VIENTIANE — Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday called for concerted efforts between China and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member states to push forward the Belt and Road initiative at the 19th China-ASEAN summit and the summit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of China-ASEAN dialogue relations.
Laos: A Remote Battleground For North And South Korea
North Korea and South Korea maintain strict separation most everywhere in the world. Yet oddly, one of the few places they intersect is Laos, the small, communist nation that’s long had ties with the North and now has growing links with the South.
“As strange as it sounds, Laos is kind of this remote battleground for inter-Korean politics or competition and diplomacy,” says Sokeel Park, research director for Liberty in North Korea, a private South Korean organization that assists North Korean refugees.
Laos rarely receives international attention. But it’s in the spotlight this week as it hosts a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which has drawn many heads of state, including President Obama.
To find evidence of Laos’ longstanding ties to North Korea, look no further than the dining establishments. Laos hosts a North Korean-run restaurant in the heart of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. These North Korean restaurants are part of the regime’s money-making operations, a way for Pyongyang to earn hard currency abroad, since sanctions have increasingly cut it off from the rest of the world.
“North Korea has had fairly close relations with Laos for several decades. They’re both countries that [are] at least nominally socialist or communist states,” Park says.
Park’s work includes some dealings with Laos. It’s one of the countries North Korean defectors sometimes pass through on their way to a final destination, like South Korea.
“Laos is one of the countries in Southeast Asia that North Korean refugees will go to out of China,” he explains. The vast majority of defectors cross from North Korea into China, rather than attempting to cross the heavily guarded inter-Korean border.
A place for business, a route for defectors
So the North Korean-Laos relationship cuts both ways. It allows them to do business together, but it also means that North Korean defectors look at Laos as way to get out, and they know Laos is willing to look the other way.
And in recent months, South Korea has stepped up efforts to drive a wedge between Laos and North Korea.
North Korea’s nuclear test and missile tests brought a new round of international sanctions this spring. It’s also been an opportunity for South Korea to court Laos.
South Korea has been sending diplomats, increasing communication and signed a new military-to-military agreement. All in hopes Laos will get tougher on its North Korean partner.
“We think Laos and other countries previously friendly with North Korea have turned around considerably after the U.N. sanctions went into effect, and that they’re now supporting South Korea’s policies,” says South Korea’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck.
But the ties with North Korea endure. Laos is believed to be one of the few places left where North Korea can send its labor to earn cash. North Korean diplomats continue to visit Laos. And North Korean still runs these Pyongyang restaurants, playing patriotic North Korean karaoke songs.
Haeryun Kang contributed to this story, from Seoul.
Source: NPR
Blind and Missing Both Hands, Bombing Victim Navigates Life in Laos
VIENTIANE, Laos — Phongsavath Souliyalat was walking home from school in his tiny village of Hin Hub, a few hours north of the capital of Vientiane, when a friend found a metal ball on the ground.
The Bombing of Laos: By the Numbers
2 million tons – the amount of ordnance dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, according to Legacies of War, an advocacy and education group. This amounts to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, for nine years.
270 million – the number of cluster bombs that were dropped on Laos during this period.
80 million — the estimated number of cluster bombs that did not detonate, most of which are still buried in farmland.
210 million — how many more bombs were dropped on Laos than were dropped on Iraq in 1991, 1998, and 2006 combined. In fact, Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.
20,000 — the number of people who have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance in Laos.
50 — the number of casualties per year, down from 310 per year in 2008. Forty percent of the victims are children.
$4.9 million — the average amount per year the U.S. has spent on clearing unexploded ordnance in Laos, from 1993 to 2016.
$30 million — the amount the U.S. will spend on clearing unexploded ordnance each year for the next three years.
Source: ABC News
Plan For Logistics Hub in Laos
Aim is to speed up flow of goods into Asean, with hub serving as central node for goods from outside grouping.
A group of Singapore businessmen is hoping to turn Laos’ geographic location from a weakness to a strength by boosting its connectivity to the rest of the region.
In Laos, Obama Bashes Trump For Being An Isolationist
President Obama and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte met informally Wednesday night before a gala dinner at a summit in Laos, breaking the ice a bit after Mr. Duterte called him a “son of a bitch.”
Their brief meeting took place in a holding room before the dinner, Philippine officials told The Associated Press. There was no immediate confirmation from the White House.
Philippine Foreign Secretary Pefecto Yasay said the short meeting “springs from the fact the relationship between the Philippines and the United States is firm, very strong. The basis for this relationship is historical and both leaders realize this.”
The White House canceled a formal meeting between the two leaders Tuesday after Mr. Duterte’s outburst. He was reacting to reports that Mr. Obama intended to confront him about extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers in the Philippines.
At the dinner in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, Mr. Obama and Mr. Duterte sat near each other but didn’t interact. The Philippine leader sat next to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and they appeared to be enjoying each others’ company, clinking their glasses of red wine several times, reporters said.
“They seemed to be hitting it off,” according to a pool reporter traveling with Mr. Obama. “Medvedev was laughing at things Duterte said.”
Earlier Wednesday, Mr. Obama took a not-so-subtle shot at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Laos, lamenting to a foreign audience that the U.S. will be “left behind” if America turns to isolationism instead of embracing Asian cultures.
Speaking to Asian youth leaders in the mountain town of Luang Prabang, Mr. Obama didn’t mention Mr. Trump by name, but he pushed back against the Republican nominee’s proposals such building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and temporarily banning Muslim immigrants.
“We have to be able to promote principles that rise above any individual religion, nationality, race,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to promote — not always successfully. Not everybody in America agrees with me on this, by the way. I’ll leave it at that.”
Mr. Obama reminisced fondly about growing up in Indonesia, and chided Americans for a tendency to ignore what’s going on in the world.
“If you are the United States, sometimes you can feel lazy and think, you know, ‘we’re so big, we don’t really have to know anything about other people,’” Mr. Obama said. “That’s part of what I’m trying to change, because this is actually the region that’s going to grow faster than anyplace else in the world.”
He added, “If we aren’t here interacting and learning from you, and understanding the culture of the region, then we’ll be left behind.”
Mr. Obama is promoting a free-trade deal with Asia-Pacific nations, and predicted Congress will approve the agreement after the November elections. Both Mr. Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The president said ethnic tensions and conflicts with new immigrants surface in the U.S. particularly “when the economy is not doing well, and so people feel stressed.
“And typically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them,” Mr. Obama said. “So we have to fight against that.”
Source: Washington Times
Obama Pays Tribute to Victims of U.S. Bombings During the ‘Secret War’ in Laos
Eight-year-old Thoummy Silamphan wanted bamboo shoots for his family’s soup, so he went into a field near his village, spotted some good ones and started digging in the soil with his hands.
What he also found that day 20 years ago was an American bomb left over from the Vietnam War era that had fallen from the sky but never detonated. It exploded, obliterating his left hand and knocking him flat into the field of shoots until neighboring farmers carried him to safety.
“I knew about the bombs,” he said this week, “but I didn’t have a choice. We have to go out into the fields anyway.”
On Wednesday, Silamphan went to the center here where other survivors are treated for their wounds to meet the president of the United States, five decades after the U.S. dropped 270 million cluster munitions on Laos to cut off enemy supply lines to the Viet Cong in a CIA-run operation that was kept secret from Americans.
President Obama did not apologize for the bombings that left an estimated 80 million baseball-sized undetonated explosives all over Laos. But as the first U.S. leader to visit the country and pay tribute to victims of the so-called bombies, he acknowledged them in a way that no predecessor had.
“We’re a nation that was founded on the belief in the dignity of every human being,” Obama said. “That belief has to lead us to value the life of every young Lao boy and girl, who deserve to be freed from the fear of the shadow of a war that happened long ago.
“Acknowledging the history of war,” he said, “is a way that we make future wars less likely.”
The visit was part of a legacy-of-war tour that Obama has been making in his last year in office, traveling to Vietnam and Japan this spring and now to Laos. “Confronting history,” Obama calls it.
This stop carried its own variety of sorrow, as many of the 20,000 people killed or wounded by the ordnance were children. The bombies look like balls, for play.
Silamphan was looking for food, not toys, as he walked home from his primary school in the Xieng Khuang province, on a plateau near the border with Vietnam.
People working in the farm fields around his home heard the explosion. The farmers came running and carried him to his family, who immediately took him to the hospital.
For years after the accident, Silamphan felt shame about his missing hand. He looked at others around him. “Their bodies were perfect,” he said, and he didn’t want to be around them. For a while, he refused to go back to school.
Eventually, he met an older boy who was also missing a hand, and he urged Silamphan to return to the classroom. The bomb had taken his hand, the boy told Silamphan, but it shouldn’t take his life.
Silamphan went on to study business and earn a master’s degree. Now 29, he runs the Quality of Life Assn., a foundation that helps survivors get treatment, prosthetics and social services.
His story has inspired others to work for the cause, among them Channapha Khamvongsa, a Lao American who met Silamphan a few years ago on a visit back to the country she and her parents left as refugees when she was young.
“It made me realize there was so much more the U.S. could do to support the people of Laos to recover and heal from the physical and emotional toll of war,” said Khamvongsa.
She formed her own group, Legacies of War, to raise awareness in the U.S. about the unexploded bombs in Laos.
Among those who heard about the effort was Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor to Obama. Dispatched by the president to explore ways to strengthen U.S. ties to southeast Asia last year, he met with survivors of the bombs.
They sat in a circle, some with burn scars, some missing limbs, and told him their stories. Rhodes promised to tell Obama.
Some did not know who Rhodes was talking about. They were surprised enough to meet an American who wanted to talk about the unexploded ordnance.
“It’s wrong that the American people were not told about our bombing campaign in Laos,” Rhodes told them, recounting the episode this week in an interview.
“They knew that, that they were the forgotten part of the Vietnam War.”
In Laos this week, Obama announced the U.S. will provide $90 million over the next three years for finding the munitions and clearing them out, an increase over the $3-million yearly commitment in place when Obama took office.
One simple thing the U.S. government plans to do is to search Pentagon records of the bombings to help determine where unexploded ordnance may be concentrated.
At present, bomb finders, mostly women, wander fields with metal detectors in search of the balls. Some are lying out in the open; others were plowed into the ground. Cluster munitions are exposed through careful digging and then blown up where they are.
Obama also asked for help in finding the remains of U.S. servicemen whose planes were shot down over Laos as they were dropping those bombs, and the Laotian government agreed.
On his visit Wednesday to the Cooperative Orthotic Prosthetic Enterprise, or COPE, Obama met Silamphan.
Around them, prosthetic legs of different sizes, some with socks on, hung from the ceiling. Nearby was a basket of crutches.
“History does not have to drive us apart; it can sometimes pull us together,” Obama told reporters afterward. “Addressing the most painful chapters in our history honestly and openly can create openings.”
Silamphan only hopes the U.S. effort will aid victims.
“We can’t forget what they’ve been through,” he said.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Wisconsin’s Hmong Community Applauds Obama’s Recognition Of US Bombing Of Laos
Hmong community leaders in Wisconsin are applauding President Barack Obama’s acknowledgment of the United States military operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, saying it could lead to better relations between the white and Hmong communities in Wisconsin.