Word: souvanna
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...Kissinger flew into Vientiane, Laos, cease-fire negotiations between Premier Souvanna Phouma and the Communist-dominated Pathet Lao were already well advanced. The chief difficulty has been the Communist insistence that any military truce be coupled with political concessions. A similar position had hampered the set tlement in Viet Nam until Hanoi finally agreed to separate those issues. If a similar deal can be struck in Laos - and Kissinger was pressing for it - a ceasefire could come as early as this week. In anticipation of that, the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese troops made last-minute pushes to grab more...
...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...
Hanoi has never admitted the presence of its forces in Laos, where they are barred under the terms of the 1962 accords. Souvanna worries that "we have no lever to force them out," and he has some understandable doubts that Hanoi would honor a new great-power agreement requiring the withdrawal of "all foreign" troops from the country. In 1962 only 40 North Vietnamese troops marched out of Laos through the prescribed International Control Commission checkpoint-and 30 of them claimed that they had merely been building a house for Souvanna. Thousands of other NVA troops either slipped back...
...Souvanna told Simms that whatever happens, "we shall certainly survive." But time is not on his side. In dusty Vientiane, Simms found "no dearth of traffic, from expensive Mercedes, to ex-army Jeeps, to whole schools of motor scooters. It takes a little while to discover that something is not quite the same as in most cities. Then one gradually notices that the driver of the black Mercedes is a beautiful Laotian girl wearing the traditional skirt of glossy silk, heavily embroidered in gold, and that the driver in the Jeep behind her, wearing a pair of smart Levi...