Word: nong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Scattered throughout Southeast Asia, the refugee camps have taken on personalities of their own. The Laotian camps in northern Thailand are probably the most satisfactory, in part because the Lao are ethnic cousins of the Thais. The sprawling camp at Nong Khai, with 46,000 people, is larger than the provincial Thai capital. Its inhabitants were able to bring some valuables with them into exile; the camp has a nightclub, several silver shops, a produce market, a makeshift gym and an arts and crafts center. Farther south, camps for Cambodians are little more than barbed-wire enclosures. The Vietnamese camps...
...will accept the Laotians as ethnic cousins, while the Cambodians are not a group to be greatly feared; after all, the Thais always got their slaves from Cambodia." Still, exploitation is rife in the U.N. camps. In April, 18 Thais were arrested for robbing refugees in a camp at Nong Khai that houses 26,000 Laotians. Camp officials encourage Laotians to find work outside the compounds. "Many factories in this country are looking for cheap labor," explains Nong Khai Governor Chamnarn Potchana. "While Thai workers want vacations and labor unions, refugees just want work...
...ammunition, they have made most of the mountainous area uninhabitable for Communist troops. Blia Ya Moi, a former leader of the anti-Communist forces, explained to DeVoss that "we have to make every bullet useful; one bullet for one life." Blia closely watches events in Laos from the Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand...
...spring of 1946, an American OSS veteran named James Thompson paid a call on the governor of Thailand's Nong Khai province. "Come upstairs," said the governor. "I have a Lao prince you might like to meet." The governor's guest was Prince Souphanouvong, then a leader of the embryo Laotian independence movement and now titular head of the pro-Communist Pathet Lao. Souphanouvong asked Thompson for pledges of U.S. support against the French colonialists who were then re-establishing their control over Laos. Their talk was, almost certainly, the first contact between American officials and independence-minded...