Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
followed
Eastern bloc models
: they collectivized farms, centralized control of prices and
nationalized what little industry there was. The government required long-haired teenagers to
get haircuts and women to wear traditional skirts in an effort to develop Lao socialist men and
women. Prostitutes and petty thieves were shipped off to re-education camps of their own on
islands in the middle of Ang Nam Ngum.
As living standards declined within Laos and the number of refugees in camps in Thailand
swelled,
opponents of the regime
found ready recruits. The Thailand-based Lao National
Revolutionary Front produced anti-government propaganda and sent sabotage teams into
Laos, while remnants of the Hmong secret army went on the offensive in northern Laos, cap-
turing a town on the outskirts of Luang Prabang in March 1977. Fearing that opponents might
rally around the figure of the king, the government arrested the royal family and banished
them to Hua Phan, where the king, queen and crown prince died, something officially ac-
knowledged only in 1990.
Vietnamese forces helped quell the Hmong revolt, and in July, Vientiane and Hanoi signed
a 25-year
Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
which formalized Vietnamese political,
economic and military assistance, including the stationing of more than thirty thousand Viet-
namese troops in Laos over the next decade. Relations were also close with the Soviet Union,
which sent hundreds of technicians and advisers to Laos, drawing it firmly within the Soviet
sphere of influence.
The new thinking
By 1979, external and internal difficulties facing the new government forced it to re-evaluate
its policies; as a result, its agricultural cooperative programme was suspended and a less rigid
form of socialism was adopted. After ten years of power, in December 1985, Laos was still
dependent on foreign aid and it remained one of the world's poorest countries. The time had
come, in the eyes of Kaysone, for a change.
After overcoming opponents of reform, Kaysone was able to implement the
NewEconomic
Mechanism
, approved by the Fourth Party Congress in November 1986, which essentially
introduced a market economy. Without an upheaval among the party's leaders - many of
whom had worked together since their days in the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1940s
- the ageing hardliners of the Pathet Lao embarked on a series of reforms, generally known
as
jintannakan mai
or the New Thinking, which was as thorough as anything to be found in
Eastern Europe at the time. By the late 1980s, the centralized socialist economy had been
largely dismantled. Farmers could own their own land and sell their crops at free-market
prices, state-owned businesses had to make a profit or close their doors and wholly owned
foreign investment projects, protected against nationalization, were authorized.
Political changes did not accompany the economic reforms, however. Local elections held
in 1988 - the first since 1975 - and subsequent national elections in 1989 did provide some
