Souphanouvong

Souphanouvong (1978)

Prince Souphanouvong ( Lao ສຸ ພາ ນຸ ວົງ , pronunciation: [súʔpʰáːnūʔʋóŋ] ; * July 13, 1909 in Luang Prabang , † January 9, 1995 in Vientiane ) was a Laotian politician. From 1950 he was head of the anti-colonial and pro-communist movement Pathet Lao and from 1975 to 1991 the first state president of the Lao People's Democratic Republic .

Life

Family and education

He was born the son of the viceroy of Luang Prabang in Laos, Boun Khong, and his concubine Kham On. He was the younger half-brother of Prince Phetsarat and Prince Souvanna Phouma and, like them, had a decisive influence on the political life of his home country Laos.

Souphanouvong attended the Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi and then studied civil engineering at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées in Paris . After graduating in 1937, he returned to Indochina and worked for the Public Works Office in Nha Trang . He married the Vietnamese Le Thi Ky Nam, who was the daughter of a civil servant and is characterized as an unusually self-confident woman. The two had eight children. Until 1945 he continued to work as a civil engineer and was responsible for the construction of bridges and roads in central Vietnam and Laos.

Leader of the Lao Issara

After the surrender of the Japanese at the end of World War II , he contacted the Việt Minh to ask them for support for Laos' independence and against the return of French colonial rule. In Hanoi he also met Hồ Chí Minh , whose follower was his wife and who made a great impression on him. Souphanouvong became one of the leaders of the Lao Issara national liberation movement , first acting as its provincial chairman in Thakhek , then as foreign minister of the Lao Issara government and commander in chief of the “Army for the Liberation and Defense of Laos”. Unlike other members of the national liberation movement, Souphanouvong believed that Laos could only free itself from French rule in an alliance with the Việt Minh, and wanted Lao Issara and Việt Minh to unite in order to wage a struggle against French rule across all of Indochina . On November 1, 1945, Souphanouvong signed a mutual assistance agreement between Lao Issara and Việt Minh. After the Battle of Thakhek on March 21, 1946, when he tried to flee across the Mekong on a boat , he was seriously wounded by low-flying aircraft. But he managed to escape to Bangkok anyway. Like other Lao Issara leaders, he remained in exile there for the next three years. In March 1949 he resigned as foreign minister of the government-in-exile after conflicts over the continuation of cooperation with the Vietnamese liberation movement.

Leader of the Pathet Lao

He became famous under the name “the red prince” as the nominal leader of the pro-communist Pathet-Lao movement supported by North Vietnam , which emerged from its radical wing in 1950 after the Lao Issara split. In fact, however, this was led by the communist politician Kaysone Phomvihane , the prince played more of a figurehead. On August 13, 1950, Souphanouvong was elected President of the “Congress of the Free Lao Front”, which met at the Việt Minh headquarters in Tuyen Quang , North Vietnam .

Souphanouvong was not a staunch communist, at least initially. He joined the Pathet Lao rather because of personal conflicts with the leadership of Lao Issara. In an interview with a US diplomat in Bangkok in 1949, he described Laos as a classless, Buddhist country in which communist theories had no basis. On the contrary, he proposed an independent Laos, with American help, as a neutral buffer against the spread of communism in Asia. The Democratic People's Republic of Vietnam and Pham Van Dong , he not called a communist, but as a "liberal-socialist." The fact that Souphanouvong was actually so clueless cannot be ruled out, since the close leadership circle of the Vietnamese and Laotian communists was extremely closed and his Marxist-Leninist program was kept strictly secret from outsiders - including Souphanouvong. Radical goals such as expropriation, class struggle and the abolition of the monarchy would not have appealed to the vast majority of the Lao population with their Buddhist beliefs. However, all statements Souphanouvong should be treated with caution, since according to two American friends he was a "perfect liar".

Perhaps the decisive factor was more of his Pro-Vietnamese orientation. He had spent much of his adult life in Vietnam, studied and worked there, and was married to a Vietnamese woman. As a result, he had more exchanges with Vietnamese than with Laotians of his generation and probably also had a greater intellectual affinity with educated Vietnamese, whom he perceived as more dynamic, than with Laotian elites, whom he described as apolitical and passive. He is thus in the line of tradition of many aristocrats in Laotian history who, in order to come to power or to hold onto it, sought the support of one of the two large neighbors - either Siam / Thailand or Vietnam. Under monarchical conditions, Souphanouvong, as the youngest son of his father with his concubine, would have been far too low to come to power in the traditional way and without external support.

Souphanouvong joined the Lao People's Party in 1955 (which later became the Lao People's Revolutionary Party , LRVP), but was not part of its leadership. However, he became chairman of the Lao Patriotic Front (Neo Lao Hak Sat) founded in 1956 , in which trade unions, women's and farmers' associations were also represented. During the national unity government under his neutralist half-brother Souvanna Phouma from 1957 to 1958 he was Minister for Planning, Reconstruction and Urban Development. In May 1958, he was elected to the National Assembly for Vientiane with the highest number of votes of any candidate in the country.

However, the unity government collapsed and the new government under Phoui Sananikone arrested Souphanouvong and other representatives of the Pathet Lao in July 1959. The group managed to escape to the headquarters of the pro-communist forces near Sam Neua ( Houaphan province ) in May 1960 . Souphanouvong continued to advocate cooperation between Pathet Lao and neutralists and contributed to the negotiations that led to the 1962 Geneva Laos Agreement. In the second unity government that followed, Souphanouvong was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economics and Planning. After the assassination of the left-wing Foreign Minister Quinim Pholsena in April 1963, Souphanouvong left the government and retired again to the base of the Pathet Lao in Sam Neua.

It was not until 1967 that he publicly committed himself to Marxism-Leninism. Whether this reflected his authentic ideological convictions or was power calculation, however, remained questionable.

Souphanouvong tried again to form an alliance of Pathet Lao and neutralists in order to end the long Lao civil war in which his eldest son was killed. In 1972 and 1973 he was again involved in talks that led to the third unity government. In this he took no ministerial office. However, he chaired the National Political Consultative Council, which drafted the 18-point program that gave the government the guidelines for its policy.

President of the People's Democratic Republic

After Pathet Lao took power in the whole Kingdom of Laos in 1975 , Souphanouvong became the first President of the Laos People's Democratic Republic and President of the Supreme People's Assembly. Both were mostly representative offices without any influence on day-to-day political affairs. In the Politburo of the Communist Party ( Lao People's Revolutionary Party , LRVP) he held only a low rank. Rather, the decision-making power lay in the hands of the prime minister and general secretary of the party Kaysone Phomvihane and his deputy Nouhak Phoumsavanh .

From 1986 Phoumi Vongvichit was acting president for the permanently ill Souphanouvong. After the new constitution was passed on August 14, 1991, Kaysone Phomvihane officially succeeded him as president. Prince Souphanouvong died in 1995. He was given a state funeral and his ashes were buried in a small but elaborate stupa near Pha That Luang in Vientiane.

One of his sons, Khamsay (* 1943), was finance minister from 1991 to 1995 and a member of the central committee of the LRVP. However, he fell out of favor with the party leadership and fled to New Zealand in 2000.

Souphanouvong is celebrated by the leadership of the Lao People's Democratic Republic and its press organs as a hero and "figure of light" of the revolution and the Laotian nation. Since his 95th birthday in 2004, in particular, his role in recent Lao history and his services to the revolution, independence and national interests as well as the maintenance of peace have been increasingly emphasized by the authorities.

Souphanouvong died on January 9, 1995 in Vientiane .

literature

• Geoffrey C. Gunn: Theravadins. Colonialists and Commissars in Laos . White Lotus Press, Bangkok 1998, ISBN 974-8434-39-7 .
• Martin Stuart-Fox : A History of Laos . University Press, Cambridge 1997, ISBN 0-521-59746-3 .
• Oliver Tappe: History, nation building and legitimation politics in Laos. Lit Verlag, Berlin 2008, in particular Section 2.3.5. The “Red Prince” Souphanouvong , pp. 167–179.

Web links

• Laos: Country Studies

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Prince Souphanouvong died on spiegel.de
2. ^ ^{A b c} Martin Stuart-Fox: Historical Dictionary of Laos. Scarecrow Press, Lanham MD / Plymouth 2008, p. 318.
3. ^ ^{A b} Mai Elliott, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica CA 2010, p. 569.
4. ^ ^{A b} Seth Jacobs: The Universe Unraveling. American foreign policy in Cold War Laos. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2012, pp. 32-33.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Tappe: History, nation building and legitimation politics in Laos. 2008, p. 170.
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Stuart-Fox: Historical Dictionary of Laos. 2008, p. 319.
7. ^ Arthur J. Dommen: The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans. Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN 2001, p. 182.
8. ^ Michael Leifer: Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia. Routledge, London / New York 1995, p 200, keyword Neo Lao Hak Sat .
9. ↑ John Holt: Spirits of the Place. Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2009, p. 112.
10. ↑ Stuart-Fox: Historical Dictionary of Laos. 2008, pp. 319-320.
11. ↑ Patrick Heenan, Monique Lamontagne (Ed.): The Southeast Asia Handbook. Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago / London 2001, p. 298, keyword Souphanouvong, Prince
12. ↑ Lucien M. Hanks: Corruption and Commerce in Southeast Asia. In: Beyond Conflict and Containment. Critical Studies of Military and Foreign Policy. Transaction, New Brunswick NJ 1972, p. 54.
13. ^ ^{A b} Stuart-Fox: Historical Dictionary of Laos. 2008, p. 320.
14. ^ Tappe: History, nation building and legitimation politics in Laos. 2008, p. 169.
15. ^ Tappe: History, nation building and legitimation politics in Laos. 2008, p. 167 ff.