The Forgotten Country

The history of Laos offers some insight into why the Pathet Lao leaders were willing to cast aside traditional Communist economic doctrines. For centuries, tiny, landlocked Laos has been a pawn in the hands of far more powerful countries, which coveted it for its strategic location, bordering China on the north, Vietnam on the east, Thailand and Burma on the west, and Cambodia on the south. As a result, Laos, which itself has never launched a war, has known hardly a moment of peace over the years. Although it has historically been a battleground between the Siamese and the Vietnamese kingdoms, it was also con­quered by France in the :88os and by Japan in the Second World War, and then underwent the final, climactic struggle with the forces of the United States and Thailand on one side and the Vietnamese and their subservient allies the Pathet Lao on the other. Modern-day Laos is a French creation, not a Laotian one; the French colonialists, who brought in Vietnamese to run the country, set the borders of Laos in consultation with neighboring powers, allowing the Laotians themselves no say. The result is a nation of at least sixty-eight ethnic groups, many of them traditionally at odds with the lowland Lao, who live on the Mekong plains and make up about half the population. The Hmong, one of the sixty-seven other groups, were ready recruits for the CIA's secret army; young men who had never seen a car or an electric light were plucked from primitive villages and put into jet fighters and helicopter gunships. When the Pathet Lao took over, Vang Pao, the leader of the Hmong, fled to Thai­land—with his six wives and twenty-nine children, according to an extensive report on him in the Fresno Bee in July 1989. Tens of thousands of other Hmong also left, and today there are more than a hundred thousand in the United States—many of them living near Fresno, in California's Central Valley.

Although Laos became the forgotten country of Indochina in 1975, it played a central role in the region starling in the 19505, with the increasing aggressiveness of the Vietnamese Commu­nists—the Vietminh—and their Laotian counterparts, the Pa-thet Lao. In 1953, when the Vietminh established a stronghold in northeastern Laos, the French decided to protect the ap­proaches to Luang Prabang by occupying Then Bien Phu, a strategic Vietnamese outpost on the Laotian border. That deci­sion cost the French the Indochina War. In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower called Laos the key to Southeast Asia. It was Laos, not South Vietnam, that played the role of the crucial domino: if the Vietminh took over Laos, the reasoning went, they could launch an invasion of their historic enemy Thailand. The Vietminh left nothing to chance in their relationship with the Pathet Lao, since the Laotians, the most tractable of the civilizations of Southeast Asia, possessed a legendary ability to be somewhere else when the bullets were flying. The American press frequently mocked the performance of the Royal Lao Army during the Vietnam War. One American military officer was quoted at the time as calling it "without a doubt the worst army I have ever seen—it makes the South Vietnamese army look like storm troopers." Nor was the Lao air force about to waste the potential of its American-supplied planes by confining their ac­tivity to bombing runs; more typically, the Laotians used the aircraft to ferry passengers for money or to smuggle opium. They would bomb miles away from the target if they even suspected the presence of antiaircraft guns, Robbins noted in The Ravens. Sometimes they wouldn't show up at all, if they thought the day would be unlucky. And, according to Robbins, "The Lao preferred to use the most expensive ordnance, ordering CBU-25 canister bombs as often as possible.... The Lao pilots brought the empty canisters back to sell the aluminum, having already snipped off the umbilical cords to sell the wire."

The Pathet Lao were different, because of their subordination to the Vietminh. Joseph J. Zasloff, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, who is one of the few American specialists on Laos, told me that "in Vietnamese eyes the Pathet Lao weren't all that impressive." He went on, "When I wrote a book on the Pathet Lao, I interviewed a Vietnamese adviser to them, and he sounded like an American military officer describ­ing the South Vietnamese. The Vietminh were crucial to the development of the Pathet Lao. They recruited the leaders, they trained them, they had advisers there, and during the Vietnam War they had their own troops fighting in Laos." Of the three top Pathet Lao leaders, two had Vietnamese wives. The third, Kaysone Phomvihane, who has headed the Laotian Communist Party since its formation in 1955, is himself half Vietnamese. The son of a Vietnamese civil servant in Savannakhet, he at­tended a lycee and law school in Hanoi. In 1975, he became the prime minister of the newly formed Lao People's Democratic Republic. He ruled Laos until his death at age 72 in November 1992, and was succeeded by another longtime Pathet Lao hard­liner, Finance Minister Nouhak Phoumsavan, 78.

The secretive Kaysone, who lived in a cave in Sam Neua Province near the Vietnamese border during the years of the American bombing, was a figure largely unknown to the rest of me world. In the 19605, the American press, which in those days covered Laos thoroughly, hardly acknowledged Kaysone. Instead, the press depicted an epic struggle between two half brothers. On one side—sometimes backed by the Americans and at other times the object of CIA plots—was Prince Souvanna Phouma, the neutralist, always willing to seek a compromise. His political adversary—even though they remained personally fond of each other—was Prince Souphanouvong, the so-called Red Prince. French-educated, cultured, and autocratic, these two members of the Lao royal family went their separate ways politi­cally in 1949, when Souphanouvong cast his lot with the Viet­minh. He had become radicalized by his contacts with French Communists during a year he worked on the docks at Le Havre, and in 1945, when he was a thirty-three-year-old highway engi­neer in Vietnam, he first met Ho Chi Minh. "My father lived entirely from his salary as an engineer," the Prince's son, Kham-sai Souphanouvong, who is a high Laotian official, told me. "He had no land, no house. No one thought who was the prince, who was the worker—they were all Communists." Souphanouvong was named prime minister of the resistance government in 1950; with the Pathet Lao takeover, he became the president of Laos. He gave up that job in 1987, because of a stroke.

While Souphanouvong maintained ideological "purity," Sou-vanna Phouma presided as prime minister over a series of coali­tion governments that spanned twenty-four years, from 1951 to 1975; he tried desperately—in the face of plots, counterplots, and coups, some of them aided by the CIA—to steer Laos on a neutral course that would satisfy all sides. An elegant man who spoke fluent French and was a lover of French wines and big cigars, Souvanna willingly suffered many indignities in his effort to save his country. Leonard Unger, who was the American ambassador to Laos in the early 19603, recently told me of one such instance. In 1963, when Unger was in Saigon meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, he received a middle-of-the-night phone call from his deputy telling him that an attempted coup against Souvanna was in progress, led by a right-wing general. Unger returned to Vientiane immediately. "I found out Souvanna was at home, but he was essentially a prisoner, because his whole compound was ringed by the dissidents," he said. "I had to get to him and tell him all was not lost, that the United States was supporting him. So I drove down a driveway parallel to his compound, walked to the fence, and leaned over. He came out on his balcony, and he could hear what I said if I shouted. Reporters were all around listening, I was shouting, and he was on the balcony shouting back. The French ambassador was there, and he immediately dubbed it la diplomatic a la 'Romeo et Juliette.' " Souvanna was a genuine patriot hopelessly squeezed on one side by the rigidly anti-Communist Americans and the rightist factions in the Lao army and, on the other side, by the militant Pathet Lao and Vietminh, who would agree to compro­mises and then brazenly disregard them in their effort to gain control of Laos. "Neutrality was not a fashionable idea at that tune," Souvanna's son Prince Panya Souvanna Phouma told me in an interview that took place in Bangkok, where he works as a business consultant. "The problem was that nobody cared about Laos. We are at the crossroads of several frontiers, and everyone thought that Laos could be of use. The Americans acted as if they were blind. There was no relation between the problems of Laos and the reaction of the Americans."

While political machinations embroiled Vientiane, and Ameri­can bombing devastated the countryside, the Pathet Lao leaders waited patiently in the caves of Sam Neua Province until an opportune time to move. In the summer of 1975, sensing that the Pathet Lao would soon gain control of the whole of Laos, the British ambassador, Alan Davidson, flew to Sam Neua to witness an entire shadow government functioning in a network of caves. "I was the first non-Communist to be received there," he told me, in a telephone interview from London. "I hoped very much to see Kaysone and some of the other leaders we hadn't met, but that was not to happen. They had a sort of hotel cave, and then we visited a hospital cave and a theatre cave, where I was compelled to dance with a Pathet Lao danseuse. Souphanouvong's cave was very elegantly furnished, with a car­pet, a bookcase, and the sort of sofa and armchair regarded as chic in that part of the world. The hotel cave, however, was , distinctly Spartan, with a naked light bulb and only cold water from an outdoor tap. There was a 10:00 p.m. curfew, and at 9^:56 the Pathet Lao foreign minister told us we had four minutes to brush our teeth before the light went out. It. was a little bit-crazy and surreal."

By 197 5, Laos was a ravaged country. For many years, education, medical care, roads, and communications had been largely ignored while Vientiane subsisted on an inflated wartime econ­omy, and that economy collapsed with the end of the Vietnam conflict. Entire provinces lay in ruins from the American bomb­ing. After years of venality, corruption, and political infighting manipulated by foreign powers, Laotians of many political stripes welcomed the Pathet Lao takeover. This bloodless coup demon­strated for the first time that the Pathet Lao, despite their close ties to Vietnam, were capable of imposing uniquely Laotian solutions—in this case, a government incorporating the toler­ance and the lack of aggressiveness that distinguish the Laotians from their neighbors. What happened was extraordinary: After overthrowing the government of Souvanna Phouma and abolish­ing the royal family, the Pathet Lao didn't execute the prince and his followers, expel them from the country, or even throw them in jail. Instead, they immediately named Souvanna and the king, Savang Vatthana, advisers. And the United States, the country that had bombed Communist-held areas of Laos for nine years, was invited to maintain its embassy in Vientiane. This flexibility of the Pathet Lao would be demonstrated again when the time came to change the course of the economy.

By most accounts, Souvanna's position was not just an empty title, either. In 1977, the New York Times reported that "the 7&-year-old former prime minister still lives quietly in his old residence, occasionally attending diplomatic dinners," and went on, "He has decided to stay despite pressure from his family to join them in exile in France. Treated with deference by the government, he has been named a special adviser and attends the monthly cabinet meetings and other important functions." When he died, in 1984, he was given an elaborate state funeral, attended by Kaysone himself, who rarely appeared in public. The king was not so fortunate. In 1977, the government, fearing that insurgents from Thailand would attempt to organize a coup built around him, since he was still revered by many Laotians, sent the royal family into internal exile in Sam Neua Province. Under the harsh conditions of the mountainous jungles of the northeast, the king and the queen died. No one knows the details of their deaths, which the government officially acknowledged only in 1990. When I toured the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang, a palace guide, who willingly told me all sons of stories about the king's life, only laughed nervously when I asked about his death. To this day, no details have emerged on the fate of the crown prince, Vongsavang.

The Pathet Lao's willingness to impose a homegrown solution didn't extend to two other major problems: what to do with the army officers and bureaucrats of the old regime, and how to handle an economy that had been destroyed by war. In both areas, the Pathet Lao opted for the precedents set by previous Communist liberation movements. As a result, they inflicted grievous harm on the country, causing many of the economic problems that Laos is struggling to overcome today.

Souphanouvong, the new president, with his French educa­tion and his internationalist outlook, could have steered Laos on a more centrist course, which might have brought Western aid. But from the beginning it was clear that Kaysone, the new prime minister—he appeared at a reception on December 5, 1975, and that was the first time he had been seen in public since 1958 -  to be in charge, with Souphanouvong occupying a figurehead role. To Davidson, the former British ambassador, the role assigned Souphanouvong seemed logical, since this ur­bane, Westernized man was so different from the other Vietminh and Pathet Lao leaders, whose outlook had been shaped by years of a harsh existence in the mountains and jungles. "You couldn't really have a Communist country dominated by the princes and the ruling class educated in Paris," Davidson said.

Kaysone and the other Pathet Lao leaders made two grave errors almost immediately. First, they rounded up somewhere between thirty thousand and forty thousand people and put them in re-education camps; the internees included many civil ser­vants and officers of the Royal Lao Army. This action, combined with a mass exodus of the Laotian elite across the Mekong River to Thailand, stripped Laos of those who were capable of restoring the economy and running the agencies of government. In the United States, I spoke with a man who had been sent to one of these camps; because he is applying for political asylum, he asked that his name not be used. This man, who speaks elegant French, was a colonel in the Royal Lao Army from 1960 to 1975. "The Pathet Lao invited the hundred highest-ranking officers to their regional headquarters to watch a film about their goals and to hold a meeting," he told me. "They sent out official invitation cards. But when we got there the Pathet Lao troops surrounded us. They said that they were taking us to the north for a visit to discuss what is happening to the country—that a big group of people would be waiting to welcome us with flowers. They flew us to Sam Neua Province, to a camp on the Vietnam­ese border. It wasn't fenced in, but it was a mountainous area with a river on one side, and guards blocked the only path to escape. They took our military uniforms and gave us civilian us civilian clothes, and we got a new set of clothes once a year. We cut branches to construct shelters, and used banana leaves as beds. There was no medicine; a lot of people died from malaria. Each morning, they rang a bell at five and assigned jobs for the day - to cook rice, cut wood, work in the fields. When the sun went down, we ate dinner, then sat in a circle to talk about the deficiencies of the old government and to engage in self-criticism. There was no physical torture, but a lot of psychological devices, mindless rules just to control you. They let us write letters home, but then they read them to see what we were thinking, and never sent them. I was in the camp for twelve years, until 1987. I was sent to dig a canal, to build a school, and I was hitched to a plow to do the work of a water buffalo."

Faced with the prospect of a re-education camp, hundreds of thousands of Laotians chose to flee the country. Since 1975, 143,000 Laotians—roughly a tenth of the population—have registered as refugees in Thailand. The new government was being run not by highly skilled people but by thousands of cadres from areas that the Pathet Lao had controlled. "The Pathet Lao, when they came out of their caves, knew how to conduct guerrilla wars, but they didn't have the slightest idea of how to run a nation," a Western aid official in Vientiane told me. Just as in the French-colonial days, personnel brought in from Vietnam helped to run the Laotian government—only, this time, of course, they were Vietnamese from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. In addition, more than forty thousand Vietnamese troops were stationed in Laos. The Pathet Lao took over a country bereft of money and resources. The previous government had depended on foreign aid, mostly from the United States, for 80 percent of its budget; now this aid was cut off, and those fleeing the country were taking with them every­thing that could be turned into a liquid asset. Facing severe shortages and rampant inflation in a nation with a per-capita income that was then less than ninety dollars a year, the Pathet Lao set about imposing a Stalinist system: they collectivized farms, nationalized the tiny industrial base, and centralized control of prices and all other facets of the economy. The government made it clear that it was regulating every aspect of life. Long-haired youths were told to get a haircut; women were required to wear the traditional long native skirt; everyone was expected to engage in communal rice and vegetable growing on evenings and weekends, and children had to be taught in Laotian instead of French. "Laws are being enforced now," the New York Times reported in 1976. "No one locks his car doors any more. There are even traffic rules, and people are beginning to obey them. If a violator is caught, the vehicle is confiscated."

How did Vientiane, under the same Pathet Lao leadership switch to unrestrained free enterprise, zooming motorbikes, and jammed discotheques? As anyone finds who asks any question involving Laos, getting a straight answer from government offi­cials is not easy. Even an interview is hard to come by, since in Laos, although it is facing shortages of many commodities, a stifling bureaucracy is in abundant supply. Strict protocol con­trols every government transaction; when I went to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, for example, I ended up being accompanied not only by my government interpreter and a driver but also by officials of both the administrative and the information sections of Savannakhet Province, and a security guard besides. (In typi­cal Laotian fashion, the security guard was armed with nothing more deadly than a camera. Even in Vientiane, there is almost no evidence of a police or a military presence.) My first interview came only after a week-long process of writing letters and sub­mitting questions, which were sent off to the relevant ministries and seemed to be mainly disregarded, in the hope that the problem would disappear before anyone had to do anything about it. My interpreter, who handled these negotiations, would shake his head sadly every morning and say about the minister under discussion, "He is a very busy man." At one point, he drew up an impressive appointment chart, showing the time at which each official was to be interviewed. However, none of the ministries had yet responded to the interview requests; the appointment chart represented the interpreter's fantasies about what would happen. I discovered that journalists aren't the only ones to encounter bureaucratic difficulties in seeing government officials. A Soviet diplomat in Vientiane told me, "The Soviet ambassador has to wait a few days or a week to get an appoint­ment even with a first deputy minister, not just Kaysone. They're all very busy. What they're doing, no one knows, but they're very busy. No one wants to take responsibility. 'Well, of course, we'll think it over—yes.' "

A government official's monthly pay is barely enough for a couple of tanks of gasoline. My interpreter, who had sufficient status to have worked for the Laotian government in New York, India, and Australia, was supporting a wife and two children on twenty dollars a month. A first deputy minister makes about forty dollars, hardly more than a desk clerk in one of the newly privatized hotels, but he does get a government-supplied house and car. Khamsai Souphanouvong, who is the second-ranking official in the Ministry of Economics, Planning, and Finance, told me, "Workers in a factory now get a higher salary than mine, and I am responsible for finance all over the country. I buy things from the market and cook them myself, and go to restaurants only for official business. But during our period of fighting in the jungle no one got a salary. Some years, we didn't even have salt. We had to sacrifice ourselves for our country." Some government officials supplement their income by holding a second job—often during government hours—or by growing vegetables in their back yards and raising chickens and pigs. A Western diplomat told me he once saw a high Laotian official selling quail eggs in the market before going on to his office. For those whose idealism may have faded, extra income from corruption may be readily available in the newly open economy. In Bangkok, I met a Thai businessman whose company sells to Vietnam and Cambodia but refuses to do business in Laos. "I gave a Laotian official a bribe of ten thousand baht"—four hundred dollars—"and he kept the money but never came through with the deal," he complained. "For Vietnam and Cam­bodia, we have to pay people in the government, too, but at least they deliver for us."

The low salaries are matched by dismal working conditions. Government buildings are dank and filthy, because there are no maintenance staffs; employees are supposed to clean their own offices on Saturday mornings. Few dignitaries have receptionists or secretaries, and even my Foreign Ministry interpreter had trouble finding the offices of people I was supposed to interview. When we did corral the proper official, the interview sometimes turned into a lecture, which I wasn't permitted to interrupt. Kham Ouane Boupha, vice-minister of agriculture and forests, took forty-two minutes to answer my first question. A stern-looking man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, who brought his own interpreter and ignored mine, he watched me closely during the translation. If I looked up even for a moment, he pointed to my notepad and made a writing motion with his thumb and forefin­ger. These interviews, since I was asking many questions about the revitalized economy, included lots of statistics, and the statis­tics confirmed a warning I had had from Western diplomats— not to trust any figures I heard, since statistics in Laos were notoriously unreliable. One high economic official told me that foreign investment in Laos had totaled $100 million so far; a second official, of similar rank, put it at $70 million; and a Western embassy that had just completed a study of the Laotian economy claimed that the most accurate figure was $5 million. In Savannakhet, a bustling city that sprawls for several miles, a local official insisted that the population was just twenty thou­sand; Westerners in Vientiane said that it was actually seventy thousand.

Yet the interviews did help to explain how the Laotian version of perestroika came about. In different ways, several of the gov­ernment officials' explanations had a common theme: Over the centuries, as the Laotians fell victim to one foreign power after another, they survived by turning inward—by developing a strong sense of national identity intertwined with their Buddhist beliefs. What evolved was a Laotian way of doing things. But two Pathet Lao moves—the Stalinist economy and the re-education camps—were taken wholesale from the Vietnamese, and it even­tually became clear that neither was working. So the Pathet Lao leaders, behind their image as a rigid dictatorship, had to exer­cise great flexibility. What happened was best explained to me by Somphavan Inthavong, a key economic planner, who is one of the most articulate of the Laotian leaders. "To survive, we must have a very Asian philosophy," he said. "We must be like the trees that curve with the strong winds. We changed when history bent us to the point where if we didn't change we would break. We had made many errors in the first ten years of the new regime, because we had little experience and wanted to copy the big countries. But we do better when we go our own way. To copy means to refuse to see that you are in a different stage of development. We are a country the size of West Ger­many with just seven percent of its population. We can potentially grow crops on four million hectares of land, but now only four hundred thousand are under cultivation. Last year, our rice" production exactly met our needs, but we couldn't distribute it evenly. Where are the roads? It's cheaper to buy rice from Thai­land than to bring it up from the south of Laos. So our change has been motivated mostly by our internal needs. But it should not be denied that, in addition to the internal reasons, Laos has been shaped by economic and political influences from the outside world. Every day in Laos, you can tune in Thai television and watch CNN in color." To emphasize the degree of the government's flexibility today, Somphavan said, "The man who came to see me just before you was one of the leaders of the rightists in the old regime, a vice-prime minister. All countries must change. We have a different way, a Laotian way, of doing things."

As is true of every major decision in Laos, the central figure in bringing about the economic changes was Kaysone. "He's very busy, because he's the only man who makes the decisions on all vital questions," the Soviet diplomat in Vientiane told me. (While many of the diplomats in Vientiane readily agreed to interviews, all asked that their names not be used.) "That's not very good, and that's why Laos lags behind in many ways. Kay-sone can't get people to do things. This is one of the main problems here: the old generation is still in power." Kaysone, a distinguished-looking man with a round, fleshy face and graying hair receding at the temples, lived in the same clandestine man­ner he developed in the caves of Sam Neua. Until he visited Japan and France in 1989, he had never traveled outside the Soviet bloc except for two visits to Thailand. He almost never granted interviews, and my repeated requests to see him were rebuffed with the usual explanation: "He is a very busy man." Although Kaysone had never been to the United States, his house was a little slice of Americana. Along with many other Pathet Lao leaders, he lived in Kilometre 6, an American-style suburb on the edge of Vientiane, complete with ranch-type houses built by the United States during the Vietnam War. (The kilometer counting starts at the Presidential Palace, on the Mekong River.) Kilometre 6 can be reached by a half-mile-long road from the main highway. Since I saw no guards around, I asked my cab driver to let me off on the highway, telling him I would walk in as far as I could get. Although he had previously been fearless in taking me around Vientiane, this time he refused even to slow down, saying that he would be arrested if he did.

By several accounts, Kaysone possessed a keen mind. "I've met him many, many times," the Soviet diplomat said. "He's a very clever man. One of his advantages is that he likes to learn from everybody. He acknowledges his mistakes, and he knows what should be done to build his country." Kaysone seemed capable of expounding on all sorts of subjects. When in 1990 he addressed a conference of Laotian bankers, he spoke for the entire day, with only a break for lunch. He described in detail the backward state of the country's economy and noted that when there was capital available it was usually either wasted or used for immediate needs, not for long-term projects. "Short­ages exist in rice, foodstuffs, fertilizer, farm tools, and other staple items," he told the bankers. "But the market is inundated with whiskey, beer, cigarettes, and other types of expensive goods imported from foreign countries."

The nearest he came to discussing the economic reforms publicly was in a February-1989 interview with Grant Evans, an Australian sociologist who is an expert on Laos. Evans asked him, "Why did you have the old policy?"

"Well, they had done it that way in other socialist countries, and I thought I understood how it should be done," Kaysone replied. "So we tried it out here. It worked in some situations but not in others. Then [in 1979) we had to slow down, and then change direction." He noted that "the real change began in 1985," and said, "It was then that we really began to tackle the problems of prices, values, and money. We began experi­ments with a more flexible pricing policy. . . . If we are not good at controlling the macroeconomic relations between goods and money, we'll have the same problems as China."

To an outsider's eye, the economic reforms might look like unbridled capitalism. But Laotian officials patiently explained— one of them while sitting beneath a map of Laos that had a picture of Engels taped to it—that sound socialist principles were lurking underneath. The teachings of Lenin, they said, give the free market a vital role in the transition to socialism— you have to pass through a capitalist stage on the way to true socialism, and Laos had never done this.

"Is it the goal of Laos to be a socialist state?" I asked Boun Omme Southichak, one of the officials who oversee foreign investments.

"Sure, but we need some time," he replied. "We have to go step by step. We don't know how far away socialism is; it de­pends." The unwillingness of the government to abandon its ideological baggage makes for schizophrenic scenes these days in Vientiane. The biggest bookstore sells nothing but publica­tions from Communist countries, but a couple of blocks away you can buy a television and watch four channels from Thailand. (The Thai and Laotian languages are so similar that people who speak one can easily understand the other.) While Laos's television station still serves as a propaganda mouthpiece for the government, its salesmen are pounding the streets trying to persuade businessmen to buy commercial time. Students still have to pass an exam in Marxism to graduate from a university, and one student told me that—at the same time that the govern­ment was leasing state-owned factories to capitalists—his Marx­ism teacher was lecturing on how factories under capitalism exploited their workers.

I asked the student whether he had pointed out the contradic­tion.

"You don't ask questions," he replied. "You just take down what the teacher says."

It seems axiomatic that changing the economic system of an impoverished country in a way that frees some of the people to get wealthy while the vast majority remain very poor must create resentment—particularly if the economic freedom is not accom­panied by fundamental political reforms. I assumed, therefore, that it would be easy to find Laotians critical of their government, at least in private conversation. But I found none at all. One Western ambassador told me he had never met a dissident, and explained, "The young Laotian would say, 'We have freedom to travel, we have discos, we have economic reform.' I don't see any sign at all of political pressure for change; I can't imagine where it would come from." Another diplomat noted, "The Voice of America broadcasts an hour a night, and it's very well listened to. They get Thai television and radio. So the seeds have been planted. But there's no indication that anything is sprouting."

"Laos is a different country, Oriental in thinking," said a Russian diplomat. "People are very passive politically here. Their thinking is that if they have rice that's good, but they don't necessarily want to have more rice. Inevitably, there will be dissent, but probably not for several years more."