History - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Northern Thailand - page 999

Reversal of Fortune
The communist cooperatives in Indochina were a miserable failure and caused almost as
much suffering as the wars that had preceded them. Pragmatic Laos was the first to liberal-
ise in response to the economic stagnation, and private farming and enterprise were al-
lowed as early as 1979. However, the changes came too late for the Lao royal family and
the last king and queen are believed to have died of malnutrition and disease in a prison
camp sometime in the late 1970s.
Vietnam was slower to evolve, but the arrival of President Mikhail Gorbachev in the
Soviet Union meant glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were in, and radic-
al revolution was out. Doi moi (economic reforms) were experimented with in Cambodia
and introduced to Vietnam. As the USSR scaled back its commitments to the communist
world, the far-flung outposts were the first to feel the pinch. The Vietnamese decided to
unilaterally withdraw from Cambodia in 1989, as they could no longer afford the occupa-
tion. The party in Vietnam was on its own and needed to reform to survive. Cambodia and
Laos would follow its lead.
Jon Swain's River of Time (1995) takes the reader back to an old Indochina, partly lost to the mad-
ness of war, and includes first-hand accounts of the French embassy stand-off in the first days
of the Khmer Rouge takeover.