Laos: Improvement, If Not Joy

Untroubled by the Chinese bomb, the permanent crisis in neighboring South Viet Nam, or by anything else, Laos was having a festival. Celebrating the end of Buddhist Lent, clowns cavorted down Vientiane’s dusty streets, brandishing great red-painted phallic symbols. While phonographs blared a Laotian favorite, Jingle Bells, fireworks exploded and countless candles were lighted to exorcise demons from homes and bawdyhouses. One of the few worries concerned the supply of lao lao, a form of rice firewater whose production the government has restricted so as not to diminish the rice supply. Said a Cabinet minister: “We Laotians live in joy.”

Western diplomats hardly shared the ecstasy, but they agreed that Laos has just a little more reason to be happy than usual. In recent months, since the Communist Pathet Lao overran the Plain of Jars last May, neutralist and rightist forces have regained 2,000 sq. mi. of territory. Route 13 north of Vientiane is now cleared of a Red blockade, as is intersecting Route 7 almost to the Plain of Jars. South of the Plain, right-wing troops captured 350 sq. mi. around Tha Thom. The Pathet Lao have often fallen back without a fight, and some 500 Communist troops have defected.

The Reds’ setbacks are the result of a stiffer U.S. and Laotian government policy. U.S.-supplied T-28s are crippling Pathet Lao supply lines. The Reds could counterattack massively on the ground, but they apparently fear U.S. retaliation. Neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma has survived with the help of the rightists, who have not tried a coup to take over the government for fully six months-although there has been an occasional, embarrassing mutiny among neutralist soldiers. During a recent Paris conference of the Laotian factions, Souvanna stood firm against unilateral concessions to the Reds. King Savang Vatthana got so vexed with the French for trying to pressure Souvanna into concessions that the monarch commissioned a new portrait in which his French decorations were conspicuously omitted.

Souvanna thinks the Reds are bound to attack again, but the neutralist-rightist brass are downright cocky and probably overconfident. Tough little Neutralist General Kong Le, newly decorated with his country’s Order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol, Third Class, even talks of sweeping the Reds from the Plain of Jars, most of which they still hold.