I don't know if the 2 last ones (about Laos) are exact, but for sure the first one is false.

It's a shame to corupt history for nationalist reasons. This is the best way to conduct people into hate, wars, blood.... people who do that should go to hell

This is what i know from Lao History:

Arround 1900 (little bit before), Laos was independant country, bigger than now (a part of current thailand was lao), but seriously weakened by internals problems (separated into 3 kingdoms...). It was under strong influence of Thai (from the south),who were trying to conquer all Laos, and suffered from Chinese thiefs attacks from the north.

Then came a third country "interested" in Laos. France (my country), who had conquered previously Cambodia and Vietnam. The french seams to behave at this time much better than the 2 others, they helped the king of Luangprabang to preserve his country from chinese thiefs and thai (who didn't behave really better than the chinese with laos people: taking the girls and wifes, force lao people to feed them and work for them, killing...). So the king of Luang prabang asked for official french protection (this is how Laos became french), and the french could kick the chinese and thai away from Laos. In fact not exactly: a huge part of the original Laos was lost in this affair (most of the part of the country that was on the other side of Mekong river).
French could preserve the lao territory as ou know it now, but not all. That's better than nothing. if french wouldn't have bean there, all Laos would certainly belong to Thailand nowadays.
The king in Laos could keep his position and tittle, but the real administrators of the country were the french.

The end of the story is much less favourable for french.... as they seams to didn't care a lot about Laos when Laos was french. The country was a lot autonomous, french preserved and respected a lot lao culture, but they developed the country very few, never proposed high administration position to lao people (reserved for french or some "imported" vietnamese...), so when after WWII France was so weak, Laos (under japanese influence, i think) was fed up with french (they had good reasons) and asked to retreived independance, what France accepted without too many problems.

Things were much more difficult in Vietnam between France and local people, and after with Americans. This is sad story and Laos, as a close neighbour, was seriously involved in this last part of the story, for sure the most dramatic. There were also at this time some fights between royalists and communists in Laos. Communists wins, but they rapidely understood the limits of the "pure communist economy" and quickly found a good balance between "communist economy" and "capitalist economy" (but with pure communist political system)... but the country remained closed and isolated until end of 20th century. Laos begin to develop when autorities decided to open the doors in the mid 90es.

Is this good sum up?

-- Edited by paris_vientiane at 13:15, 2008-08-18