Misplaced Pages

Vientiane Treaty

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
1973 cease-fire agreement in the Laotian Civil War
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Vientiane Treaty" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Vientiane Treaty was a cease-fire agreement between the two warring factions in the Laotian Civil War (the Kingdom of Laos and the communist Pathet Lao), signed in Vientiane (the capital of Laos), on 21 February 1973.

The Vientiane Treaty was in some sense a corollary to the Paris Peace Accords, signed the month before, which had ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Just as the Paris Accords had mandated the withdrawal of all US forces in Vietnam, the Vientiane Treaty called for the removal from Laos of all foreign forces allied to each side.

Under the terms of the treaty, a new coalition government was to be created; security in major cities (such as Vientiane) was to be undertaken by joint forces from both sides.

There were no outside guarantees to the terms, as the agreement was only between the Lao factions; the ICC (which had overseen the 1954 Geneva Accords ending the First Indochina War) was more powerless than before to monitor compliance.

The coalition government envisaged by the treaty did not long outlast it; as with the treaty itself, events in Laos emulated those in Vietnam. Shortly after the fall of the South Vietnamese government on 30 April 1975, the Pathet Lao took over Laos on 15 August 1975.

External links


Stub icon

This article related to the history of Laos or its predecessor states is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Stub icon

This article related to a treaty is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories:
Vientiane Treaty Add topic