Capital’s timeless quality unchanged by new regime

Press, 27 December 1986, Page 20

Capital’s timeless quality unchanged by new regime

By

MICHAEL ADLER

of Agence France-Presse through NZPA Vientiane A ' mixture of the ancient, colonial and rural gives the rundown Laotian capital a charm all its own, where a goat is likely to be seen grazing at the Foreign Ministry or a water buffalo on a hotel lawn.

With its gilded temples, wide avenues and baroque monuments, Vientiane seems to have remained unchanged from past French and royal Governments through to the present Communist regime. The setting has a timeless quality, even if cyclists now have through the rainy-season drizzle as street loudspeakers blare Communist Party doctrine.

Charm and setting aside, however, there have been some basic transformations in this Indochinese capital, which is a sprawling municipalitylof 377,900 people, en-j

compassing 294,000 hectares of rice plains and jungle forests. One long-time foreign resident recalled the latenight socialising in the red-light district of Dhong Pahane before the Communist takeover on December 2, 1975. Dhong Pahane is now a quiet residential area, its sober rows of wooden houses interspersed with three-sided shacks used as shops. Residents said that if authorities suspect a Laotian girl of dallying with foreigners she is packed off for “re-education" on one of two islands in the desolate reservoir behind the Nam Ngum Dam, 100 kilometres north of here. Men are re-educated on Done Thao island, women on Done Nang island. The prudery imposed by the Pathet Lao on once-raucous Laos has also affected the annual “rocket festival,” a former fertility rite which is one of the few really festive times still cele-

brated in this country. In pre-communist days, the gathering, called the Bun Bang F’ai, was a religious affair, with monks’ incantations meant to bring forth rain and guarantee the fecundity of the rice fields. Special altars were built and on the day of the rocket launchings, young people paraded carrying wooden phalluses and puppets entwined to represent sexual intercourse.

But at this year’s festival in June, the altars were replaced by large bamboo-covered booths from which officials called out the names of the village teams participating and the results of their rocket-launching attempts. Thousands of spectators craned their necks at what had become a sports event to watch young men climb a rickety bamboo platform to shoot off fivemetre poles propelled by gunpowder charges strapped to one end.

A diplomat said the Pathet Lao had banned the carrying of phalluses for this celebration. “It really is tame now,” he said.

The libertine past is dimly reflected during the festival, however, when boys dress up in exagagerated, almost clown-like fashion to parade as girls and engage in mock flirting.

While most of the 9000 permanent foreign residents of Vientiane are Vietnamese or Chinese, several hufidred Western diplomats and aid officials are still living here, most of whom are not allowed more than six kilometres outside the city centre without authorisation.

They still have half a dozen French restaurants to choose from in this capital once completely dominated by French culture and cuisine. The Laotians seem to have made their revolution according to their easygoing tradition of “Bo Penh Nhang” feever

mind). Laos was the only one of the three Indochinese countries to have had a non-violent transition of regimes in 1975.

Instead of knocking down a baroque monument viewed as a symbol of the corruption of the royal regime, the Pathet Lao left it in place and built their own memorial

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier constructed in the 1960 s by the royal Government was made from concrete the United States had given for airport runways. This structure, with its four arches dominating a major crossroads, is now “a nonmonument; no longer famous,” one official said.

To honour their own unknown dead, the Pathet Lao in 1977 built in a main square a stark white “stupa” which is antisep-tic-looking in comparison with the rococo designs and pink shading of the larger, dishonoured monument.