In Hanoi's Dark Shadow

For a while, the small town of Keng Kok in southern Laos seemed relatively safe from war. There was a fluid "front line" ten or 12 miles away, patrolled by troops of the North Vietnamese Army's 29th Regiment. They were reckoned to pose no threat to a town with only a market, a hospital and barely 5,000 inhabitants. In the early morning hours of Oct. 28, Keng Kok's immunity suddenly came to an explosive end. Two North Vietnamese companies, aided by local Pathet Lao allies, slipped into the town. Two missionaries trying to escape in their pickup truck were stopped at an NVA roadblock; they were eventually marched away to an unknown fate. When Royal Laotian Army troops managed to retake the town four days later, they found the charred bodies of two other missionaries, both of them women, tied to posts in their burned-out house. Nearby, the body of a young Lao who had evidently tried to help the women was found stretched out on the ground, shot through the chest.

Keng Kok was not a random, eleventh-hour casualty in a fading war. Shortly before the attack, Hanoi had ordered North Vietnamese units in Laos, and the pro-Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas who fight alongside them, to be ready, in the event of a quick ceasefire, to seize a number of towns and cities still in government hands. Evidently the 29th jumped the gun; the early cease-fire that Hanoi had been planning on did not materialize, and the actual strike order was never given. Even so, Laotians worry that when "peace" does officially come to Viet Nam their country may face another and more agonizing stage of the war.

Path to Peace. Of all Indochina's savaged battlegrounds, dream-like Laos should have the easiest path to peace. Unlike Viet Nam, the country is not riven by irreconcilable rivalry between northerners and southerners, between Catholics, Buddhists and Communists or even--in a country with the acreage of Britain and the population of Brooklyn--between the landed and the landless. "If we could speak as one Laotian to another," Interior Minister Pheng Phongsavan told TIME's Peter Simms in Vientiane last week, "we could solve our problems without any great difficulty." That has not been possible, Phongsavan complains, because "the Pathet Lao are always looking over their shoulders to get their instructions from Hanoi."

After two months of fitful negotiations in Vientiane, there has been scant progress in the talks between the Pathet Lao and the U.S.-backed but nominally "neutralist" government of Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma. Souvanna wants the pro-Communist rebels to join in the tripartite government that was set up by the Geneva accords of 1962. The Pathet Lao demand a two-thirds share in the government, and they have a large but unacknowledged North Vietnamese military presence to back their claim. What is fundamentally at issue is whether Laos will emerge as a reasonably independent buffer state that might help to bring some stability to Indochina, or as an out-and-out fiefdom of Hanoi.

The answer will not begin to be apparent until Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris finally agree on an overall Indochina peace plan (see THE NATION). Even so, reports Simms after extensive interviews with government and Pathet Lao leaders in Vientiane, the odds seemed heavily weighted in the direction of a North Vietnamese fiefdom. Government leaders, says Simms, seemed "completely despairing" about the possibility of being left with North Vietnamese forces still entrenched on Laotian soil. The Communists, by contrast, eagerly welcomed a ceasefire. The Pathet Lao spokesman in Vientiane, Soth Pethrasy, said confidently, "We are the party of victory."

Despite lavish if clandestine American support of pro-government forces, the Communists today control roughly four-fifths of Laos' territory and one-third of its 2,800,000 people (see map). This has been achieved not by the feckless Pathet Lao but by the North Vietnamese, who have at least 65,000 soldiers in Laos--more proportionally than they have in South Viet Nam. Furnished with tanks, long-range Soviet-made 130-mm, guns and what Western observers describe as "some of the finest and most highly motivated infantry in the world" (see story, following page), Hanoi's forces in Laos are more than a match for the 80,000 Royal Laotian Army troops, Thai mercenaries and CIA-supported Meo tribesmen who oppose them.

No Lever. Experts agree that there is no road, airport, town or city in the country that the North Vietnamese could not capture and at least hold for a while. U.S. and Laotian officials worry that the Communists will try to make good on Pathet Lao claims of "victory" on the eve of a ceasefire, by seizing several important cities, perhaps even Vientiane or Luangprabang, the seat of the country's constitutional monarch, King Savang Vatthana.

Hanoi has never admitted the presence of its forces in Laos, where they are barred under the terms of the 1962 accords. Souvanna worries that "we have no lever to force them out," and he has some understandable doubts that Hanoi would honor a new great-power agreement requiring the withdrawal of "all foreign" troops from the country. In 1962 only 40 North Vietnamese troops marched out of Laos through the prescribed International Control Commission checkpoint--and 30 of them claimed that they had merely been building a house for Souvanna. Thousands of other NVA troops either slipped back to North Viet Nam in secret or stayed behind to help organize the Pathet Lao.

Souvanna told Simms that whatever happens, "we shall certainly survive." But time is not on his side. In dusty Vientiane, Simms found "no dearth of traffic, from expensive Mercedes, to ex-army Jeeps, to whole schools of motor scooters. It takes a little while to discover that something is not quite the same as in most cities. Then one gradually notices that the driver of the black Mercedes is a beautiful Laotian girl wearing the traditional skirt of glossy silk, heavily embroidered in gold, and that the driver in the Jeep behind her, wearing a pair of smart Levi's, is also a girl. Then one realizes that there are far more women drivers than one would normally see--except, that is, in a small country that is losing 500 to 600 soldiers a month, killed, wounded or missing in action."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.