Long and winding road to reforms

Long and winding road to reforms

Economic reforms bring mixed results in Southeast Asia's underdeveloped region. Andrew Nette examines the changes in this Inter Press Service report.

HANOI: When aid and political support from the former Soviet Union dried up in the late 1980s, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia all took the road to reforms. Since then, however, the three Indochinese countries have taken widely divergent paths.

The change has been most dramatic in Cambodia, where a UN peace plan helped it become the only Indochinese country to establish a multi-party system. The groundwork for this shift was laid in 1991 when the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, which had ruled Cambodia since Pol Pot's fall in 1978, changed its name to the State of Cambodia party and formally dumped any adherence to Marxism.

Vietnam and Laos also tempered their Marxist rhetoric, but they modeled their reforms on the Chinese model: opening their economies while retaining one-party rule.

Vietnam's free market reforms have produced an annual growth rate of nine percent. But the continued secrecy on economic affairs and the fact that 87 percent of the nation's business capital remains under state control shows Hanoi is still lukewarm toward capitalism.

Indeed, speaking at the 50th anniversary celebrations of Vietnamese independence in September, President Le Duc Anh pledged the government would continue toward the creation of "a just and civilized society along the socialist oriented line".

For its part, Laos launched economic reforms in 1979, four years after the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) took power. A decade later, Vientiane introduced the `new economic mechanism' that included measures aimed at attracting foreign investment, cutbacks in state services and widespread privatization.

The transition has been relatively painless in Laos. "The country was in a better position to move more quickly with reform because in a sense their socialist activities had not penetrated so far as the system has in China and Vietnam," says Grant Evans, an Australian academic who has written widely on Laos.

But Laos echoes Vietnam in making clear that economic openness should not be confused with political change. Both countries stress that there is no one rule book for democracy, and that political systems should be applied as befit the "special conditions" pertaining to a country's economic and cultural development.

In Vietnam, these sentiments have been accompanied by stepped- up attacks on what are apparently considered `hostile forces' working against the country. Barely a week after U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited Hanoi in August, for instance, seven Vietnamese and two Vietnamese-Americans were given stiff sentences for activities described by the local media as "very serious violations of national sovereignty and security".

In June, two elderly Communist Party dissidents were also arrested, in what political experts say was a retort to their calls for more pluralism in the party.

The experts say these moves seem like the authorities' attempts to assert control after the normalization of relations with the United States and Vietnam's entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Says one analyst: "It's the leadership's way of saying even though they are opening up to the outside world, the party is still very much in control."

The arrests coincided with official denunciations of Western interference in Vietnam's human rights affairs. "We are willing to continue a dialogue on human rights, which we consider a global issue, but do not accept it as a condition for trade and economic relations," said a foreign ministry spokesperson.

In Laos, meanwhile, the LPRP has also explicitly ruled out any chance of sharing power. Evans says a key difference in Laos is that there is little demand for change. "The relative isolation of the vast majority of the people from the affairs of the city has made them less interested in politics, " he says, noting the largely peasant-based nature of Laotian society.

But not everyone agrees there has been no political change in Vietnam and Laos. Says a Vietnamese official who asked not to be named: "Many in the foreign media say reform has just been economic. Things have definitely become more liberal."

He points to the growing independence of the respective National Assemblies in both countries, the lifting of internal travel restrictions, and the rising availability of foreign media such as newspapers and satellite television. Says the official: " Three years ago you could not even invite a foreigner into your home without permission but now this is no longer the case. The bottom line is that while change is happening it will be step by step."

Some observers believe Laos and Vietnam have good cause to be wary of the changes sweeping them, as both poor countries confront a painful integration into the world economy on terms that can hardly be considered favorable.

Neighboring Cambodia has also provided them vivid proof for their assertion that multi-party systems bring instability and could endanger economic growth. Vientiane and Hanoi had pointed to Cambodia under the direction of the United Nations as an example of the risks of unrestricted opening to the outside world: a lack of indigenous sovereignty, economic chaos, a rise in crime, the influx of foreigners with dubious intentions and connections.

And while the 1993 polls went smoothly, many believe Cambodia's human rights situation two years after the UN peacekeepers left is far worse than that of its two neighbors. These include attacks on the press, and what a 1994 U.S. State Department report called "credible reports that individual members of the security forces committed serious human rights violations including instances of extra-judicial killings".

Cambodia also suffered a series of financial scandals recently and is still battling the Khmer Rouge insurgency that drains drain resources and creates a general climate of uncertainty.

But the future of the one-party rule in Laos and Vietnam depends on the continued ability of Chinese-style reforms to generate sufficient economic development to buy off the emerging middle class of these nations. Adds Evans: "If the LPRP and the Vietnamese Communist Party can transform themselves into straight nationalist parties in the tradition of capitalist one-party states so common in the developing world, they might survive in the long run."

-- IPS