LAOS: Further Disaster for tke West

THE one substantive accord to come out of Vienna was Nikita Khrushchev's statement that he favored "an effective ceasefire" in Laos. In his otherwise grim speech reporting on the meeting, President John Kennedy declared himself "hopeful" that this could "be translated into new attitudes at Geneva."

The hope did not last long. Even before Kennedy spoke, Russian-supplied guns opened up on the small Laotian village of Padong, high on a 6,000-ft. ridge in Communist-held territory, but manned by two holdout battalions of royal soldiers, most of them untrained Meo tribesmen. The barrage lasted all day and all night, and at dawn the defenders fled, leaving the village to the Communists.

In Geneva, Western negotiators were grim. They had been sitting around waiting for the return of Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko with word from Moscow. But when he arrived next day, he was almost mocking. "My pockets are empty," he said.

Cleansing. In protest at the flagrant violation of the ceasefire, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman announced that the U.S. would boycott the conference until fighting stopped. The British and French backed him up. But the Communists did not even bother to deny the shooting. Padong is "the Dienbienphu of 1961 for the U.S.," crowed the New China News Agency, predicting that just as France had been forced to negotiate from defeat in 1954, the U.S. would now have to surrender Laos. The Communists' two favorite Laotian princes, ex-Premier Souvanna Phouma and his half brother, Souphanouvong, arrived in Geneva from Moscow to explain that Padong was only a "cleansing" operation (Western delegates were calling it a disaster, but in some ways, Souvanna's term was more accurate, since in typical Laotian fashion, only ten defenders were killed at Padong before the royal army fled).

The U.S., which had made the cease-fire its only small condition for attending the conference, had no ready counter. The pro-Western Laotian Premier, Prince Boun Oum, who has been sitting on the Riviera doing nothing in particular, was not much help. "The Pathet Lao are the strongest on all fronts," he wailed. "They will capture Vientiane, Luangprabang, Savannakhet, anything they want. Nothing can stop them." Prince Boun Oum hoped to get together with his rival princes to plead for peace. But Prince Souvanna was openly contemptuous. "Boun Oum is playing hide-and-seek," he said. "If we would go to Nice, he might take off for the North Pole."

Compromise. Since the West was not prepared to fight (De Gaulle told Kennedy flatly that he would not under any circumstances approve of any SEATO intervention involving the use of troops), it was prepared to keep on sitting at Geneva in the hope that something would turn up. At week's end, Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Home launched yet another compromise plan, under which the U.S. would stop its airdrops of arms to pockets of troops stranded behind enemy lines, and the Communists would stop shooting. Gromyko told Harriman that this sounded fine--though there was reason, on the record, to wonder how much another Communist cease-fire promise meant.

No matter what happened at Geneva, the key question remaining seemed to be how the Princes Souvanna Phouma and Souphanouvong would split up power between them once they take over Laos. Here, too, the outlook was dim. Souvanna is recognized by the Communists as Premier, and 2,000 good troops commanded by Captain Kong Le support him. Both Kong Le and Souvanna insist that they do not want a Communist Laos. But Souphanouvong, a Mephistophelean-looking fellow in his sideburns and trim mustache, is a hardened Communist guerrilla. His sneaker-shod troops total 12,000 and are veterans of jungle fighting. It is obviously the winning team--and getting stronger every day.

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