefore it shouldn’t pay any duties!" This is a complicated piece of the reality that I think the Lao are highly conscious of that has little to do with the peculiarly American experience but has to do with their long-term presence.
The other piece is the multiethnic character of the country. The population statistics usually show a majority of the country are ethnic Lao. Those may be accurate population statistics, but it’s not a great majority, and the problem of how you maintain [national] coherence, how you do programs that satisfy the needs and interests of very different and distinct ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and keep them within a coherent state is not an easy problem. Some people feel that some of the most conservative tendencies that we find when we’re dealing with Laos are those tendencies that are most responsive to their grassroots base in the countryside, often an ethnic minority-based grassroots that aren’t sure they want what people in Vientiane want in terms of opening up to the West and to a new private market economy. It’s a complicated process and the more you understand what goes on in Laos, there are problems of prejudice and discrimination—the US being a country with a lot of expertise in this area ourselves. There is a lot of prejudice, but there is also a lot of affirmative action, trying to ensure that minorities are represented in governance. Frank Proschan, who is at the Smithsonian, did a wonderful analysis once of who it was at that point on the Politburo of the Lao party, and I think two of the ten people were actually ethnic Lao. The rest of them were minorities of one group or another. From the outside it looks simpler than it does from the inside.
I want to talk about one thing that hasn’t been mentioned, which is the issue of insurgency and the issue of Lao- and Hmong-Americans in relation to it. The point has been raised about terrorism and the Lao undescribed but basically positive relationship to the US on the terrorism question. The Lao in a sense have been very generous not noting too frequently that they too have a problem of terrorism, last year when there were a series of bombs in Vientiane, and at the border crossings and this totally lunatic across-the-border-raid from Thailand [in July 2000]. There’s never been any prosecution in the United States of people raising funds for these kinds of terrorist activities. There may be investigations ongoing, but they’ve not surfaced to the point that they have given people caution about whether it’s such a good thing to do a fundraiser and use money to support insurgency in the country. That’s a problem that’s going to have to be addressed, as well the issue of the political influence.
I mean, I’m Irish-American. I know that ethnic populations in the United States have a strong concern about what goes on in their country of origin and often are deeply engaged in trying to affect its politics, not always to the pleasure of that home country. It’s an old American tradition, but somehow we manage to track down some of the people who were raising money for the IRA, and a number of them went to jail, and those fundraising networks were shut down. Now particularly after September 11, we’re going after a lot of money that was going into Al Qaeda and other sorts of terrorism. It would be nice to see that sort of attention also going into the Lao and Vietnamese and Cambodian fringes of those communities that still keep the war alive.
We’ve commented a couple of times about non-governmental organizations. There are about a hundred international non-governmental organizations [in Laos]. Several of them are represented here—Connie Woodberry is with the Consortium and should make some comments on what they’ve been doing for years. We just did this big conference [in Vientiane] that Susan Hammond organized last June with 600 people from international NGOs. More than 260 people were from Laos; there’s a report in the newsletter on the table. It was not easy. Susan almost went nuts at various times trying to put it together. But the Lao government made a totally serious effort. They took it seriously to the point of not just government ministries in Vientiane but people, prepared people, coming from every province of the country. Everybody talks about the screw-ups of this and the screw-ups of that in aid and development programs, but it is hard to imagine a country with the human resource situation at this point that Laos has, the amount of effort they put into making that conference work. We just have to be appreciative of what that symbolized, as well as what the long-term consequence of it was.
I think the Lao are very glad we have an ambassador now [Douglas Hartwick]. We have a good ambassador; we’ve had several good ambassadors. I bet Wendy [Chamberlain] wishes she were back in Laos at the moment (she’s now our ambassador in Pakistan). It was again the inattention of folks like us that allowed that to go on, to allow the nuttiest part of the US Senate—and I can say that because they don’t pay my salary—Bob Smith and Jesse Helms, people who have singlehandedly done more to destroy serious American participation in the world, were able to sit on us having an ambassador in Laos for two years because there was nobody pushing in the other direction. And then a year ago we started pushing and I’d like to think that we made the difference, but at least we added something to it. We have a good ambassador now, and problems can be solved. Not every problem all the time, but that’s what countries do with each other, and having an ambassador there is important.
The last thing I want to say is about human resources. Again because we work in Vietnam, we’re painfully conscious of the fact that there’s this big Ford Foundation program for scholarship money, there’s a big Fulbright program, there’s now a scholarship program that comes out of the Vietnamese debt payment to the US. Vietnam’s a much bigger country, it ought to have bigger programs, but there ought to be a lot more effort made to offer to Lao the possibility of graduate education in the United States. I think that this humanitarian aid is very important, and I hope that this $2 million is only the beginning, but I think we also need to push the fact that there are potentials. Human infrastructure means human beings who have widened their horizon and learned new skills. It would be nice if we could raise money to send people to places that are not in such an expensive neighborhood, but the dynamic is, it’s probably easier to find a bigger amount of money to bring them here, and there’s all of the long-term benefits of US-Lao relations that come from that. I would hope that that also could get on the agenda at some point in the future. Thank you.
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