Parting Ways: Two Civil Wars amid the First Indochina War in Laos (1945–1954)

This paper examines civil wars during the First Indochina War in Laos (1945–54). The first civil war emerged between those fighting for Lao independence, the Issara, and those continuing to defend French colonial rule after World War II, the loyalists. The second civil war broke out as the first one ended in late 1949. It was fought between the Royal Lao Government (RLG) and the Pathet Lao. This new civil war was fought over the question of whether Laos was independent and would now be communist. By then the Cold War had begun to loom over the later years of the First Indochina War in Laos. While initially civil war came to Laos as political violence cutting across family, region, and ordinarily divided ethnic lines by 1949, some Lao saw it as a clash between two states, the RLG and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In reality, there were dueling “liberations” of Laos under way by this point, depending on which side one was on in the RLG-Pathet Lao civil war. Interstate war was enmeshed in bloody local civil wars, resulting in a double conflict. This became clear during the Pathet Lao-People’s Army of Vietnam offensives of 1953–54, toward the end of the First Indochina War in Laos. In the aftermath, RLG leaders’ visions of their civil war with the Pathet Lao became distorted by their own rising anti-communist and anti-Vietnamese nationalism.