Word: phouma
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Communists did in fact show a new flexibility. They abruptly reversed their longstanding refusal to deal with military and political matters separately. Communist spokesmen suggested that Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma was overoptimistic in his prediction that a cease-fire in Laos would come within 15 days of one in South Viet Nam, but they agreed that a truce would come soon. Lending a helping hand, the Soviet Union offered to fly negotiators between the capital of Vientiane and the Communist stronghold of Samneua, about 200 miles away...
There remains, moreover, the unanswered problem of the other wars in Southeast Asia. Last week the Laotian Premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma, predicted that fighting in his country would stop by mid-February. The Cambodian government announced a three-day cease-fire to give the Communists a chance to stop fighting if they wanted to. Cambodian President Lon Nol also made plans to participate in peace talks with the Khmer Rouge Communists and aides of deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The prospects for a lasting peace in Laos and particularly in Cambodia, however, seemed at least as dubious as in South Viet...
After two months of fitful negotiations in Vientiane, there has been scant progress in the talks between the Pathet Lao and the U.S.-backed but nominally "neutralist" government of Premier Prince Souvanna Phouma. Souvanna wants the pro-Communist rebels to join in the tripartite government that was set up by the Geneva accords of 1962. The Pathet Lao demand a two-thirds share in the government, and they have a large but unacknowledged North Vietnamese military presence to back their claim. What is fundamentally at issue is whether Laos will emerge as a reasonably independent buffer state that might help...
...pagoda he had helped build in 1916, and a young man testifies to how successful the bombing was in driving the population out of Pathet Lao territory: "We saw that it wouldn't end, and we fled to the side of the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, the Prime Minister. Because the war was so severe, we had to flee from our homes, rice fields and paddies, cows and buffalo and come here in poverty...
North Vietnam and its allies refused to capitulate. On November 20, Prince Souphanouvong of the Pathet Lao wrote his half-brother Souvanna Phouma that unless Phouma gave up his U.S. support, the Lao people would not "tolerate" his policies any longer. Subsequent fighting began in Laos and Cambodia...