Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...students, charging that USAID was formerly a cover for CIA activities, and that much aid money tended to end up in the pockets of corrupt officials, seized the compound two weeks ago. They were supported, at least at first, by some Laotian employees of the agency who agreed with the students' charges; more important, they had the backing of the Communist-led Pathet Lao, whose soldiers lounged around the compound throughout the occupation. The Pathet Lao presence, in fact, became significant when, after several days of protest, a group of 200 Laotian USAID employees sent a delegation to neutralist...
Steady Stream. The students' victory was, in a way, Pyrrhic. USAID had been the largest single employer in the entire country after the Vientiane government itself, and it was still handing out $32 million in economic aid this year (the equivalent of $10 per Laotian). Pathet Lao representatives said they wanted U.S. aid to continue without any supervision, but that seems unlikely. As of last week, the steady stream of departing Americans had reduced the U.S. presence in Laos from more than 1,000 a month ago to about...
...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...
...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...
Angry protests lodged at the Laotian Foreign Ministry by U.S. Chargé 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...