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A slap for helping the
Hmong
By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - American Ed Szendrey claims a
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed
Laotian general helped finance his trip into
communist Laos, which ended in expulsion last week
because Szendrey bought illegal satellite
telephones for Hmong rebels, set up a
"communications network", and aided their
movement.
Szendrey, a former US Navy
veteran who served in the Gulf of Tonkin at the
start of the Vietnam War, said he negotiated the
"surrender" of 173 minority ethnic Hmong on June
4, and hoped to arrange future deals for thousands
of other Hmong who are led by armed fighters. "We
have never supported a military solution,"
Szendrey, 62, said in an interview.
Laotian officials expelled Szendrey and
his wife, Georgie, on June 6 after interrogating
the activist couple who live in Chico, California.
Before arriving in Laos on June 3, Szendrey met US
State Department "Laos desk" officials in
Washington along with Vang Pao, a notorious,
former CIA-backed Laotian general.
Szendrey said he went with Vang Pao to the
State Department to explain the Hmong's plight and
to ask for help in getting their story to the
United Nations.
Vang Pao was named "a
despotic warlord" in Alfred McCoy's respected book
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
for allegedly smuggling opium on the CIA's Air
America and operating a heroin factory in Long
Tieng, Laos, during the late 1960s and early 1970s
- while commanding the CIA's so-called Secret Army
against Laotian and Vietnamese communists in Laos
during the Vietnam War.
Much of Vang Pao's
heroin was probably "for [American] GI addicts in
Vietnam," McCoy wrote.
After years of
massive aerial bombardment of tiny, landlocked
Laos, the US lost the war in Vietnam in 1975 , and
communist Pathet Lao forces seized power. Many of
Vang Pao's CIA-trained Hmong mercenaries, however,
fled into the hills, where they dwindled due to
injuries, malnutrition, disease and neglect.
Laos currently suffers occasional deadly
bombings of its markets, buses, bridges,
government outposts and other soft targets, which
it blames on right-wing "bad elements" and "exiled
Lao reactionaries" in the US, France, Australia,
Thailand and elsewhere.
Concerned about
the alleged "persecution" of Hmong who refuse to
surrender, Szendrey created a fact-finding
commission that includes a website, and he has
visited Laos several times. He also boosts that
Vang Pao, who is based in California, is the
Hmong's best leader.
"As the one who was
involved with the US government, was involved with
the development of the CIA army, was the person
who was the go-between, he [Vang Pao] is looked up
to by the majority of the Hmong community,"
Szendrey said. "He is the individual that should
be the one that can represent them, and
communicate for them, to the world."
Vang
Pao helped finance Szendrey's ill-fated trip this
month.
"I know that he has helped raise
money; for instance, when we take a trip like
this, the funding becomes available, and we
understand it comes from a variety of Hmong,"
Szendrey said. "It's good. My only hesitancy is
that when I say that, we have [people reacting]:
'Oh, this is a Vang Pao thing.' No, we do not work
for General Vang Pao."
"We do have people
who are followers of his, and organizations who
are followers of his, who have financially
supported us," Szendrey added.
Laotian
security officials expelled the Szendreys after
they deceptively entered the country on tourist
visas. "We were not there on vacation," Szendrey
said. "They charged us with having interfered with
their rural village relocation program. That was
the offence they deported us on."
Szendrey
said he met 173 unarmed Hmong women, children and
elderly men on June 4 on a country road, to ensure
their "surrender" would be peaceful. No Hmong
fighters surrendered at the site in the Xaysomboun
Special Zone, which is off-limits to foreigners.
Future "surrenders" could include up to
17,000 Hmong who are hiding in about 20 scattered
clusters, each led by two or three armed leaders,
Szendrey said. But those 50 or 60 leaders will
probably never surrender, he added. "They probably
have already been tried and convicted," in
absentia, by the Laotian government for treason,
armed rebellion and related crimes, and would
likely face imprisonment or execution.
Laotian officials detained the Szendreys
on June 4 and interrogated them after the Hmong
gathering. The security forces were especially
angry about Szendry's earlier role in providing
illegal satellite phones to Hmong fugitives.
"Over the last four years, we have
established a communications network in which they
do have [satellite] telephones up in the jungle,"
Szendrey said. "We helped with the purchase" of
the satellite phones. "We don't know physically
how those actually got to them," he said. "I think
the total we got in was four or five" satellite
phones.
"On Saturday night, when they
[Laotian interrogators] started zeroing in, that's
the questions they wanted to know. How these
people got the phones. They wanted to know how our
communications, how our satellite phones, got to
them, and how we had our communications system
going."
The interrogation ended in havoc.
"I kind of almost made a mistake that was turned
[around]. I said, 'Yeah, we encouraged getting the
phones in there'... and they were turning that
into a serious confession," Szendrey said. "I
said, 'We did not smuggle the phones in, we have
no personal knowledge of actually how they got
from the borders to these people'."
Szendrey did not tell his interrogators
that he paid for the satellite phones. "No, no, we
'encouraged' getting the phones in there," he told
Laotian officials. "It finally ended when I
demanded to see the [American] Embassy, and
refused to sign the paper."
The unsigned
confession, written by Laotian authorities, listed
Szendrey's support for the Hmong, and described
"our contacts with them, that they had satellite
phones and how they were used, what were the goals
of our organization, things like this".
The Szendreys entered Laos on June 3, went
north to meet the Hmong the next day and were
seized by security forces several hours later. The
Szendreys were expelled to Thailand on June 6 and
flew home from Bangkok on Friday.
Richard S Ehrlich is a
Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco,
California. He has reported news from Asia since
1978 and is co-author of Hello My Big Big
Honey!, a non-fiction book of investigative
journalism. He received a master's degree from
Columbia University's Graduate School of
Journalism.
(Copyright 2005 Richard S
Ehrlich.) |
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