ATTAPEU, Laos — As heavy rains lashed southern Laos over the weekend, volunteers from many countries were continuing to help victims of earlier flooding caused by the failure of a foreign-funded hydropower dam.
“It shows the spirit of humanity,” Yen Saisamon, a 17-year-old Laotian volunteer, said Friday at a relief center in the town of Attapeu.
Yet if foreigners are helping now, they also share a piece of the blame. The accident at the billion-dollar Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydroelectric project last week has cast a harsh spotlight on the default agenda of the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party: selling natural resources to foreign companies while evading scrutiny for investment projects that exacerbate rural poverty — or, in this case, kill innocent villagers.
Laos’ one-party communist government and the international financial institutions that support it have long embraced a “high-wire act” of prioritizing investment over stronger regulation, said Keith Barney, an expert on Laos at the Australian National University. But in the accident’s wake, “the potential pitfalls of poor regulation are now evident for everyone to see,” he said.
The South Korean company that is the main builder of the hydroelectric project has admitted that it knew the dam was deteriorating a day before it failed.
Barney said the accident at the dam, part of the hydroelectric project, was perhaps the biggest challenge to the ruling party’s legitimacy since its handling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, which led to rapid inflation. Officials may now face more pressure to incorporate social and environmental protections for rural people in the push for development, he said.
“Their response could either build confidence in the government or undermine it,” Barney said.
Analysts see Attapeu province, where the flooding occurred, as a case study. Even though it is brimming with logging, agribusiness, mining and hydropower projects, villagers “generally don’t reap many benefits from these activities” and instead face the most significant social and environmental impacts, said Miles Kenney-Lazar, an expert on Laos at Kyoto University in Japan.
The state-controlled news media has provided shifting and contradictory statements about the number killed in the accident — putting the death toll at 27, for example, but later revising it to four. Independent analysts say the deaths could exceed 27.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.