Indochina nation

Usage examples of laos.

These alliterative expressions, collected by the linguist Martha Ratcliff, give some inkling of the intimate relationship the Hmong of Laos had with the natural world.

In Laos, the French colonial government encouraged them to pay their taxes in raw opium in order to supply the official lowland network of government-licensed opium dens.

No wonder that when Christian missionaries first came to Laos, they often found small, meticulously wrapped balls of opium in their offering plates.

In the 1950s, it was estimated that the Hmong of Laos were burning about four hundred square miles of land a year and, by letting the topsoil leach away, causing enough erosion to alter the courses of rivers.

Geneva Accords of 1954, signed after the French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu, had recognized three independent states in what had formerly been French Indochina: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which was temporarily partitioned into northern and southern zones that were supposed to be reunited within two years.

In 1961, on his last day in office, Eisenhower told President-elect Kennedy that if Laos were to fall to communism, it would be only a matter of time before South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma fell too.

The United States was anxious to support an anticommunist government in Laos and to cut the military supply line that the North Vietnamese ran to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex of roads and pathways in southeastern Laos, near the Vietnam border.

CIA recruited the most remote ethnic minority in Laos, one notorious for its lack of national consciousness, instead of the dominant lowland Lao.

In Laos, they had already proven their mettle as guerrillas during the Second World War, when they fought on the side of the Lao and the French during the Japanese occupation, and after the war, when, similarly allied, they resisted the Vietminh.

The CIA thus conveniently inherited a counterinsurgent network of Hmong guerrillas that the French had organized in northern Laos two decades earlier.

Finally, many Hmong had a huge personal stake in the war because they lived in the mountains surrounding its most crucial theater of operation: the Plain of Jars, a plateau in northeastern Laos through which communist troops from the north would have to march in any attempt to occupy the administrative capital of Vientiane, on the Thai border.

Some were forced into combat because bombing in northern Laos had obliged them to abandon their fields, and there was no other employment.

Hmong military base at Long Tieng, in northern Laos, to markets in Vientiane.

More than two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, mostly by American planes attacking communist troops in Hmong areas.

By 1970, forced to adapt their migratory habits to wartime, more than a third of the Hmong in Laos had become refugees within their own country.