Laos

DESPITE PRESS FREEDOM ADVANCES ACROSS ASIA IN RECENT YEARS, totalitarian regimes in Burma, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos maintained their stranglehold on the media. Even democratic Asian governments sometimes used authoritarian tactics to control the press, particularly when faced with internal conflict.

Sri Lanka, for instance, imposed harsh censorship regulations during the year in order to restrict reporting on the country's long-running civil war. And in countries with a vibrant independent press, including India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia, journalists were frequently subjected to physical assault and intimidation.

CELEBRATIONS OF A QUARTER CENTURY OF COMMUNIST RULE, a wave of bomb attacks, and signs of internal dissent all contributed to foreign media interest in Laos in 2000, which in turn spurred the government to reassert its control of information and the press.

In July, Laotian viewers were able to tune in live Thai television coverage of a border raid by supporters of an heir to the former royalist government of Laos. The official media castigated the Thai journalists' coverage of the siege for lending credibility to what it termed banditry, but the incident highlighted the increasing difficulty of maintaining a regime of information control in Laos.