“The provision of large-scale land concessions in the 2000s ... was the latest in a succession of episodes of violence in recent Lao history.” Land Concessions and Postwar Conflict in Laos I AN G. BAIRD I n May 1975, the communist political move- ment in Laos, the Pathet Lao, took control of the country. The takeover was initially accom- plished without bloodshed, by manipulating the national political situation and undermining the coalition government that had been formed in the wake of a February 1973 agreement that ended major military conflict. King Sisavang Vat- thana abdicated, and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) was officially established on December 2, 1975, modeled on the Soviet Union and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The dramatic political, economic, and social changes that followed resulted in considerable upheaval. Thousands of political opponents of the new regime, without being charged or tried, were sent to euphemistically named “reeducation camps,” which actually were hard-labor concen- tration camps. Even more fled across the Mekong River and ended up in refugee camps in Thailand. Some elements of the opposition inside and out- side Laos took up arms against the new regime, with limited support from Thailand. Thai leaders wanted Lao dissidents to collect military intelli- gence for them and act as a buffer against possible communist Lao and Vietnamese incursions into Thailand. With South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos all becoming communist in 1975, and the Communist Party of Thailand gaining political and military strength, there were fears that Thai- land could be the next domino to fall. In 1979, when the Sino-Soviet ideological split ruptured China’s relationship with Vietnam, and by extension with the Lao PDR, China decided to support the Lao insurgency with arms, supplies, and training. This conflict, along with the one that broke out in Cambodia after the Vietnamese ousted the Khmer Rouge in early 1979, constituted what many refer to as the Third Indochina War. The regional conflict brought protracted political and military strife to various parts of Laos, espe- cially along the Laos–Thailand border in the 1980s. In both the pre-1975 Royal Lao Government era and the post-1975 period, the Lao state, like most of its peers in Southeast Asia, dared not give for- eign governments or companies substantial land rights due to concerns about losing sovereignty to outsiders. Serious qualms about large-scale land concessions first emerged during the early post- colonial period in Southeast Asia. In Laos, those concerns ensured that land concessions never exceeded five hectares each. In the 1980s and 1990s, when it instituted economic but not political reforms, the Lao PDR government began to shift its policy on land con- cessions to foreign operators. In 2001, the govern- ment adopted a new land law. For the first time, it allowed foreign companies to obtain concessions for commercial tree plantation developments of up to 10,000 hectares each. It was the beginning of a new era. INTERSECTIONS OF VIOLENCE The provision of large-scale land concessions in the 2000s inflicted violence on local people in the form of loss of land and livelihoods. This was the latest in a succession of episodes of violence in recent Lao history. It was different in form but intertwined with the violence of armed conflict that occurred after 1975 in Laos: that which fol- lowed the Second Indochina War (the Vietnam War), and the “postwar” violence associated with the Third Indochina War (the Sino-Soviet rupture in mainland Southeast Asia), which continued up until the 1990s. There are more connections between the violence of the Lao postwar military conflict and the violence of large-scale land IAN G. BAIRD is a professor of geography and coordinator of the Hmong Studies Consortium at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. 230