The government of Laos lashed out at the international news media Wednesday over coverage of the arrest and detention of two European journalists and an American pastor.
Government-run Radio Vientiane quoted the country’s foreign minister, Somsavat Langsawat, as singling out the American news agency Associated Press for allegedly publishing distorted news coverage of the journalists’ arrest.
Thierry Falise, a Bangkok-based photojournalist from Belgium, Vincent Reynaud, a cameraman from France, and Naw Karl Mua, a naturalised American citizen and Christian pastor born in Laos, were arrested on June 4 in the northern Lao province of Xiangkhoang.
”I have warned foreign correspondents that when they come to Laos, if they don’t know the realities, they should not report anything wrong,” Somsavat was quoted as saying in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, where he was attending a foreign ministers meeting on Tuesday.
”Every news reporter must respect their own dignity. The AP news agency should not criticise the Lao government,” he said.
The radio broadcast, monitored in Bangkok, said the three suspects were in good health and were receiving proper care and visits by French and Belgian consular officials.
The government has given few details of the case, saying only that the three ”will face heavy punishment” related to the killing of a Lao soldier in Xiangkhoang on June 3.
However, human rights and journalist protection organisations have called for the immediate release of the journalists on grounds that they were only trying to gather news when they found themselves in the middle of a gunbattle between Lao government forces and ethnic Hmong guerrillas.
A Canadian schoolteacher, Patrick Foisy, said he met Falise and Reynaud shortly after their arrest and they told him they had been trekking from a remote Hmong rebel village when they witnessed the firefight.
Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand in Bangkok on Monday night, Foisy said the two journalists had fled the fighting but were arrested when they encountered a Lao government checkpoint.
He said they urged him to inform their families and embassies they were gathering news on the Hmong rebels and did not take part in the gunbattle.
The continued resistance of Hmong guerrillas nearly three decades after the 1975 communist takeover of the country is a highly sensitive subject for the Lao government.
Colleagues of Falise and Reynaud said they were likely to have contacted rebel supporters outside Laos in order to have arranged their visit to a remote Hmong village of about 1 000 residents in Xiengkhouang.
They said the Lao government appeared to be trying to make an example of the journalists for trying to report on a rebel movement that officially does not exist.
The rebels are believed to be remnants of the legendary General Vang Pao’s army, which was backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the so-called ‘Secret War’ in Laos in the 1960s. The rebels reportedly continue to receive support from US-based anti-communist Hmong and Lao groups.
”Journalists should not be arrested for doing their job,” said Lin Neumann of the Committee to Protect Journalists. ”These guys were just doing their job.”
The London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International said it was ”extremely concerned by the bellicose nature of remarks made by Lao government officials regarding the alleged incident in early June”. – Sapa-DPA