Kaysone Phomvihane
Kaysone Phomvihane ran the Lao communist movement for thirty years and the country for seventeen, and was so little known that his own citizens rarely saw a photograph of him before 1975. He was the son of a Vietnamese civil servant and a Lao mother, studied law in Hanoi, and was a founder of the Pathet Lao under Vietnamese sponsorship in 1950. The relationship with Hanoi was the constant of his career and of Lao politics afterwards. What happened to Laos between 1964 and 1973 has no real parallel. The United States dropped more than two million tonnes of ordnance on it in a war it never declared there - roughly a planeload every eight minutes for nine years, and more bombs than fell on Germany and Japan combined in the Second World War. Perhaps a third of the cluster submunitions failed to detonate, and they are still killing farmers. The Pathet Lao took the country in 1975 as Saigon and Phnom Penh fell, abolished the six-century-old monarchy, and sent the king and queen to a re-education camp where they died. Tens of thousands went to the camps; a tenth of the population left, and the Hmong who had fought for the Americans were pursued for years. He built a one-party state on the Vietnamese model, collectivised agriculture, watched output fall, and reversed course in 1986 with a market opening two years before the Soviet Union tried one. He died in office in 1992 and the system he built is still there.
- Lived: 1920 CE – 1992 CE
- Nationality: Lao
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
