Removing the Last Obstacle

With Communist control over the government and armed forces of Laos nearly complete, only one obstacle blocked a total victory: the U.S. presence. Last week that too crumbled. As the last rightist territorial strongholds in Laos collapsed when Communists marched into Savannakhet and Pakse, the State Department bowed to the inevitable. It ordered the evacuation of nearly all Americans from the tiny landlocked kingdom, ending two decades of intense--and at times dominant--U.S. involvement in Laotian affairs. The order also removed the last significant elements of Washington's once enormous military, diplomatic and economic influence in Indochina.

The American exodus climaxes a month-long anti-U.S. campaign led by Laotian students and youth, tacitly backed by the government's police and almost certainly organized by the Communist-led Pathet Lao. U.S. involvement in Laos had dwindled to a shadow of what it was in the early 1970s, when several thousand American diplomats, military advisers, economic and agricultural experts and intelligence agents literally ran the country and directed the fight by the rightists against the Communists. Still, as last week began, the U.S. community numbered a sizable 1,000 or so. Of these, 340 were government employees, about half of whom work for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); in Laos, the agency has often served as a cover for the CIA.

The anti-American campaign hit its high point shortly after midnight one day last week when several dozen long-haired Laotian students scaled the 9-ft. wire fence surrounding the sprawling USAID compound in Vientiane, Laos' administrative capital. After several hundred reinforcements were bused in the next morning, the students kept two U.S. Marines and one U.S. civilian locked inside the main buildings. They also ransacked the compound, liberating cases of American beer from the commissary.

Pathet Lao military policemen at the compound did nothing to halt the looting. The students plastered the compound's fence with crudely lettered signs, proclaiming in Lao, French and English YANKEE GO HOME and CIA OUT, then distributed a manifesto listing their demands. Among them: the immediate dissolution of the USAID mission. Proclaimed the manifesto: "All Americans should be driven out of Laos."

Angry Charge. Meanwhile, some 140 American families living in the suburban-style residential complex for USAID workers outside Vientiane were being held virtual prisoners. Pathet Lao and rightist troops brandishing potent-looking grenades were searching cars at the compound's gate and preventing nearly all Americans from leaving. At Prakhao, six miles north of Vientiane, students and police barricaded the entrance to a major USAID supply center.

Angry protests lodged at the Laotian Foreign Ministry by U.S. Charge d'Affaires Christian A. Chapman did no good. In fact, the Laotian Cabinet--still nominally under the leadership of the neutralist Premier Souvanna Phouma --legitimized the students' demands by insisting that the U.S. end all but formal diplomatic activity in Laos and that it turn over to the government all USAID material in the country. Left with no choice but compliance, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced that there will be a "substantial reduction" of U.S. personnel in Laos.

Fourteen Americans, including USAID employees and their families, who had been held under loose house arrest in Savannakhet for eight days by Laotian students, had already been flown to Thailand after Vientiane officials obtained their release.* Several hundred additional U.S. officials and dependents left Laos at week's end. Most of the remaining Americans are scheduled to leave as quickly as transportation facilities permit, taking with them only one suitcase and a carry-on flight bag. The Laotian students thus obtained still another of their demands: that the Americans leave behind most of their personal possessions.

It is uncertain whether the radical reduction in the U.S. presence will mean a similar cutback in the level of U.S. economic aid--currently running at a magnitude of $32 million. Laos' leaders, including the Communists, realize that a halt in aid would cripple their economy. They have therefore made it clear that they want U.S. aid to continue, but without the enormous superstructure of American agencies that have been administering it.

Buddha's Sacrifice. What is certain is that the American exodus removes the last pillar around which Laotian opponents to a Communist regime can rally. Rightist officers have apparently given up hope of fighting. They offered no resistance, for example, when a convoy of about 400 Pathet Lao troops last week marched into Savannakhet, a city long regarded as a rightist stronghold. An estimated 20,000 people greeted the Communists and showered them with garlands. On the political front, the fac,ade of the coalition government that Souvanna is desperately trying to preserve has become increasingly transparent. "We are not Communists. We are socialists," insisted Souvanna last week in an interview with TIME Correspondent David Aikman. "I myself am a socialist. Don't forget that we are Buddhists and that Buddha sacrificed his wealth to beg for meals." Nonetheless, observers in Vientiane give him almost no chance of blocking the Communists from exercising full control over the government if they desire it.

* Elsewhere in the world, Americans did not fare so well. Three Stanford University students and a Dutch woman, all of whom had been working at an animal-research center in Tanzania, were abducted by a band of heavily armed men. In Tehran, two unarmed U.S. Air Force officers were fatally shot; a woman who claimed to be speaking for a movement opposing Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi boasted, "The Shah is a stooge of the Americans. Therefore we murder Americans!"

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