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The World Bank has marked its fiftieth anniversary of doing business in Laos with a typically slick press release, multi-media timeline and video. There is probably much that could be said about the World Bank’s work in Laos, as well its commemoration of this occasion – please feel free to leave your comments.
One interesting aspect for me is the increasing occurrence in recent years of official fifty-year anniversaries in Laos, which mark events that took place under the previous Royal Lao Government regime. To name a few, these include the SEA Games in Laos two years ago, and a number of diplomatic ties, including, off the top of my head, those with Thailand and China. In an article I’ve published on the SEA Games in Laos, I reflect on the official remembering, and forgetting, exhibited during the event:
The SEA Games even drew tentatively on the pre-revolutionary period of royalist government (1949-75), which official history usually condemns as ‘neo-colonial’. This remembering required strategic acts of forgetting. Before the Games, Somsavat [Lengsavad, president of the organizing committee] celebrated Laos as a ‘founding father’ of the SEA Games in 1959, but omitted the fact that ‘Laos’ had been the Kingdom of Laos, not the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. While such omissions are hardly surprising, it is unusual for the Royal Lao Government period to be acknowledged in positive terms.
The games seem to have heralded a more general change, however, as other parts of the “neo-colonial” past – the noncontroversial and superficially non-political ones – are also becoming more palatable.
Simon Creak has drawn our attention to the increasingly subtle reconfiguring of memory in Laos today, not just by the government but by respectable international organizations like the World Bank too.
One source of this, I would contend, is the confusion that has emerged among visitors to Laos and foreigners working there about whether it is more correct to call the country ‘Laos’ or ‘Lao’ because the ‘s’ is absent in the Lao language. There is a reason why an ‘s’ may be added to ‘Lao’, and that is to transform it into a noun. Thus, the term ‘Lao’ is an adjective; with the ‘s’ added it becomes a noun. This is a logical solution to a linguistic problem within most European languages, or one may say a resource that these languages have. Some people seem to think that the written ‘s’ is silent, but this is simply a rationale for the observed difference between the spelling of Laos and the fact that many people these days do not pronounce the ‘s’ when speaking.
The confusion is set to continue. But it is worth noting the political and stylistic confusions that accompany it. The people who have had the biggest impact on English usage in Laos are the international aid organizations and the embassies. Between them they produce mountains of documents in which they have ‘solved’ this problem in a most ugly way stylistically. Instead of using ‘Lao’ as both an adjective and a noun in these documents (which is how most of them use it in speech) they continually forgo the noun form in favour of the adjectival, i.e. they write the Lao PDR, endlessly. Some unconsciously recognise the problem and try to turn the adjective into a noun, such as with ‘in Lao PDR’. Laos or Lao would be so much simpler. Furthermore, it has produced confusions between the country of Laos and the current regime, the LPDR. If the Lao PDR is your pseudo noun, how do you refer to the country before this regime was in power? In one case I saw a graph series for the ‘Lao PDR’ stretching from the 1950s into the 1990s! Of course, the Lao PDR has only existed since December 1975. Even the American Embassy tripped itself up when in 2005 it celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relations between ‘The USA and the Lao PDR’. They of all people should have been aware that they initially established diplomatic relations with the Royal Lao Government in Laos. No doubt the Lao PDR itself is very happy to see such slipping and sliding in historical memory as it garners to itself all the ‘good’ things that have happened in Laos’ recent past.
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Thanks to Simon and Grant for starting this discussion. This is a really serious issue. In fact the video on the World Bank website states: “The 1960s / Partnership begins / Lao PDR joins the International Monetary Fund…”
Unbelievable.
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