Conocimiento general del humedal

During the ‘American era’ Laos was a country divided into three areas – the region around Vientiane controlled by the USA-backed Royal Lao Government, the ‘liberated zones’ in the north controlled by the Pathet Lao with assistance from socialist sources, and the disputed regions of central and southern Laos (Luther, 1983:7). With rural Laos sustaining massive bombing8, it was, inevitably, a time of huge social upheaval with displacement of families and whole communities. Thousands of people from the northern province of Xiengkhouang were forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in Vientiane when the province became a buffer zone between the opposing forces. Throughout the length of the country, peasants living in the mountains forming the border with Vietnam were forced to vacate their land as the US sought to destroy the Ho Chi Minh trail. To this day, in spite of numerous foreign aid projects aimed at finding and destroying unexploded ordinances, farmers and children in these areas continue to be maimed as they go about their daily lives.

The Americans, like the French before them, viewed Laos in terms of its usefulness to its interests in Vietnam. Consequently, the establishment of the infrastructure of a nation state focussed on the development of physical infrastructure to assist its war on communism – the construction of air fields and the establishment of telecommunication links between the main urban centres (Evans, 2002:151). With this agenda, education was of secondary importance, just as it had been to the French in the colonial era. However, primary schooling slowly expanded in the urban areas to 433 public schools and 76 private schools by 1972 (ADB, 1993:3) – three times the

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Dommen (1985:90) writes, ‘By 1975, the USA had dropped more than 2,000,000 tons of bombs on this tiny, poverty stricken country – approximately the same amount its forces had dropped in Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War’.

number towards the end of the colonial era. Secondary schooling continued as it had under the French until 1967 when United States (US) aid financed five secondary schools (named Fa Ngum schools, after the founder of the Kingdom of Lan Xang) in the administrative centres of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Savannahket, Pakse and Phone Hong, the administrative centre of Vientiane Province (Dommen, 1985; Vistarini, 1978). For the first time, the language of instruction was Lao, and therefore accessible to greater numbers of the population. The curriculum was a balance of vocational and academic education, but did not take into account the ‘economic reality of Lao’ (Vistarini, 1978:6) and was, as a consequence, unsustainable once US aid was unavailable. The US aid program also funded teacher training programs. Despite these expanded opportunities, research by Vistarini demonstrated that 88.7% of the students within the education system were urban ethnic Lao. As a result, ‘the elitism introduced and perpetuated by the French was largely unchanged by an influx of Americans’ (Vistarini, 1978:7).

The perpetuation of an urban elite was aided by the American policy (and its biggest expenditure) of propping up the government by paying the salaries of its soldiers, policemen, teachers and civil servants (Evans, 2002:102) rather than in instituting ‘good governance’, which may have been achieved with the Lao attempts at coalition governments. The result of the influx of American dollars, according to Dommen (1985:139), was ‘the emergence of a consumer-oriented society in the main towns’ with ‘the growth of occupations and groups associated with a middle class … [and] a small intelligentsia emerged, newly returned from overseas studies’. At the same time, ‘the careless dispensation of American aid’ caused ‘corruption and wealth disparities [and] serious political rifts in Laos’ (Evans, 2002:103). These manifestations of wealth disparity brought with them a concomitant concern for moral welfare and the traditional values of Lao culture. Ironically, the influx of US dollars also had the effect of increasingly undermining the authority of the Royal Lao Government because

the bond between governing and governed, or between centralised state and decentralised local power, rested traditionally on payment of tribute and the reciprocal obligations that entailed. Failure to impose and collect a land tax, and the one-way flow of US development aid, freed rural communities of any obligation towards the central government and any expectation in return (Stuart-Fox, 1997:130).

In contrast, in the Pathet Lao ‘liberated zones’ the people’s loyalty was harnessed through ‘membership of village associations and contributions of rice in support of national goals proclaimed by leaders to whom they felt themselves closely bound in a common struggle’ (Stuart-Fox, 1997:130). In these zones, the Pathet Lao

had been developing an alternative education system since 1955 which aimed to ‘inculcate the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, promote national ideals and provide practical training for active life’ (Vistarini, 1978:16). By 1970, there were reported to be in the liberated zones 2000 primary schools with an enrolment of 69,000 students, 70 ‘ethnic minority’ schools with an enrolment of 2,000 students, two high schools and two teacher training institutions, as well as short courses for adults in which some 60,000 people were reported to have enrolled (Vistarini, 1978:17). It was the first opportunity for both adults and children in these regions to learn to read and write and the enrolment figures vastly outnumber those of the US-backed urban areas, despite the difficulties of life in the buffer-zone of civil and international war.