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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Laos
Index
United States support of Souvanna Phouma's government
in the
face of continuing North Vietnamese aggression did not
constitute,
technically speaking, a violation of the terms of the 1962
Geneva
Protocol, as Radio Hanoi and Radio Pathet Lao charged. It
did not
involve Laos in a military alliance, and there were no
United
States military bases or ground troops in Laos. Supply
flights to
RLG outposts were flown by civilian companies under
charter to
Souvanna Phouma's government. United States military
pilots in
civilian clothes, their names deleted from Department of
Defense
rosters, flew forward air control missions over Laos.
United States
pilots killed or captured in Laos often were officially
described
as lost "in Southeast Asia." CIA advisers assisted the
guerrilla
units of General Vang Pao's Hmong army, which, along with
irregular
forces in the south, was supplied with rice, arms, and pay
by CIA
operatives based at Udon Thani in Thailand. The total
number of CIA
personnel involved in this effort never exceeded 225 and
included
some fifty case officers.
On the periphery of the plenary sessions at Geneva,
Harriman
and his deputy, William H. Sullivan, had arrived at an
informal
understanding with Soviet deputy foreign minister Georgi
M. Pushkin
to the effect that as long as the United States did not
technically
violate the Geneva Protocol the Soviet Union would not
feel
compelled, out of consideration of its ally in Hanoi, to
respond to
United States activities in Laos. The official curtain of
secrecy
associated with this arrangement gave rise later to
statements in
Congress that the United States was engaged in a "secret
war" in
Laos, a perspective that obscured the Ho Chi Minh
government of
responsibility for its support of the communist-dominated
resistance movement in Laos since 1945.
Souvanna Phouma was having problems of his own because
of the
peculiar nature of the Cold War in Laos. In April 1964, he
visited
Hanoi and Beijing. Premier Zhou Enlai reiterated China's
support
for the 1954 and 1962 Geneva agreements and advised
Souvanna Phouma
to dissociate the Laos question from the Vietnam question,
a
difficult task. Hanoi seemed to have succeeded in its
strategy of
making "one battlefield" out of Indochina--Cambodia, Laos,
South
Vietnam--and the Ho Chi Minh Trail now extended through
Laos and
Cambodia.
After a new tripartite meeting on the embattled Plain
of Jars,
Souvanna Phouma returned to Vientiane without any result
and
announced his intention to resign. Two rightist generals
took
advantage of the situation, staged a coup attempt, and
arrested
Souvanna Phouma. Only concerted action by Western
ambassadors in
the capital secured his release. Souvanna Phouma pledged
to merge
the rightist and Neutralist factions.
There was further infighting among the generals. In
February
1965, General Phoumi, whose business dealings had earned
him many
enemies on the noncommunist side, left for Thailand.
With the formal merger of their faction with the
rightists,
Neutralist leaders increasingly felt their lives to be in
danger.
Kong Le eventually took refuge in the Indonesian embassy
in
Vientiane, leaving Laos soon after for the safety of
Paris. He was
replaced as commander of Neutralist troops by General
Sengsouvanh
Souvannarath.
From 1965 to 1973, the civil war seesawed back and
forth in
northern Laos, characterized by short but often very
intense
engagements. Because of the large areas contested, even
North
Vietnamese regular divisions in Laos, such as the 316th,
were used
in small-unit engagements during the dry season to deny
control of
territory and population to the other side. Population
control was
particularly important, because that was where recruitment
for
military training and transport occurred. The Hmong, in
particular,
suffered. Aside from the casualties, entire villages
periodically
had to escape the fighting, disrupting crop growing and
livestock
tending.
An exception to the rule of small-scale engagements was
the
major North Vietnamese-Pathet Lao offensive against Vang
Pao that
began in mid-December 1971 and lasted until the end of
April 1972.
This battle involved more than twenty North Vietnamese
battalions
and some 10,000 Hmong irregulars and Royal Lao Army
defenders.
After blasting the last defensive positions on the Plain
of Jars
with newly introduced 130-mm guns with a thirty-kilometer
range,
the North Vietnamese advanced on Longtiang. They captured
a number
of positions on a ridge dominating the airfield before
being driven
off with heavy loss of life on both sides. The Hmong
halted an
attack of T-34 tanks against the airfield by skillfully
placing
land mines.
Since 1963 Souvanna Phouma had kept vacant the cabinet
seats
allotted to the LPF, as he had done in the case of
Phoumi's seat as
interior minister in his August 30, 1960, government. When
the
National Assembly rejected his budget in debate in
September 1966,
he obtained a vote in the King's Council to dissolve the
assembly
and hold elections for a new assembly the following year.
Elections
were held again on January 2, 1972; forty-one of the
fifty-nine
deputies elected were new. The LPF boycotted the
elections. The
prime minister kept up contact with Souphanouvong in his
cave
headquarters in Houaphan, occasionally using the ICC and
Soviet and
North Vietnamese ambassadors as messengers.
Powerless to stop the war and acquiescing in the
diplomatic
fiction that the 1962 Geneva Agreement was still in
effect,
Souvanna Phouma endured the revilement of Radio Pathet
Lao, which
called him traitor, a capitulationist, and a tool of
United States
aggressors. The war drained Laos's manpower resources and
pushed
Souvanna Phouma into agreeing to introduce Thai artillery
units on
the royalist side and also helped to identify him with the
rightist
faction. As a result of the war, a peak number of 378,800
internally displaced persons were being cared for by the
RLG in
October 1973. Souvanna Phouma never gave up hope of
resuming
negotiations when conditions became more favorable.
Data as of July 1994
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