On the evening of 15 December 2012, Sombath Somphone, a leading democracy activist from Laos, was stopped at a police checkpoint on a busy street in the country’s capital Vientiane. Footage from a traffic CCTV camera shows that within minutes of him being stopped, unknown individuals forced him into another vehicle and drove him away in the presence of police officers. The footage also showed an unknown individual arriving and driving Somphone’s vehicle away from the city centre.
Three years later, Somphone’s family obtained new CCTV footage from the same area and made it public. The video shows his car being driven back towards the city by another unknown individual.
Somphone specialised in advocating for education of all Laotians, particularly in poor rural areas. He was perhaps the most prominent member of Laos’ small civil society: his work aimed at setting up a community-based development by incorporating the knowledge and opinion of rural people in the planning and management of development projects and programmes throughout the country.
Continue reading “‘Sorrow is a defeatist movement’: An interview with Sombath Somphone’s wife Ng Shui-Meng “