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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Laos
Index
Perhaps more understandable than its brutality toward
its own
people was the party's hostility toward the formerly large
United
States aid program, which had been directed at supporting
the RLG.
Even so, the public humiliations inflicted on the
departing aid
mission personnel--forced to leave behind everything they
could not
carry aboard a plane--were excessive by any standard. Aid
projects
such as the Operation Brotherhood hospital at Longtiang
were
abandoned overnight. In spite of Souvanna Phouma's
assurances to
the United States ambassador that the government would
provide
continuity in medical services, foreign nurses and other
technicians were not replaced.
No record exists of any discussion by the United States
embassy--staffed at the chargé d'affaires level after the
departure
in April 1975 of Ambassador Charles S. Whitehouse--of
United States
"participation" in healing war wounds or of the
reconstruction aid
mentioned in Article 10c of the Vientiane Agreement. Even
had the
United States been predisposed to discuss these matters,
the
conditions of the takeover by the LPRP would have
precluded it.
Ambassadorial relations resumed in 1992.
Another issue was opium production, which, in Laos as
in the
rest of the Golden Triangle of Laos-Burma-Thailand, had
grown as
the demand for the opium derivative heroin grew. Opium
production
and trade became a source of tension in relations between
the two
governments. Laos resented official United States pressure
as an
attempt to shift the blame for the problem
(see Bilateral Relations
, ch. 4;
Narcotics and Counternarcotics Issues
, ch. 5).
Data as of July 1994
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