King's Turn

Just about everybody else had offered an idea for ending the civil war in Laos. Last week the most peaceable man around, King Savang Vatthana, had his try. Clad in a gold-buttoned tunic, grey pantaloons and black silk stockings, the King plucked a pink folder from atop a silver urn proffered by a kneeling courtier. In cadenced, elegant French, he read a message to "the countries of the world." Laos, he declared, was "a peaceful country, which for more than 20 years has known neither peace nor security." Savang Vatthana promised to refrain from any military alliance, to rid Laos of all foreign bases. All he asked was that a commission come in from his neutral neighbors--Cambodia, Burma and Malaya--to stop the fighting and to identify and denounce any foreign interventionists.

Bogged Down. The King's speech had been written after close consultation with the U.S. embassy. To back it up, the State Department let it be known that if the Russians called off their open assistance to the Pathet Lao rebels in the north, the U.S. would even be willing to pull out its 162-man team of soldiers in civilian clothes presently attached to the Royal Laotian Army, and to channel future aid through the neutral commission.

Russia was in no hurry to come to terms. Premonsoon rains had turned Laos' few roads to quagmires, bogging down the halfhearted Royal Army drive against rebel strongholds. Cambodia, under heavy pressure from Red China, declined to participate in the King's plan, and called again for a grandiose, 14-nation conference on little Laos. Such a round table would only prolong the sputtering civil war indefinitely--while giving the Red Chinese a seat and a propaganda forum.

Last week the Communists talked Laos' neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma (whom they still recognize as the "legitimate" Premier of Laos, though he was deposed three months ago by the National Assembly) into flying into a small airstrip on the rebel-held Plaine des Jarres in north-central Laos. Tearfully, Prince Souvanna embraced Captain Kong Le, the rebels' chief fighting man, and Prince Souphanouvong, who happens to be Prince Souvanna's own half brother as well as the political leader of the pro-Communist Pathet Lao. Souvanna forthwith dismissed the King's plan as "facetious and devoid of any practical value." Souphanouvong called it "a deceitful, reactionary" plot of "U.S. imperialists."

Tough Side. In a last effort to save the King's gambit, President Kennedy himself made a direct appeal by letter to Cambodia's nervous young Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Alternatively, there was talk of finding some other neutral nations to fill out the commission. But the U.S. had obviously bent about as far as it intended to. In fact, the more reliable anti-Communists of Southeast Asia were openly miffed. "The neutrals sidestep the responsibilities in the area and the really tough decisions," griped a Thai diplomat. "And then you keep inviting them back to settle everybody else's affairs."

To point up the tougher alternatives of U.S. policy. Secretary of State Dean Rusk will fly out to the March 27 meeting of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in Bangkok. While getting to know the foreign ministers of the other SEATO powers (Britain, France, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand), he hopes to set to rest Thai fears that, by conciliation in Laos, SEATO has become nothing but a "paper tiger."

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