A New Civil War?

Just nine months after the 14-nation Geneva Conference guaranteed Laotian neutrality, Laos last week tottered on the brink of civil war and once again threatened to drag the major powers into a bitter struggle.

For three weeks, the Red forces, reinforced by cadres of Viet Minh troop commanders, mortar specialists and artillery advisers from Communist North Viet Nam, had been nibbling away at neutralist positions around the 30-mile perimeter of the grassy, pool-table-flat Plaine des Jarres. Strategically placed in the center of Laos, the plain—named after the ancient stone burial jars still found in the area—controls the approaches to the rest of the country and is the primary access route to North Viet Nam. With the Plaine des Jarres in their hands, the Reds could solidify their hold on all of northern Laos. Last week this gloomy prospect was all but a fact, as 10,000 Red troops poured onto the plain, forcing the neutralists to its very edge.

Fleeing Neutralists. The week began with a desperate flight to the plain by Neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma, who hoped it still might be possible to arrange a cease-fire between the Communist Pathet Lao and Neutralist Army Chief Kong Le. Things seemed cheery enough as the opposing leaders embraced and their troops exchanged cigarettes. But. as one neutralist put it, "we exchange cigarettes during the day and bullets at night." All too true. Hardly had Souvanna departed when the truce abruptly collapsed.

No one knows who fired first, but all of a sudden the Pathet Lao was shooting, and the neutralists were running. On the dusty Plaine des Jarres airstrip, mothers breastfed dirty babies, and children sagged under the weight of parachute packs crammed with household belongings as they patiently waited for planes to evacuate them to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, 120 miles away. In his ramshackle, tin-roofed headquarters, guarded night and day by a patrolling platoon of tanks, Kong Le worked round the clock drawing up a battle plan, although weakened by a liver ailment and a serious sinus condition.

"This," he said, "is the final showdown."

Moving over the mountaintops and through the passes girdling the plain, the Reds at last surrounded the six-mile-long plateau. From the heights, the Communists laid a mortar barrage on the airfield, Kong Le's last remaining lifeline to Vientiane. With the airstrip inoperable, Kong Le was forced to rely on runners as his primary means of communication; he had no choice but to pull together what was left of his shattered forces and move off the plain.

Pressure from Two Quarters. Kong Le's retreat caused consternation in Vien tiane. With his left-right-center coalition fast coming unstuck, Premier Souvanna Phouma was fearful that Kong Le's troops would join forces with a right-wing army just southwest of the Plaine des Jarres and launch a joint counterattack against the Reds that would surely precipitate civil war. Desperately he appealed to Britain and Russia, overseers of the Geneva agreement, for quick intervention to stop the Pathet Lao's flagrant violations of the ceasefire.