Keeping Colonial Laos Profitable

WE DON'T call it a colony, but of course that's what it is, that little country which has just made one of its periodic re-entries into the American consciousness, Laos is an American colony-or an attempt at one. Everyone in Laos knows it, and all but the Americans discuss it openly, some with hate, some with envy, some with fear, some with an affection born of greed.

The French know it. They know colonialism when they see it; being its past masters Many of the original French colonials were understandably a little upset back in '54 when the French forces in Indochina had to cut their losses and leave for good, but those who stayed on anyway-often because they couldn't afford the passage home-have had the last laugh.

Dressing up the white man's burden in anti-communism, the Americans have kept Laos-and Vietnam-a comfortable and profitable home for a white man.

The French have one major worry-not that the Americans will ever leave, but that they will spend so much money that inflation will make it impossible for these lower-middle echelon functionaries to continue to live like kings. And, after all, isn't that what colonialism is all about-turning an accident of nationality in to permanent effortless profit?

Still, while it lasts the French have a few good laughs on the Americans as they sit around the tennis club in Vientiane, which is to Saigon's Cercle Sportif as the IAB must be to New York's Racquet Club. The club is integrated; after a few gins-and-tonics the Laotians and the French get to laughing together, and to toasting "permanent friendship between our two nations."

The French, whose outdoorsy days are over, have their laughs over bourbon in the Hotel Continental, for years one of Vientiane's only two hotels. No American girl who values her reputation enters the Continental bar/lobby; here the French drinking companions are American pilots-employed by Air America, paid by the CIA, earning $1000 a week for airlifting "rice" to tribal villagers, drowning out the echoes of antiaircraft fire with dope and liquor. "Laotian neutrality" and American "food aid" are pretty good jokes when you're ripped.

[Do you know that when I went to Laos at age sixteen, I didn't smoke any dope, didn't bring any back, either? Do you know that it was selling in the marketplace for 200 kip-40c-an ounce? Do you know how I cried when I read all about it later in the Times, the moralistic stories about the international hippies who were crashing in Vientiane and tripping constantly? Of course, it all would have turned out rather differently if I'd been smoking over there-the ultimate horror wouldn't have sunk in.]

Why is everybody laughing? Laugh and the world laughs with you. (The joke is on the people who are crying, the refugees, the bombed-out villagers, the farmers whose land now resembles the surface of the moon . . . . ) Our good radical mental picture of the long-suffering Asian leaves out the Laotian who is getting a good laugh and a fat pocketbook out of the American colonial ego trip.

"Speculation rises in (Vientiane, Saigon, Tokyo, Paris, London, Washington, Cambridge) that South Vietnamese forces have invaded Laos with American support at the express invitation of the pre-eminent clique of right-wing Laotian generals, against the wishes of neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma."

It is the summer of 1966. I am sixteen. I am living in the house-i.e., stockade-of the Chief of Staff of the Royal Laotian Army and Air Force. I am eating breakfast with mon general, who is rarely at home in Vientiane. "He is with the army, cherie." In my sweetest voice [You can talk to me, I'm just a dumb girl . . . .], in my best high school French, I ask, "Please, mon general, tell me, how goes la guerre?"

Mon general, a very fat and jolly man, grins at me toothlessly. "Mais, cherie, quelle guerre?" I learn later that the general does indeed spend a lot of time with the army, his army-guarding his holdings in Northern Thailand, supervising opium and gold smuggling by the Air Force and the army.

I learn that these holdings in Thailand are for the day when the war ends and "mon general" must flee the country-the day when, as the peasants put it, Prince Souphanouvong, commander of the Pathet Lao, beats out his older but less educated half-brother, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, in this family quarrel.

This is not to say that all Laotian generals are so corrupt and hypocritical. Some of them are quite fired up about "following orders" and contributing to the genocide of their countrymen. One has been faithfully utilizing CIA funds and personnel for eight years, training tribesmen to fight other tribesmen trained by the North Vietnamese.

Of course, he hasn't produced many results. Up until recently, the same Laotian provinces had for years been changing from royal to Communist control and back again with boring regularity.

Perhaps he has trouble inspiring his soldiers Ironically, these tribesmen-the Meo-occupy a place in the hearts of their Laotion countrymen similar to the place in the hearts of white Americans occupied by the black and brown men who do so much of their country's fighting.

This general is an unusual case, though. Some months after my conversation a major government-military crisis developed when an over-eager Air Force general tried to divert planes from the opium trade to fighting the war. He lost. Let the B-52's and Air America do the fighting. It was the Americans' idea in the first place.

Let the B-52's do the fighting . . . . Can a plane and a peasant have a fair fight? Who's gonna be the ref? Who coaches the B-52? A cocktail party, a drunken American military attach: "Well, you know, we read the reports on enemy activity, about how infiltration or supplies have been observed in X village-maybe. Then we talk about it-or sometimes we don't."

"Well, what happens when you don't talk about it? Does that mean you don't believe the reports? So you don't do anything?" [Remember, I was only sixteen.]

"No, well, it means that one of the big men has decided already. We don't need to talk, about it-he's turned his hand over, like so . . . ."

"You mean, like so? Well, what does that mean?"

"Yeah, like so. . . . It means we go in and wipe 'em out."

Don't get the wrong idea from this story-not all Americans in Laos-back then there were 1200 in Vientiane alone, out of a population of 30.000-are alcoholics who talk too much. There are quite a few, though-those who learn too late that they can't live with the crimes they are committing, and those who are trying and failing hopelessly to do something decent.

These failures . . . the Foreign Service offers them security, and Laos offers them high hardship pay. . . . They are usually almost alone in their offices or agencies in perceiving the true evil of the American presence, but they count on somehow being able to do their little liberal humanitarian thing.

They fail when the disparity between their perception and that of their superiors becomes too glaring, when they are called upon to become accessories to crimes of colonialism and war, when the CIA induced redbaiting within the American community becomes unbearable, when through various bureaucratic ruses and maneuvers they are denied their low-grade security and advancements.

. . . They stop being able to laugh at the comedy of American hypocrisy.

OF COURSE, a lot of the American colonials are successes. They cope; they make it all possible. The most prevalent type, the backbone of the American effort, is the technician/bureaucrat, the member of the Silent Majority who "does his job," who believes what he reads in the papers and in the company hand-out much as he would "Stateside."

This "Home, Home on the Delta" type predominates in USAID, but neither the Embassy nor USIA could survive without him. He is not bothered by contradictions between today's and tomorrow's official rationalizations for American actions, nor does he bother to construct claborate and doomed-to-fail personal justifications for his guilty participation, as does the liberal mentioned above, nor is he disturbed by such phenomena as the ubiquitous anonymous presence of CIA agents-"ghosts." When asked to justify the American presence in Laos, this cog is likely to respond with something like this: "Do you realize that before we came here, Laos had no paved roads at all? Now it has one, and we built it !"

The fact that that one paved road stops seven kilometers from Vientiane when it reaches the American compound- which looks like nowhere so much as Ventura, California-does not seem to bother this man.

Another type of well-adjusted American must be very familiar to the long-suffering Indochinese. When the French governors and advisers moved out of their mansions on the banks of the Mekong fifteen years ago, this species of American moved in. Not for him the tract houses and all-electric kitchens of the American rank-and-file; if he had wanted that life style, he could have stayed Stateside.

No-America's ambassadors and high-level bureaucrats deserve better than that, and they get it, as the French did before them. Native servants, limousines, Swiss boarding schools for their children to compensate for the cultural deprivation of growing up amidst "backwardness, ignorance, and filth." Too bad that Laos-once calculated to be one of the world's two least developed countries-is a pretty poor heap to be at the top of.

The last type of successful American is what-we-want-to-be-like-when-we-grow-up-and-join-the-Peace-Corps.

Laos has no Peace Corps, but it has the International Voluntary Service, and the Red Cross, and missionaries.

This American is not ugly; he alone takes the trouble to learn the Lao language and culture, to discard his racist and culturally biased preconceptions and expectations. The work he does is very often merciful and humanitarian, although in Laos he does not function in an emergency comparable to India's or Pakistan's.

However, this American is usually an unwitting tool of America's colonial goals, of its official modernization effort. He goes about his work with no conception of its implications for Lao nationalism. Even when he has no part of it, he cannot undo the damage done by the American war effort nor can he even rectify the image of the American oppressor. And what if he could? He only serves to divert the enthusiasm of the people from their only realistic source of security.

LAOS is a small, poor, non-unified fiction of a country with few prospects for "development," few resources. It is in the nature of international politics that its powerful neighbors should seek to conquer it, or at least to bring it within their spheres of influence, either through bribery or by force.

The 1962 Geneva Accord between the great powers which declared Laos to be neutral flew in the face of this political reality. It set up the International Control Commission, made up of Polish, Canadian, and Indian representatives, under a mandate to regulate Laotian neutrality, to police foreign intervention.

Yet the fact that the ICC has always been pitifully under-financed and under-staffed, and the fact that its reports and recommendations often go unheeded are evidence that the sponsoring powers have no intention of giving up their reasonable options to colonize Laos.

Colonization. . . . It is said that North Vietnamese forces never left Laos after the end of the Civil War in 1962. . . . Even if one believes the official U.S. claims that there are not now, never have been, and never will be, U.S. troops in Laos, one has to admit that the presence of American advisers in every department of the Laotian government, in every Royal province, seems to accomplish the same thing.

So the Laotian generals at the moment look to the United States for protection, seek to include their country in the American sphere. They are lining their pockets and laughing at America's pretensions of high moral purpose. Doubtles they would as readily look to North Vietnam or to China as patrons if it were not too late, if they were not sure of being dispossessed by a nationalist communist regime. Ho Chi Minh might have found "mon general's" five Mercedes a trifle excessive.

But the United States is 18,000 miles away. It is probable that we are unable to win the war, and that the Lao generals will wish that they had followed the lead of the Pathet Lao's Souphanouvong, and chosen a protector closer to home, because defending an "outpost" 18,000 miles distant does not have the immediacy of defending one just across your borders.

Of course, another obstacle to winning the war, to culminating our colonization of Laos, is that unlike most colonialists we are competing with a rival who has an immense psychological advantage. A comparable situation . . . the United States would not be too pleased if the Soviet Union attempted to bring Canada into its sphere of influence, but we could rest assured that we would have an edge in the competition-300 years of a common cultural heritage with Canada.

Trapped in the Western cultural pattern, and inevitably racist, few Americans are ever able to develop the respect for the Lao-or Asian, for that matter-character and culture which is necessary for cooperation. The American yoke will never fit Laos as comfortably as the Chinese or Vietnamese.

[I am returning to Vientiane after a week in the royal capital of Luang Prabang, even four years ago constantly threatened by Pathet Lao guerrillas. If I am anxious to get back to Vientiane, where the main amusement is Walt Disney movies dubbed in Thai, rest assured that Luang Prabang must have been dead. It is the rainy season. The only way to get to Vientiane, since there are no passable roads, is to fly-in a DC-3. The only way to get to the airport is to cross the river-on a ferry, since there are no bridges in Laos.

The ferry is not leaving on time because a truck has gotten stuck in the mud of the riverbank after driving half-way off. We wait . . . and wait . . . and wait . . . while no one does anything to budge the truck so the ferry can leave. If it doesn't leave pretty soon, we will miss the plane to Vientiane, and who knows when there will be another one to get us back to "civilization?" Doesn't anyone realize the urgency of the situation?

Apparently not . . . I explain my concern to my Lao friends, who look at me rather blankly-politely-and at each other questionably. It gets closer and closer to the time when the plane is scheduled to leave. . . . Finally one of my friends realizes why I am upset, and explains:

"We will not miss the plane because the plane will be late the same way we are. If it left when it said it would, that would be just stupid, No one would be on it."]

Form over content. . . . If the job doesn't look like it would back in the States, then it just isn't getting done, that's all there is to it. Inefficiency which would horrify an American management consultant must be just as dangerous in Laos, it just must be. . . .

THE American style and the Lao style are so disparate that no American will believe that a Lao can be trusted to perform well. And as long as there are Americans around to "help out," to give the natives the benefit of their expertise, then Lao casualness will continue to be taken at face value, as a sign of hopeless incompetence.

The Lao know what the Americans think of them, and they respond with mixed emotions. Almost without exception they worship American materialism. . . . Where the Americans go, so does money, and things to spend the money on-movies, records, radios, clothes, cars, motorcycles. Of course, for as long as you care about them, you can spend the American dollars on uniquely Lao status symbols and valuables-silk, gold ornaments, huge, lavish parties for all your family and friends.

The Lao who goes on caring about Lao things longer than most tempers his love of American money with prideful resentment of Americanization. Yet outwardly he is as charming and warm as the most enthusiastic concert to the American way.

This Lao charm confuses most Americans, even revolts them, since they insist on judging the Lao culture by American standards of "straightforwardness." "These folks sure don't shoot from the hip, do they now? Come to think of it, they might even shoot you in the back." For some reason Texans seem disproportionately represented in the Foreign Service.

Americans don't know how to deal with "the smiling Lao"-as a result they tend to put their foot in it quite often, but they get away with it. The Lao responds with such politeness that the American comes away unaware that he has been rude. The rudeness of individual Americans, and the racist quality of official policy combine to offset the otherwise limitless ingratiating power of the American dollar.

It is typical that America should want, and should expect to be able to, buy love with dollars, just as it is typical that we find it necessary to disguise our neo-colonalism as "protecting the right to self-determination, "promoting democracy," etc.

How much will it all cost? [I ask the head of USAID in Laos, "Is there any way of estimating approximately how much money we give Laos every year?" He laughs and answers, "Why, of course, 50 million a year-exactly-no more, no less."

I can't figure me out-I was cynical enough even then to know that there must be loopholes, like rice for the peasants being sold to buy tanks, but I was so naive that I actually thought this man would admit to their existence-even describe them for me. Oh, well, even $50 million is a lot to spend to keep a country of two million in line. . . . And that was four years ago.] . . .

How much will it cost? When will we know? When will it end?