LAOS: Thorns Appear in Lotus Land

The Pathet Lao builds a harsh new world

For centuries Laos was a sleepy country of rice fields, water buffaloes and a notably pacific people who seemed to find little to fault in their fertile lotus land.

But two decades of civil war and three years of Communist rule have taken the bloom off. Under the Puritan discipline of the Pathet Lao, who seized control in 1975, the gentle life of the Laotians has undergone a harsh transformation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Phong Saly province, a remote region that juts into southern China. There, the Pa thet Lao have set up prison camps for "enemies of the state" that seem like something out of Solzhenitsyn: their heavy log walls are covered with barbed wire and bordered with sharp bamboo stakes; beyond, there is nothing but dense jungle and forbidding mountains. "You can try to escape," the guards taunt their charges, "but we'll have you back here within seven days."

This jungle Siberia is the maximum-security wing of a detention system that may give Laos the sad distinction of having more political prisoners per capita than any other country.

By the regime's own reckoning 40,000 Laotians (out of a population of 3.4 million) have been herded off to "reeducation camps."

Most of them are former army officers and "rightist" officials linked with the old pro-U.S. government, and, at least in theory, they can look forward to release after they have learned their lessons.

But the regime's figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian Journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, "No one ever returns."

Those who wind up in Phong Saly are accused of specific crimes, although the charges may be as vague as being a "spy" or a "reactionary." Since Pathet Lao soldiers have been given blanket permission to charge just about anyone and no trials are necessary, many Laotians have been banished to Phong Saly for little reason.

Among others sent to the camps: Khong Khetsakhorn, a machinery operator whose crime was to have worked on USAID construction projects, and Ut Philaphan-deth, a scion of an important Laotian business family, who was accused of harboring "a nest of spies."

The only prisoners known to have walked away from Phong Saly are five of a group of 15 Thai nationals released from Laotian jails last month as a gesture of reconciliation. They tell a grim tale of forced labor, undernourishment and disease. Said one: "We were so thin, so hungry that we even tried to roast toads. We pleaded for medicine, but the doctor wouldn't give us any. We thought we would die." Others told of three prisoners thrown into tiger cages for having killed and eaten a guard's dog; one Thai claimed that disease had killed at least 10% of the 600 or so inmates at his camp.