President Kaysone Phomvihane of Laos, the country's ruler since the Communist takeover in 1975, died Saturday, Laotian state radio said. He was 71.
The broadcast, monitored in Bangkok, said Kaysone died of an illness. It did not specify the problem, mention who would succeed him or other significant details.Kaysone, who would have turned 72 on Dec. 13, helped direct three decades of revolution against France and the U.S.-backed regime in Vientiane.
He had been chief of the Laotian Communist Party since 1955 and was premier from 1975 to August 1991, when the National Assembly elected him president and endowed the post with greater power.
Since 1986, Kaysone had relaxed controls over the economy and permitted some private enterprise in this landlocked Southeast Asian country of 4 million, one of the poorest and most isolated nations in the world. But political dissent is still not tolerated.
On his 70th birthday, Kaysone said he became a revolutionary at age 16 "by developing a spirit of patriotism through a sense of love for our nation, independence and determination to look for the truth."
He was born on Dec. 13, 1920, in the southern panhandle province of Savanakhet, his official biography says. His mother was a Lao peasant, his Vietnamese father a civil servant for the French, who then ruled Laos.
He studied law at Vietnam's Hanoi University and became involved with student activities under the wing of the fledgling Indochinese Communist Party.
"In those days, I never, never gave a thought to communism or socialism," his biography quotes him as saying. "But I believed that the Soviet Union would defeat the Hitlerite fascists."
He reportedly developed strong personal ties with North Vietnam's revolutionary father, Ho Chi Minh, and its military leader, Vo Nguyen Giap. Kaysone received his first military and political training from the Viet Minh.