BANGKOK – Asian police were sent in to check on Laos this week after the landlocked country, forever stuck in an isolated geographic sliver between Thailand and Vietnam, failed to report to an ASEAN energy summit in the Thai capital.
It was the sixth straight meeting Laos had failed to attend but the first time anyone had noticed the absence of the hardcore-communist nation after a roll call was taken of countries that had successfully bung-holed their domestic sustainability initiatives over the past year in favor of positive forex infows from oil and mining exports.
Asean Secretary-General Lim Jok Hoi of Brunei, who chaired the meeting, had asked during the roll call whether Laos was present and if anyone could speak for the Indo-Chinese Democratic Republic, but the only response came from Vietnam and Cambodia, who both giggled as they pointed to a plate of steaming Laab Ped that someone had placed on Laos’s empty seat.
“Look like Laos have nothing to say!” Vietnam’s foreign minister, Buyi Thanh Son, exclaimed.
“Hello Laos! Could you please stand up and raise your hand and let us know you still there!” Cambodia’s mines and energy minister, Suy Sem, added gleefully while pointing at the Laab Ped. “Maybe you disappeared yourself and oh cannot be found!”
Suy and Buyi were referring to the many unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of human rights activists in Laos over the past several years and the Lao government’s failure to order independent investigations into the disappearances or even to have the cases discussed at Asean events. But it was also believed Laos may have come down with a mystery illness like Mekong Canker Sores or Luang Prabang Lymphocitis, both of which it suddenly began complaining about shortly after failing to win any gold medals at the Asian Games in 2018 for the 14th straight time.
Saffion Singh-Erickson, an Asian case officer for Human Rights Watch, said southeast Asian countries often used newly discovered “epidemics” as cover for their domestic and international political issues, but added that it was more likely Laos simply wanted to isolate itself from international society a few years while it decides whether to continue nursing its adolescent pimples or finally grow up, come out of its room and get a career going either as a vassal state of China or as a quasi-democracy with super good food like Malaysia.
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