Fire & Water

With all their other troubles, Laotians last week watched rains raise the muddy Mekong River to near flood stage at their capital city of Vientiane. Resourcefully, U.S. Ambassador Winthrop Brown arranged for twelve planes from Bangkok to fly in 10,000 sandbags and fly out 200 American dependents. He thus was prepared for either flood or civil war--or both.

The floods are seasonal, the political troubles getting to be. Fortnight ago a brash young paratroop captain named Kong Le captured Vientiane in a predawn raid with a battalion of troops who were angry at not getting paid for several months (TIME, Aug. 22). Kong Le's coup toppled a pro-Western Cabinet, and to form a new government the captain turned to neutralist, three-time Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma, 58. Prince Souvanna put together a Cabinet that included the chief of Laos' primitive Meo tribesmen as Minister of Information. But last week he met a cold shoulder from King Savang Vatthana and open defiance from most of the Royal Laotian Army.

Fuzzy on Purpose. The issue was how Laos was to deal with Communists, foreign and domestic. Both Captain Kong Le and Prince Souvanna want to bring into the government the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas who have waged a flickering jungle rebellion since 1953. Kong Le is just disgusted with fighting fellow Laotians. Prince Souvanna's goal for Laos is "neutrality in neutralism," a doctrine that is necessarily fuzzy, he says, because Laotians are fuzzy thinkers, when thinkers at all.

Ranged against Kong Le and Prince Souvanna was ex-Defense Minister Gen eral Phoumi Nosavan, 40, whose hastily organized "Committee Against the Coup d'Etat" still holds the royal seat of Luang-prabang and is apparently keeping the King under something close to house arrest. Last week, after a quick trip to Thailand, whose strongly anti-Communist government loudly distrusts Kong Le & Co., General Phoumi turned up in the southern Laotian town of Savannakhet with a brand-new radio transmitter and a vow to chase Kong Le out of the capital.

In response to Phoumi's call a flurry of local army commanders hurried in to consult. Beating time to reedy pipe music as he presided over a table laden with Scotch whisky and French wines, Phoumi assured a reporter that his troops were racing the Pathet Lao Communists through the roadless jungle to the capital, added earnestly: "If you let the Pathet Lao into the government, they will organize and work hard and sooner or later they will control the whole country."

Twin Questions. So far, General Phoumi seems to have stalemated Prince Sou vanna, a gentle, Paris-educated man who grows lilacs and plays an expert game of bridge at his riverside estate outside Vientiane. At week's end Prince Souvanna, who is even more adroit at compromise than most Laotians, backtracked to say he would now bring the Communist Pathet Lao into the government "only if the National Assembly approves." Captain Kong Le, he added, had "gone back to soldiering" and would be no further problem. Souvanna even called General Phoumi by radiotelephone and offered to make him his army chief of staff. But Phoumi refused, and an envoy that Prince Souvanna sent to see the King wound up in the poky at Luangprabang. The two big questions now were: 1) whether the prince could dissuade the general from touching off a civil war by attacking the capital at Vientiane, and 2) whether the general had any intention of attacking.

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