Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
RE-EDUCATION CAMPS
The first group of prisoners to be transported to
re-education camps
- the Pathet Lao's
means of neutralizing its wartime enemies - arrived by invitation in full military dress
months before the communist takeover in December 1975. After receiving letters signed
by Prince Souvannaphouma, seventy high-ranking Royal Lao Army officers and provincial
governors came to what they thought would be an important meeting and were whisked
off to the Plain of Jars, where they were fêted with a banquet and a movie. Any hope of
a uniquely Lao solution to the Second Indochina War ended there, as these officials were
shortly thereafter flown off to Hua Phan, where they were stripped of their rank and sep-
arated into small work parties. In the following months, thousands of civil servants and
army officers voluntarily entered the re-education centres in Hua Phan, Attapeu and Phong-
sali after being assured the “seminars” would last only a few weeks. With their opponents
safely out of the way in the most remote corners of the country, or having opted already
to flee to Thailand, the Pathet Lao moved ahead with the final stage of their bloodless
takeover virtually unopposed.
Joined later by thousands more who arrived somewhat less willingly, the internees were
turned loose in the fenceless camps, which were heavily guarded and hemmed in by the
extreme geographical features of the Lao wilderness, and left to forage for food and build
their own shelters out of bamboo. Each morning, a bell was rung at 5am and the prison-
ers were assigned a job for the day - cutting wood in the jungles, building roads, working
in the fields. In the evenings, self-criticism and political indoctrination sessions were held.
Although there was no physical torture, mindless rules were established in order to control
the captives, who were never allowed to settle into one place. The cumulative effect of the
“re-education”, according to a former Royal Lao Army officer, who spent thirteen years in
a Hua Phan camp, was a sort of “brainwashing”. Life in the camps was hard - the officer
is certain that he only made it because of a Green Beret survival course he attended in the
US - and many ran off or died of malaria.
Drug addicts, prostitutes and other “anti-social” elements were also rounded up and
shuttled off to
Ang Nam Ngum
near Vang Vieng, where an estimated three thousand
people were placed on “Boy Island” and “Girl Island”. In 1977, the
royal family
too was
arrested and banished to Camp 01 at Sop Hao, in Hua Phan, where the king and crown
prince reportedly died of starvation two weeks apart in May 1978. The queen is said to have
died in 1981, and, like her husband and son before her, was buried in an unmarked grave
outside the camp. The only government acknowledgement of their deaths came a decade
later, when Party Secretary General Kaysone mentioned in an aside during a visit to Paris
that the king had died of old age.
