Vivid memory of the bombing, Laos, 1994.

1In Laos, the Vietnam War did not really end in 1975. For the ethnic minorities who lived in the mountains (50% of the population), particularly in the South, the most heavily bombed region in history, it continued with the presence of more than 80 million unexploded cluster bombs. In 1993, an ethnologist settled in remote villages to study the social and cultural impact of the war. He witnessed the sudden displacement of entire villages to lowlands and their precarious settlement on the roadside. The idea was to facilitate their access to education and health services, which were incidentally non-existent. Having sounded the alarm about the appalling conditions of these large-scale displacements, he managed to get UNDP, in conjunction with Unesco, to entrust Orstom with a survey in 1996 to assess the situation on a national level.

Forced displacement, Kantu minority, Laos, 1995.

2For 10 months, a multidisciplinary team – ethnologists, agronomists and economists – assisted by local education officials studied the fate of more than 1,000 families from 70 relocated villages, in six provinces. This was the first major social survey in a country that was not very open to research. It resulted in an extensive report with catastrophic conclusions. Published in June 1997, it showed the consequences of a hasty authoritarian policy, notably the very high malnutrition and mortality rates among these mountain people, who were suddenly cut off from their ecosystem and cultural environment. As a result of this report, major donor countries made their support for Laos conditional, forcing the government to restrict relocations, justify them or improve their preparation. Furthermore, this research played a pioneering role in the study of contemporary mobility in continental South-East Asia and that of the risk of rapid acculturation associated with the displacement of ethnic minorities.