Report from Laos

Like a specialist called in to diagnose a serious infection but not permitted to bring all his instruments along, the U.N. observer team sent in September to Laos to investigate charges of Communist Viet Nam aggression was hamstrung by explicit instructions to simply look and listen. Otherwise, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge might never have succeeded in his adroit procedural move to create the Laos subcommittee over Russia's negative vote. An investigation would have been subject to Soviet veto, but Lodge's lawyers had found a veto-proof 1946 precedent for "a subcommittee of inquiry" that could receive reports but could not seek facts on its own initiative (TIME, Sept. 21). Predictably, in its 32-page report to the Security Council last week, the U.N. team found plenty of evidence that the kingdom of Laos' fevers were Communist-caused, but no hard proof on the key issue of direct aggression.

Though in quick headline-reading terms the conclusion was disappointing to Laos and the West, the circumstantial evidence cited in the body of the U.N. report left little doubt where the blame lay in Laos. The committee examined captured North Viet Nam uniforms, rifles made in China and Czechoslovakia, hand grenades and medical supplies bearing Chinese lettering. Laotian witnesses testified that troops attacking them were identifiable as North Vietnamese not only by their green uniforms but by their language ("Mau! Mau!"--Quick! Quick!) and even by the common rice they ate (Laotians eat glutinous rice). Ten captured Pathet Lao rebels admitted that from one-third to one-half of their units were filled out by North Vietnamese. But when the Laotian government was unable to produce any North Viet Nam prisoners, the U.N. team (a Tunisian, a Japanese, an Italian and an Argentinian) was forced to conclude that it could "not clearly establish whether there were crossings of the frontier by regular troops of the Democratic Republic of [North] Viet Nam."

Though the report made it unlikely that the West would urge a full-dress Security Council debate on Laos, and the Russians jeered that the report "collapsed the Laotian charges like a card castle," the fact was that the very presence of the U.N. observers in Laos has put a considerable damper on overt Communist activity. And at week's end U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold decided to fly to Laos himself to determine whether the situation warrants some kind of permanent, though informal U.N. surveillance--a measure the Laotians feel would go a long way toward keeping the Red aggressors on their own side of the jungle.

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