THROUGH the centuries, the landlocked kingdom of Laos has suffered from a surfeit of interfering neighbors. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Siam, and Burma squeezed its borders, sacked its villages, and helped themselves to its territories. British colonialists once spilled across from the Shan states into the northwestern province of Haut Mekong. For sixty-one years the French controlled the country as a protectorate.
The latest threat to the sovereignty of Laos is not as new as last summer’s headlines suggested. It dates back to 1945 and is inspired and directed by Ho Chi-minh, the bearded Vietminh revolutionary who once served as an apprentice chef at the Carlton Hotel in London and is now the head of the Communist offensive in Southeast Asia. It made considerable headway in the last years of the French protectorate and between 1954 and 1958 was helped by Laotian apathy and a Western effort that failed to achieve its basic objectives.
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To a world accustomed to thinking of aggression in terms of bombs and blitzkrieg, the Communist campaign in Laos has often been unconventional and difficult to follow. But then, Laos is not a conventional country. About the size of the state of Kansas, with a population estimated in 1957 at something over a million and a half, Laos is a land of tangled mountains and turbulent rivers. Some 70,000 of its inhabitants live in Vientiane, the administrative capital, a village that lies on the banks of the River Mekong and that grew fat on American aid. Here, and in handfuls elsewhere, are perhaps a couple of hundred Laos with the education and background to perform modest administrative tasks.
For the past eighteen months there have been some signs that the government has begun to jell at the center, but basically the country is still a collection of unadministered village communities. Most of the Laos are scattered through the 9807 villages that cling precariously to the mountainsides or rise on stilts along the valleys. Many of the people even today think the world is flat. Many had never heard of their King; and, though they have been worked on for years by Communist cadres, they are unaware that they have become a critical part of the Cold War.
Desperate poverty
Spiritually, Laos is rich. Buddhism appeared in the fourteenth century and persists today as a gentle religion, a way of life that demands much of the people but also provides them with their limited cultural outlets and a large measure of their entertainment. Materially, the country is desperately poor. Though, for a time, in 1957 and 1958, television sets and automobiles figured in its list of exports, these were merely the symptoms of a vicious currency racket that has now been effectively stamped out.
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Apart from small quantities of tin, the principal legal exports consist of benzoin, a gum obtained from a jungle tree, which is in great demand for the manufacture of perfumes, and stick-lac, an insect residue found in other jungle trees and subsequently used in phonograph records. More important than these, but not listed officially, are opium poppies, which are grown on burned-off bushland by tribesmen and smuggled out of the country to enter into illicit international traffic as contraband.
Rice is the staple food, but primitive methods of cultivation, extremely low yields, lack of transportation, and poor distribution of the crop make it insufficient for the needs of the people. The mountain tribesmen fare worst of all. Their crops are raised in patches where they have slashed and burned the jungle. Lacking fertilizers and plows. they enrich the soil with the ashes and use sticks to bore holes in the ground, into which they drop the seeds of corn or dry paddy.
Almost everyone is ill, from malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, or skin and parasitical diseases. About half the children in the capital die before they reach the age of ten; in the villages, where medicines and hygiene are unknown, the mortality rate is even higher. Electricity is a luxury confined to a few towns, and industry is nonexistent. Villagers spin and weave their own cloth and supplement their meager crops with what they can secure by crossbow and fishing net.
In communications, also, Laos is a very backward land. It has a railway station but no trains or lines. It has 1800 miles of road, but most of this is impassable during the summer monsoon season. Plane travel to scattered airfields is possible the year round but always hazardous. The mighty Mekong, which rises in the eastern slopes of the Himalayas, provides a valuable waterway, but its shoals are treacherous and a succession of rapids bars the way to the sea. Radio functions effectively south of the central mountain range but fails to cope with the rugged peaks and foul weather of the north. There are approximately five hundred telephone subscribers; these are concentrated in four cities and receive little return for their money, since there is no long-distance service.
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In July of this year, these deficiencies in communications led to a state of affairs that could have occurred in almost no other country in Southeast Asia; Laos became a battleground, and for about two weeks no one in the government knew anything about it. On the night of July 17, Hanoi Radio, the voice of the Communist Vietminh in North Vietnam, announced that fighting was taking place in northern Laos. It blamed the Royal Lao government and accused it of having attacked the Pathet Lao, the Communistdirected armed forces.
The Hanoi report, which had been picked up in Taipeh and published in Saigon, was indignantly denied by the Royal Lao government. But Hanoi described the actions as becoming more widespread, and official Communist newspapers in North Vietnam began to denounce the “U.S. imperialists and their henchmen" for having “rekindled the civil war.” It was not until July 27, twelve days after the first attack, that the Lao Cabinet, meeting in emergency session, learned that its tepid war with the Communists had suddenly become hot.
The war itself was nothing new. On and off, there had been fighting for fourteen years, ever since Prince Souphanouvong, the viceroy’s younger brother, arrived from Ho Chi-minh’s headquarters in September, 1945, with ten young Vietminh officers, his Vietnamese wife, and experience in guerrilla warfare.
The Free Laos movement
Few inquired or worried about Souphanouvong’s political affiliations in those days, however. Prince Phetsarath, the viceroy, had proclaimed the independence of Laos and formed the Free Laos movement to resist the return of the French. Another brother, Prince Souvanna Phouma, rallied to the cause, and both welcomed Souphanouvong with open arms. The three brothers were all qualified engineers with French degrees. But whereas the two older brothers had returned to Laos after their training, Souphanouvong had moved to Vietnam. During World War II he joined the underground, led by Ho Chi-minh.
In the government established by Prince Phetsarath, Souphanouvong , became minister of foreign affairs and commander in chief. To buy guns and ammunition for Souphanouvong’s troops, Prince Souvanna Phouma stripped Vientiane’s pagodas of their gold leaf. He even dismantled the pump from the town water supply and sold it to a Thai village across the Mekong, leaving Vientiane, to this day, without running water.
But resistance to the return of the French was short-lived. The Free Laos movement was a revolution from the top, based on a tiny, Western-educated elite, and with little popular following. In a brief engagement near Vientiane on March 21, 1946, Souphanouvong was wounded, and the defeated soldiers retreated across the river into Thailand.
The French moved quickly with constitutional reforms. In 1949, a convention confirmed the authority of Laos within the French Union and gave the country greater liberty in the conduct of foreign relations, including the right to apply for membership in the United Nations. The Free Laos movement dissolved, and many of its members returned to Vientiane and to high office in government.
Souphanouvong, who had been expelled for advocating an alliance with the Communists, elected to continue the fight. From Bangkok he had organized a steady flow of recruits for training with the Vietminh, which was now fighting a fullscale war with the French. This time, instead of attempting to recruit in the towns, Souphanouvong concentrated on the villages, especially on the minorities, who account for almost half of the Laotian population. Kha tribesmen from the southern plateau, Black Thais from the valleys, and opium-smoking Maos from the mountains all rallied.
Leaving the simmering civil war that he and his agents had stirred up through the Laotian countryside, Souphanouvong and his principal followers transferred their headquarters to North Vietnam late in 1950. Here a Committee of Laotian Liberation was set up.
Communist infiltration
By 1953, Ho Chi-minh was ready for the next move. Two divisions of Vietminh “volunteers” invaded Laos and “liberated" two wild and sparsely populated northern provinces. From political schools in these provinces, mobile groups moved through the entire country to organize Pathet Lao cells and to spread antigovernment and anti-French propaganda. This long-range program took the Geneva Agreement and the end of the war in Indochina in its stride.
Though the fighting between the Royal Lao forces in the mountains and the Pathet Lao became sporadic and of insignificant proportions, Pathet Lao preparations for the ultimate assumption of power showed no signs of letting up. Nor did the Vietminh relax its hold. When Prince Souphanouvong met Royal Lao officials in Rangoon in 1955 to open unification discussions, he visited Hanoi on his way and reported back at the end of the conference. Frequently the Rangoon meetings were held up when he declared that he could not make decisions without consulting absent “colleagues.”
With the final agreement on unification in November, 1957, and the demobilization of 7500 Pathet Lao troops, the organization’s political front, the Neo Lao Hak Xat Party (Patriotic Front), moved overtly into the villages of central and southern Laos. Trained cadres first formed cells, and the cells split up to create groups of five to ten families, which met at regular intervals, usually once every four or five days. From these horizontal family organizations the Communists moved vertically, establishing fronts and women’s, youth, and farmers’ organizations.
Few outside the Pathet Lao ever guessed how much these efforts had weakened the royal cause until May 21, 1958. That day, in a supplementary election designed to bring the rallied Pathet Lao within the democratic framework and to be a curtain raiser to the national elections, once scheduled for this year, Prince Souphanouvong topped the poll in Vientiane. The Patriotic Front won nine out of the twentyone seats, and its electoral ally, the Peace Front, four; the other eight were split among the divided conservative parties.
American aid
The new American ambassador, Horace H. Smith, a foreign service man with a wide background of Far Eastern experience, took stock and did not care for what he found. The United States had been picking up the bills for Laos since the end of the Indochina war in 1954. Fine new homes had sprung up on the outskirts of Vientiane; shops overflowed with consumer goods. Where once there had been two hundred to three hundred automobiles — the property, almost exclusively, of senior French officials — there were now several thousand, most of them owned by successful local businessmen and entrepreneurs.
At the same time, there was little evidence that American aid had had any real impact beyond the capital. A survey of sixteen villages in Vientiane province in 1956 showed that only two had even heard of American aid; there was little to indicate that its functions were more widely known in 1958. The army wore American uniforms and slung American carbines on their shoulders, but in fighting capacity they reflected little of the $4500 that each Laotian soldier cost the U.S. government.
Under the terms of the Geneva Agreement, military training had to be left to France, which was entitled to maintain a force of fifteen hundred officers and noncommissioned officers for this purpose, in addition to a garrison of 3500 at the modern air base at Seno in southern Laos. Faced with urgent problems in Algeria and desperately short of skilled military manpower, the French cut back the Seno garrison to a caretaker guard. They also withdrew their officers from Laotian tactical units and all but abandoned their training mission.
“As I saw the task, I had four main responsibilities: to help create a stable, pro-Western government, to break the currency racket, to start some sort of rural aid program, and to help make the army combatready,” Ambassador Smith says. “By the end of 1958 I knew I was on the way. I also knew the Communists would retaliate.”
The right wing unites
With firm assurances that the United States was behind them, right-wing political groups settled their differences, and into the office of Premier for the first time came fifty-five-year-old Phoui Sananikone, head of one of the main Laotian families. Behind him, and with representatives in the Cabinet, was the youthful and anxious Committee in the Defense of the National Interest, which, again with solemn assurances of American support, began to prepare for the showdown fight with the Communists.
The Royal Lao government started to take the steps required to put its house in order. Against strong opposition from among his own supporters, many of whom found their handsome profits suddenly cut off, Phoui Sananikone devalued the kip and ended the scandal in import licenses. He planned, and partly introduced, a program for rural reform. He negotiated with the United States for technicians who could patch some of the holes in the French military training. He declared unequivocally that Laos stood foursquare with the West; and, finally, on January 14, 1959, he sought and received for twelve months the special powers he needed to implement his program.
It is not a damning indictment of Phoui to remark that his efforts look better on paper than they do in reality. A few months of endeavor could not repair the neglect of years. There is, however, still no proper policy for the minorities. There is also widespread discontent and dissatisfaction among the Laos. The army remains an army in name only. It has neither professional competence at the top nor the knowledge of how to fight in the lower ranks. Time and again, its weaknesses appeared in action.
The Communists react
To Hanoi and Peking, the Phoui Sananikone government represented a dam in the path of the Communist stream. It had to be removed. The Polish, Indian, and Canadian Commission for Supervision and Control, which had adjourned sine die in July, 1958, after the supplementary election, had to be brought back. Coalition government, “true neutrality,” national elections this year, and then a Communist government directly subservient to Hanoi could be expected to follow in turn. These, and not a major shooting war, were the objectives of the limited summer offensive.
Now, with the United Nations in the picture, there is a breathing space, another chance to take stock. The prospects are not bright. With China and North Vietnam ready and able to respond to every challenge, it is clear that Laos cannot be isolated from Communist contamination. The military side is therefore vital; a trained and equipped Laotian Army is a minimum requirement if defeat is to be averted. To achieve victory, the Communists must be beaten in the villages.
美国援助
新任美国大使霍勒斯-史密斯（Horace H. Smith）是一位具有广泛的远东经验背景的外交人员，他对所发现的情况进行了评估，但并不关心。自1954年印度支那战争结束后，美国一直在为老挝买单。在万象的郊区，漂亮的新房子拔地而起；商店里充斥着消费品。曾经有两三百辆汽车--几乎完全是法国高级官员的财产--现在有几千辆，其中大部分为当地成功的商人和企业家所拥有。