Lao revolutionary leader and president
On 2 December 1975 the National Congress of People's Representatives elected Nouhak Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the new Lao People's Democratic Republic government. Sources credit Kaysone Phomvihane, not Nouhak, as the presiding official who proclaimed the republic.
A founding figure of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and a leading Pathet Lao revolutionary. Born in Mukdahan, Siam (now Thailand) to an ethnic Lao family, he was ranked second after Kaysone in the party's Politburo at its 1955 founding congress and joined the Politburo at the 2nd Congress in 1972 with responsibility for economic affairs. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance after 1975, and was President from 1992 to 1998.
Also known as: Nouhak Phoumsavanh
Activities and affiliations
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1955–1996
Lao People's Revolutionary PartyMain
Political and party leadership
Career Timeline
- 1945Founding member of the Lao revolutionary movement
- 1949Chairman of the Lao Resistance Committee for the Eastern Region
- 1950Minister of Finance in the Lao Resistance Government
- 1954Represented the Pathet Lao at the Geneva Conference
- 1955Ranked second after Kaysone in the party Politburo at the founding congress
- 1972Joined the Politburo at the 2nd Congress, assigned economic affairs
- 1975Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance
- 1989President of the second Supreme People's Assembly
- 1992President
Related historical events
Early life and wartime resistance
Nouhak Phoumsavanh was born in 1914 in Mukdahan and moved to Savannakhet as a young man, where he worked as a truck driver. In 1941 he set up his own trucking business operating between Laos and Vietnam, and it was there that he was recruited by the Vietminh. After 1945 he made contact with Souphanouvong and represented the Lao Issara, the nationalist Free Lao movement, in Hanoi. When the First Indochina War broke out, he directed guerrilla activities in close coordination with the Vietminh along the mountainous Lao-Vietnamese border. He joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1950, and the congress of the Free Laos Front that year named him minister for the economy and finance in the Pathet Lao Resistance Government; he went on to represent the Pathet Lao at the 1954 Geneva Conference. These years established him within the leadership of the Lao revolutionary movement in a civil war that ran for roughly three decades.