DISCUSSION: DIFFERENT DONOR APPROACHES TO ADDRESSING INTERNAL RESETTLEMENT ISSUES IN THE LAO PDR

 

There is certainly some overlap in the above approaches or positions on internal resettlement, even when it comes to individual organizations, and one of the striking points about our research is the lack of consistency among international aid organizations, and even within the agencies themselves, on this issue.  Most have not developed any formal organizational or country-specific policies or strategies for addressing internal resettlement, although there are some notable exceptions. 

 

Based on the substantial volume of evidence and literature on the subject that now exists, there appears to be very little justification for aid agencies involved in rural development in Laos to continue to either ignore these issues or to uncritically support internal resettlement.  First, there are no credible empirical studies that support the position that Focal Sites, or internal resettlement in general, is benefiting either resettled or ‘host’ communities in rural Laos, even in the long-term.  Believing otherwise can only be classified as ‘wishful thinking’.  Many people relocated decades ago continue to struggle to recover from being resettled.  Even if the ‘long-term improvement’ hypothesis did turn out to be accurate, it is the impacted people (those who are made to suffer in the early years) who should be making the decision over whether they are willing to pay this heavy price for the uncertain long term benefits being promised—not outside aid agencies unaccountable to local communities.  One observer notes that, considering the high mortality rates often associated with the early years of resettlement from upland to lowland areas[1], it is only those who survive the early period that have any chance of benefiting in the long term in any regard. 

 

As has already been outlined, some active support for resettlement is based on inadequate analysis or understanding.  Given the amount of attention that resettlement has received since at least 1997, and the key role that aid agencies play in funding it, the lack of basic understanding and awareness or appropriate response to these issues by some aid agency staff in the country can really only be seen as irresponsible.  There appear to be several reasons for this unfortunate situation:

 

·         The frequent turnover of expatriate staff results in a lack of institutional memory for many organizations.  Inadequate country-specific orientation has meant that expatriate staff lack an in-depth understanding of Lao rural development policy and issues.  Some never gain this understanding.  For others, once they do, the time soon comes for them to leave the country, and the cycle is repeated. 

 

·         The local staff hiring practices of aid groups have strongly favored the 30% of the population that are ethnic Lao, over non-Lao ethnic groups.  The qualifications most valued by aid agencies—English, computer skills, and university degrees--result in an urban and ethnic Lao bias.  Few ethnic minorities are seen as qualified for these positions.  Most of the senior local staff of international INGOs, and other donors are urban lowland Lao with many of the same ethnic biases as those in the central government.  Many have little understanding or appreciation of the livelihood or cultural systems of upland communities and have never engaged in much critical analysis of rural development policy in the country or internationally.   Some local staff see the proper role of INGOs or other aid groups as to unquestioningly assist in implementing government policy, regardless of what those policies may be.  A common view is that development is essentially about making ethnic minorities more like ethnic Lao.  Therefore, they are generally not opposed to forcing minorities into situations of rapid social transformation towards ethnic Lao lifestyles and cultural and economic norms.

 

·         While they might not endorse all of the above-mentioned views, many agencies have done little or nothing to try to influence or counter them.  Either they have not made it a priority or they are simply unaware of local realities.   Even agencies with explicit ‘rights-based approaches’ and expressed commitments to social and economic justice have avoided doing anything that might be perceived as ‘controversial’ or ‘political’, for fear of offending their government counterparts or conservative senior Lao staff.

 

·         Members of ethnic minority/indigenous groups are rarely hired to work for aid agencies.  Moreover, even if one or two token members of other ethnic groups are hired, they tend to conform to prevailing practices and attitudes rather than bringing the experiences and views of upland communities to inform the programming of aid agencies or to challenge the pre-conceived notions of lowland Lao staff towards the uplands.  Some do not even speak their own languages in villages of their own ethnic groups, having gained the impression that only the Lao language is acceptable for development workers.  Clearly, many agencies have put inadequate emphasis on cultural and ethnic issues in their offices and in their working practices.

 

·         Aid agencies are not making sufficient efforts to convince local government officials that internal resettlement is a social and cultural issue above all else, not just a development project reliant solely on technical fixes, as it is often treated or viewed.

 

·      In some cases INGO/IO or other donor representatives are well aware of internal resettlement, and some have reasonable strategies, albeit mainly informal ones, for addressing the issue.  However, this is mainly a rhetorical exercise by the country representative--they have not adequately discussed the issue within their own organizations or with local counterparts.  In some cases, Lao staff from these INGOs have communicated support for resettlement activities that the organization does not officially support, due to a lack of understanding about the position of their own organizations.

 

·      Even when it is brought to their attention, some agencies appear more concerned about program continuation and ‘not rocking the boat’ than they are about addressing this issue.  It is easier, and is perceived as safer, to just go along with what government counterparts want than it is to engage in an active dialogue with partners or to promote an alternative strategy. 

 

·      Some agencies are so committed to certain objectives that they seem willing to make compromises and support activities that may encourage further resettlement.  For instance, Norwegian Church Aid staff interviewed in March 2004 felt the objective of eliminating opium cultivation and use was so important that they were willing to support law enforcement activities (per-diems to officials to cut poppy fields) and thus sacrifice the short-term economic livelihoods of the communities where they were working, in order to support this long-term goal.  The ADB’s objectives of regional integration, promotion of industrial forestry and cash cropping, and the opening of markets in effect requires the type of demographic changes in rural Laos that internal resettlement is helping to bring about—whether or not the ADB admits this explicitly.    

 

·      Internal resettlement is so prevalent in many areas of Laos that it is difficult for agencies to work there without somehow becoming involved in it.  In many cases, agencies that thought they had agreements to work in existing villages have found that they are supporting a process of resettlement.  In 2004, staff from the US government funded ‘Lao-America project’ confirmed that they would only be working in existing stable villages and would not support any resettlement.  But earlier this year they found that, contrary to their understanding and agreement, at least one of their project villages in Phongsaly was moved. 

 

Prior to 2004, the involvement of the European Union (EU) with resettlement in Laos was mixed.  On the one hand, the EU was involved in supporting many standard rural infrastructure and development projects in the country, including many associated with village resettlement or consolidation.  In Luang Prabang province they have been supporting “micro-projectsâ€� in a large numbers of villages, including newly resettled communities.  But at the same time, the small office of the EU’s European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) took a leadership role in researching and promoting alternatives to resettlement.  ECHO funded several of the more promising alternative initiatives as well as studies by ACF and UNDP.  However, in early 2005, following a change of emphasis, ECHO moved to phase out this involvement. 

 

At the same time, the main EU office in Laos has recently been coordinating a new donor initiative on resettlement.  Their representative has produced a concept paper on the topic (Cerrato 2004) calling for a new dialogue between large donors and the GoL on resettlement, and suggesting that donors should support resettlement so that it is done better.  This initiative, while well intended, is provoking substantial concern among critics of internal resettlement in the Lao PDR who see it as a significant step backwards. Some of the specific points of concern are that the concept paper: 

 

·         Is based on a flawed and inadequate analysis of the background to internal resettlement and lacks reference to previous research or donor initiatives, including the UNDP (1998) process or the fact that donors have already been heavily involved in supporting resettlement. 

·         Discounts the idea that large donors, acting together, can influence or change policy in Laos.  The paper just assumes that resettlement is inevitable and that donors are powerless to promote alternatives.  This is not the actual experience or perspective of many donors in the country.    

·         Assumes it is acceptable to support ‘voluntary’ resettlement without any analysis of what this term really means in Laos or how donors such as the EU would gain the capacity, which they currently lack, to even begin to attempt to adequately make such assessments.

·         Is based on the idea that more money and consultants can resolve the past problems with internal resettlement.  Rather than seeing fundamental flaws in the whole policy, the paper assumes that the main issue is just that implementation expertise and funding are inadequate.  As we have discussed above, there are no existing experiences or evidence on which to base such an assumption. 

 

            The EU is now in discussions with the GoL and preparing to provide millions of dollars, as well as soliciting cooperation from other donors, to support new resettlement in Laos, all based on this flawed concept paper.  Given what is known about the tremendous suffering resettlement has already caused to ethnic minority communities in the Lao PDR, this course of action is highly questionable. It could well expose the EU to the possibility that it will be seen as actively complicit in the violation of the basic human rights of impacted indigenous communities in the Lao PDR in the future. 

The EU concept paper, and some other donors, claim to distinguish between ‘voluntary’ resettlement (which they will support) and ‘involuntary’ resettlement (which they claim not to support).  Our own recent research, as well as the results of a not yet publicly released new study by ACF, and those reported by Evrard and Goudineau (2004), calls into question this whole framework.  The terms ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ fail to adequately describe the decision-making process or local context that results in the movement of communities and people in Laos.  More accurate terms of definition might be ‘villager-initiated’ and ‘externally-initiated’, but even these cannot represent the complex situations that often develop around resettlement.  It is clear, however, that almost all of what is classified as voluntary resettlement in Laos is, in reality, not villager-initiated.  Despite claims that there is no involuntary resettlement in Laos, it often takes place after a number of escalating steps that are designed to fundamentally influence or coerce villagers to support the resettlement option. 

 

 One important tool is the use of Land and Forest Allocation to limit swidden agriculture in the uplands and shorten fallow cycles to such an extent that villagers are no longer able to subsist on uplands agriculture.  A hungry person in the mountains who sees little prospects for getting ahead, considering the restrictions on swidden agriculture or opium cultivation, is likely to be more receptive to moving to the lowlands than someone with enough rice to eat.  Authorities are generally well aware of this dynamic.  Sometimes government services for villages targeted for relocation are suspended.  For example, in Phou Vong district, Attapeu province, teachers have been removed from some government schools to pressure villagers to move.  These policies make conditions in the mountains so difficult for people that they feel that moving to the lowlands could not be any worse than what they are already facing in the uplands.   At a certain point, when conditions have deteriorated considerably, many do agree to move to the lowlands.  In some places when villagers start to see a future move as inevitable, a rush to the lowlands develops in order to get in first on the very limited land and resources available in resettlement areas.  Afterwards, particularly when talking with outsiders, villagers who have moved will often report that they moved ‘voluntarily’.  But the reality is that their movements were quite coerced and manipulated.  The villagers did not initiate the process.  

 

It not enough to simply ask whether people are resettling voluntarily or not; it is critical, rather, to ask what conditions, or changes in circumstances, led to people ‘volunteering’ to resettle.  Unfortunately, not enough people ask this critical question.  Most donors lack the capacity or the time to adequately assess what is voluntary and what is not.  Their local staff are seldom aware of the underlying issues and often lack the cultural understanding, perspectives, and languages of the ethnic communities where they are working.  So they fail to sufficiently identify with the villagers’ interests or to even explore the issues in any substantive detail during their brief village visits.

 

False Promises: Another part of the program to convince villagers to resettle involves making promises about the benefits that resettled villagers will receive.  However, these promises are rarely followed through on, either due to a lack of government resources to support the plans, or due to overly optimistic initial assessments of the adaptive ability of resettled people.  In some cases, officials may even deliberately lie to villagers in order to convince them to move.  The head of the Women’s Union in Nga District, Oudomxay Province, in northern Laos reported that it is necessary to lie to local people about the extent of benefits that they will receive if they are resettled, because if they told them the truth, local people would mainly not agree to move.  Many of these promises to villagers involve directing international aid agency support to communities once they are resettled.  Sometimes government officials promise these resources without the knowledge of the donors.  Officials make promises--and then approach donors to help them keep them.

 

 

            Some of the most extensive internal resettlement from the mountains to the lowlands in southern Laos in the late 1990s took place in Xekong province.  However, in recent years Attapeu province has probably experienced the most intensive government sponsored internal resettlement in southern Laos, particularly in Phou Vong and Sanxay districts.  Therefore, examples from these two districts are provided to illustrate many of the serious livelihood issues that internally resettled people are facing all over Laos. 

 

Phou Vong district, populated mainly by ethnic Brao (Lave) people, is considered to be the third poorest district in Laos.  All of the official 23 villages in the district have been resettled for various reasons since 1975, and, since the mid-1990s, over half have been moved from upland areas to the lowlands.  Many smaller villages have also been consolidated into larger ones, and some communities have been resettled in relative upland areas near the Vietnamese and Cambodian borders.  There are even plans to resettle the district center from its present location to an area adjacent to the Kong River, although many local government officials are resisting the idea.

 

            Phou Vong has experienced many of the typical problems of internal resettlement also found elsewhere and international donors have been heavily involved in the process.   In Vonglakhone village in early 2005, the local government enticed the ethnic Brao community to resettle from the south to the north side of the Kong River so as to be near a new school being funded by the ADB’s ‘Dek Nying’ (girls) education project.  Vonglakhone was relocated from upland areas a few years ago, so this was their second government-initiated move in recent years.

 

Cheung Hiang village, another ethnic Brao community, was initially resettled to the lowlands on the south side of the Kong River near the border with Cambodia, in 2003 and 2004--despite the fact that they had generated large surpluses of rice doing swidden agriculture in the uplands before being resettled.   They did not want to move to the lowlands, but were told they had no choice but to follow the government plan.  They were promised ‘development’ once they moved.  For the first year after being resettled, the villagers mainly survived on what was left of their rice stockpiled in the mountains in previous years, after having to pay half of these rice stocks for the transport costs for moving the remainder to their resettlement site.  The local government provided only 13 buffaloes for 60 families.  Some families received zinc roofing sheets for their houses.  However, there was insufficient land to develop lowland wet rice cultivation in the area.  Only some families were able to develop small paddy areas near the village. 

 

Then, at the beginning of 2005, the villagers were told that they would have to resettle their village again, this time to a new road in the lowlands and on the north side of the Kong River.  Once again, the people did not want to make the move, as they had already developed some lowland paddy on the other side of the river, and were trying to develop more.  More importantly, the new resettlement site is in very dry dipterocarp forest area, and the closest source of drinking or bathing water is two kilometers away at the Kong River.  A village leader stated, “We did not want to move near the road until a school had been built and a secure water source had been established.  But, they [government officials] told us that we had to move before those things could be provided to us.â€�  The people were then told that they had no choice but to move immediately, as the road was built for people to use, so they must live near it.   They were told to organize their houses in single lines next to the road.  Twenty of the village’s 60 families bent to the pressure and followed these instructions, moving to the area in early 2005.  However, as of mid-April 2005, the promised wells and school have still not materialized, despite the village headman having requested urgent help with clean water on three separate occasions in recent months.  There is not a single year-round water source near the new village site.  Other problems are a lack of forest and fishing resources in the area.   There are some areas that might be developed for paddy, but that will take many years and intensive labor. 

 

The local government is now waiting for international aid agencies to come and work in the village and solve the water and school problems facing the community.  During the rainy season, however, the people in the new resettlement area will have no choice but to abandon the area in order to farm lowland paddy south of the Kong River, near their previous village location.  At the height of the rainy season the water in the Kong River will be too strong to cross.  One villager said that they would be forced to move away from the area if the water problem is not solved by next dry season.  Even then, the area is not where the people want to live.  The case of Cheung Hieng is a good example of one of the types of successive resettlements in the lowlands that often occur after the initial failure of an initial resettlement.  Evrard and Goudineau (2004) provide examples of different reasons for successive movements in the lowlands after resettlement.

 

Tra-oum village, another Brao community in Phou Vong district, has also faced serious problems since being resettled into the lowlands in 2004.  Shortly after moving to their resettlement site near the district center, at least 12 people from the village’s 60 families died of unconfirmed diseases.  The resettled villagers did not have a clean source of the water upon arriving in the area.  In their original location streams and springs ran year round and clean water was relatively abundant.  Despite being promised at least one hectare of lowland paddy fields per family upon resettling, in reality most families only received a fraction of what they need to subsist on.  By April 2005, more than 50% of the 60 houses in the new village had been essentially abandoned, and many people have opted to live near their lowland paddy and swidden fields.  There are few Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) or other forest resources near where they live, as the area has already been heavily commercially logged.  Therefore, local people still travel back to the mountains on a regular basis to fish and collect NTFPs.  ADRA has recently drilled three pump wells in the village, but only one is operating.  All three are being subjected to Arsenic testing in Australia due to a fear that they may be poisoning the villagers. 

 

In one of the three Focal Sites in Phou Vong district, “Khet Chout Xoum Houay Keo,â€� near the Vietnamese and Cambodian borders in a relatively mountainous area, more than 100 ethnic Brao families were relocated in 2005.  However, the lowland area where they have been resettled was heavily bombed during the 1960s and early 1970s, and the village area has still not been checked for UXOs left over from the war, although this is the normal practice in the area before resettlement takes place.  Despite the rationale of converting those resettled from being swidden cultivators to lowland farmers, there is only a very limited amount of land suitable for lowland paddy in the area.  More importantly, almost all of the available lowland areas are heavily contaminated with UXOs, and this year it will only be possible for UXO Lao, the international donor-supported organization responsible for UXO removal, to clear eight hectares of land.  This land is to be given to 16 families.  The vast majority of people resettled to the area may never get access to lowland paddy land.  Even the ½ hectare of paddy per family that 16 families will receive will not be enough to subsist on.  For those continuing to do swidden, the government is requiring that after each year for the next five years, the swiddens are planted with ‘economic’ tree species (cash crops), but some villagers are resisting, fearing that they will not be able to harvest the trees in the future.  A private company is providing the tree seedlings.

 

In neighboring Sanxay district, Attapeu province, to the north of Phou Vong, the ethnic Triang (Talieng), Harak (Alak) and Ye people resettled to the lowland Focal Site previously called ‘Khet Chout Xoum Nam Pa’ but now referred to as ‘Koum Ban Nam Pa’, have recently been facing serious health, food security and livelihoods problems.  The majority of the people in approximately 19 villages[2] were moved into the same general area in recent years.  One local official, himself one of the later people to resettle from the uplands, once the district center of Sanxay was also resettled to the Focal Site in January 2003.  He found that, by the time he had arrived in the resettlement area, there was virtually no lowland farmland left for him or many in his community.  Even earlier arrivals have mainly only been provided with small areas of lowland paddy.  In 2004, people in the area were only able to produce enough rice on average for three months of consumption, leaving them with a shortage of nine months over the year.  In 2004 rains were poor, leading to even more serious shortages in 2005.  There is also a shortage of buffaloes to plow what lowland fields are available.  The soil in the resettlement area is also poor quality compared to those from the upland villages where the people came from, resulting in difficulties in growing vegetable gardens.  The government has built a covered building to serve as a market, but it is not being used, indicating that the market expansion that was expected after resettlement has not yet materialized.  There are few NTFPs, including fish and other forest products, to harvest in the area, leaving people short in food and money.  People have little to sell in the lowlands, and so they have little money to buy things either.  There is a hospital in the area, but they are having problems collecting the large amount of money that recently resettled people owe them for medicine that they have received there.  The local hospital reports that resettled people have experienced increases in illnesses, especially malaria, diarrhea, measles and skin diseases.  The situation is certainly much more difficult than the relatively positive articles about this resettlement area that appeared in the Lao media in 2003 (Thammavongsa 2003a,b)

 

Considering the large concentration of people in one area, and their poor circumstances, it is not surprising that, on one morning in early 2004, 20 families from Mai Thavan village gathered up what things they could carry and abruptly, without telling anyone in advance, walked back up into the mountains to their original village.  Nobody could really blame them for returning, but the government is trying to prohibit others from following their example.  That is one of the reasons that the government is so eager to get international funding for the area, in order to prevent its total collapse and failure.   A number of people who the government wants to move into the resettlement area have not yet arrived, as they are well aware of the difficult conditions facing the people already resettled in the area, and do not want to face the same fate.  One ethnic Triang government official admitted that if the people were allowed to decide where they wanted to live, the resettlement area would probably only have about 10% of the number of people in it as are there now.

 

With all the problems that this resettlement area is facing, it is surprising that a 10 km road to and from another resettlement area to the west, Dak Hiak, was funded using ‘emergency funds’ provided by the German government bilateral funding agency, GTZ.  In 2003 GTZ also provided the resettled people with ‘food-for-work’ rice (Thammavongsa 2003a), but by 2004, this program had ended.  ADRA has also installed pump wells with AUSAID funding in the resettlement area, and there are also plans for a large loan project sponsored by the international organization IFAD to work in the resettlement villages to support agriculture, infrastructure and income generating activities beginning in late 2005.  All of these donors appear to both accept the resettlement plan of the government and be willing to fund projects in support of it, despite its obviously serious and fundamental problems and the fact that people are there against their will.

 

 

It is not the main objective of this paper to illustrate the lack of success of internal resettlement initiatives in Laos in terms of improving the human well being or reducing poverty.  The significant volume of recent research and literature on the subject is more than sufficient for that.  Our purpose is to highlight the roles that donors and aid agencies are playing in regards to this critical issue, one that is having a devastating impact on the lives and livelihoods of the poorest in Laos. 

 

Our findings indicate that many international development agencies working in the Lao PDR--whether INGOs, IOs or bilateral donors--have failed to recognize or understand the critical importance and impacts of internal resettlement related initiatives on the people they are meant to be assisting or to adequately address these issues within their own projects and institutions.  Despite some positive examples, most of the development agencies working in Laos are not addressing this issue with the seriousness of conviction that it deserves.

 

Many tens of thousands of vulnerable indigenous ethnic minority people have died or suffered due to impacts associated with ill-conceived and poorly implemented internal resettlement initiatives in Laos over the last ten years.  Many of those impacted can expect to be impoverished long into the future, if not permanently.  The initiatives responsible for this situation have received substantial indirect and direct support from outside aid agencies and donors.  Are these agencies in reality guilty of facilitating violations of the basic rights of impacted communities through their involvement in internal resettlement? 

 

Given the complexity of the issues and the varying site-specific situations involved, it is not easy to pass judgment on the difficult decision-making processes and resultant actions of individual agencies.  But overall, the international development community has little to be proud of concerning its response to internal resettlement in Laos.  Given the political and cultural context in the country, international aid agencies operate there with very little accountability--other than to themselves.  They face no real scrutiny from local communities, independent media or other institutions and seldom have to justify their actions.  At the very least, a close examination and reflection on the practices of individual agencies seems called for—by the agencies themselves, by their partner organizations, and by those that provide funding or other support to them. 

 

In order to avoid the possibility of further support for inappropriate internal resettlement, aid groups need to take much more analytical, pro-active, precautionary, culturally and ethnically sensitive, and preventive approaches to their rural development work in Laos.  Certainly local conditions in different parts of Laos are going to necessitate different approaches and resources.  We are not saying that donors should never assist resettled communities.  But we do believe that such assistance should only even be considered when based on a full understanding of the issues involved and within the context of well-thought out approaches aimed at preventing further inappropriate resettlement. 

 

The representatives of development agencies working in Laos, along with their local and international staff, could do a much better job of informing themselves sufficiently about these crucial issues.  Based on such an understanding, it should be possible to design and implement programming that is more accountable to the needs and interests of the rural poor and indigenous ethnic communities in the country.  The aid agency and donor community could be much more proactive in helping to prevent inappropriate resettlement, and to promote a more rationale and humane rural development approach in the future.

  

 

 

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