Laos: Beckoning the Undertaker

"The clouds are still hanging in the air and the weather looks bad," said a diplomat in Vientiane last week. His gloomy forecast was prompted not by the upcoming rainy season, but by the festering Communist-induced political crisis that is slowly turning-"neutral" Laos into a Red satellite.

For months on the Plaine des Jarres, headquarters of both the neutralist and Communist Pathet Lao armies, the Reds have been slowly squeezing their former neutralist allies in an effort to drive them off the grassy plateau. Defying last summer's 14-nation Geneva accords guaranteeing Laotian neutrality, the Pathet Lao is still reinforced by Communist Viet Minh cadres from North Viet Nam; to the north of the Plaine des Jarres, Red Chinese troops are building roads linking China with Red-controlled Laos itself. Slowly the Communists have been pinching off supplies to Neutralist Army Leader General Kong Le and bribing his officers to defect. Last week, with Kong Le's food and ammunition rations down to the two-day level, the Reds, in a blaze of gunfire, sliced off another chunk of neutralist territory at Xiengkhouang, just south of the plateau.

"Foreign Lackeys." Trouble began when the Pathet Lao, supported by the Viet Minh, opened fire on a group of Kong Le's soldiers fishing in their off-duty hours near the town of Khang Khay. Then the Reds advanced on the neutralist stronghold at Xiengkhouang, and launched a mortar barrage that forced Kong Le's forces out of the town. With full-scale civil war threatening to break out on the Plaine des Jarres, Kong Le evacuated the wives and children of his men to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, 120 miles away. As the bedraggled neutralist forces tried to fight their way back to the plateau from Xiengkhouang, the Reds attacked once more with artillery and bazookas, inflicting heavy losses on Kong Le's troops.

The treacherous Red attacks completed the political transformation of Kong Le, who once was the darling of Moscow and Peking. Two and a half years ago, Kong Le had joined forces with the Pathet Lao on the Plaine des Jarres and with them demanded the withdrawal of all the Western troops in Laos. But consistently neutralist, Kong Le today is as bitterly opposed to Viet Minh intervention in Laos as he had been to the presence of U.S. military advisers last October. Fortnight ago he raged that the Viet Minh were "foreign lackeys" who hoped to make Laos their base to spread their evil policies throughout Southeast Asia.

Heart in France. Last week Kong Le was desperately urging his old right-wing foes to send troops to his aid on the Plaine des Jarres. But ineffectual neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma feared that any such determined action might unglue his tottering left-right-center coalition. Souvanna could not even keep order in Vientiane, where last week another top neutralist—the second in a fortnight—was gunned down in his own house. "I don't know which foot to dance on," said Souvanna plaintively. "I wish I was on the seashore in France with my family."