Pathet Lao Take Power in Laos
The Pathet Lao took Vientiane without a battle in 1975 and abolished a monarchy of six centuries in December. Laos had been fought over for two decades as an extension of the war in Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh trail ran through its eastern provinces, and the United States dropped some two million tonnes of ordnance on the country between 1964 and 1973 — more than on Germany and Japan combined in the Second World War, and about a planeload every eight minutes for nine years. Around a third of the cluster submunitions failed to detonate, and unexploded ordnance still kills and maims people, mostly farmers and children, half a century later. The war was fought on the ground largely by proxies: a CIA-organised army of Hmong fighters under Vang Pao against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese regulars, in a conflict Washington did not acknowledge. None of it was ever declared. The Paris agreement of 1973 produced a coalition government in which the Pathet Lao held the countryside and the balance of force, and Saigon's fall in April 1975 removed any counterweight. Demonstrations, resignations and defections did the rest through the summer, and the king abdicated on 2 December. He and the queen died in a re-education camp a few years later. Some 300,000 people left, including a large part of the Hmong population, which had been promised protection. The Lao People's Revolutionary Party has governed ever since. Laos is the most heavily bombed country per head in history, and the clearance work is funded largely by foreign donors including, since 2016, the United States. Less than a tenth of the contaminated land has been cleared.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Political
