Hmong and history muddle US-Lao
ties By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - More than 30 years ago, the
United States' saturation bombing of Laos killed
thousands of people and reduced the tiny Southeast
Asian country to pockmarked ruin. Now 4,500 men,
women and children hope their support for the
United States' former "secret war" will result in
free air tickets and eventual resettlement to the
US.
The group claims they, or their
relatives, supported a Central Intelligence
Agency-backed (CIA) Lao general, Vang Pao, during
America's war in Laos from 1961 to 1975. The
ethnic minority
Hmong
purport they fled to Thailand from Laos to escape
persecution, imprisonment and possible execution
by Lao authorities due to their former links with
Vang Pao and the CIA.
They had reason to
be optimistic: last year Washington agreed to
resettle in America about 15,000 Hmong, some of
whom had languished in refugee conditions in
Thailand for more than three decades. At the time,
however, Washington said that group would be the
last of the Hmong to be resettled in the US. An
apparent shift in US policy against resettling
Muslim refugees in the US after September 11, 2001
opened the door for the animist Hmong, according
to Bangkok-based United Nations officials.
More recently, the US has launched a charm
offensive toward the communist Lao government in a
bid to counteract China's growing influence in the
region. On Thursday, US Admiral William Fallon met
with Lao Defense Minister Major General Duangchay
Phichit to offer US military assistance in
providing military engineers to help build
schools, clinics and roads.
According to
news reports, Fallon told the minister it was "not
good" that US and Lao military forces have had
little interaction during the past 30 years.
Duangchay declined the offer, saying Laos would
welcome US funds, but not US troops on Lao soil.
The Hmong remain the biggest complication
in improving bilateral ties. Laos, Thailand and
the US are now investigating the new group's
claims of political persecution, but so far have
not reached agreement over who should be held
responsible for the crisis. Thailand's Internal
Security Operations Command (ISOC) last week
prepared to send the mostly Hmong group back to
Laos, after caretaker Thai Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra ordered the ISOC to quickly resolve the
problem. Thailand has long provided sanctuary to
Hmong refugees as a favor to its US military ally.
The communist government in Laos, however,
said it suspects some in the group did not
originate in Laos, or might even be faking their
CIA-linked role to win passage to America. The
fresh batch of 4,500 began arriving last year in
Thailand's Phetchabun province, about 300
kilometers north of Bangkok, after it was
announced the US would be resettling the 15,000
that had long languished in Thailand.
"They came to Phetchabun only in the hope
of resettlement to the US," Laos ambassador to
Thailand, Hiem Phommachanh, said on July 13 at an
economic forum in Bangkok. "We have had the Hmong
problem for a long time ... and now in Phetchabun,
and it is because of Vang Pao."
Vang Pao
currently lives in the US, where 30 years later he
remains a highly popular figure among the Laotian
exile community. A color poster of the former
US-backed resistance leader is sold via the
website of the Hmong Cultural Center in Minnesota,
where more than 70,000 of the estimated 185,000
ethnic Hmong who were resettled in the US now
reside.
He is now widely viewed as the
major sticking point obstructing an improvement in
US-Laos bilateral relations, including trade and
security ties. So, too, is the ongoing
low-intensity conflict between the Laotian
government and a dwindling number of Hmong
insurgents who operate in the country's
mountainous countryside. The small but vocal
California-based Lao Veterans of America has long
lobbied against a normalization in bilateral ties
until the Lao government allows for rebels to
leave the country under UN auspices and receive
humanitarian aid.
It's not apparent that's
what the US, Thailand or Laos will pursue with the
latest batch of Hmong who have fled to Thailand.
About 140 Thai soldiers, police and local
officials are now guarding Ban Huay Nam Khao
village, in Phetchabun's Khao Kho district, to
block the group of 4,500 Hmong from traveling
deeper into Thailand.
Many of the 4,500
suffer a miserable existence without adequate
health care, food, housing and other necessities
while camped amid scrub lands. Officials earlier
said the group numbered 6,500, but some were sent
back to Laos while others blended in among
Thailand's Hmong minority, according to Thai
officials.
The CIA's
man Suspicions still run deep. The Lao
government 30 years later still complains about
Vang Pao's alleged involvement with Hmong rebels.
Those complaints sharpened recently after an
American, Ed Szendrey, said Vang Pao helped
finance his trip to Laos in June 2005, when he was
detained by the Lao authorities and later expelled
for bringing illegal satellite telephones into the
country for Hmong guerrillas to set up a
"communications network", Szendrey said then in an
interview.
Based in Chico, California,
Szendrey said he had met with US State
Department's "Laos desk" officials in Washington
with Vang Pao before he made his clandestine
journey into Laos. It is unclear what his actual
connections with the US government may be. One of
Vang Pao's relatives disappeared while carrying a
large sum of money and light arms after crossing
Thailand's northern border into Laos in 2000. Soon
after the Laotian authorities barred US passport
holders from crossing into Laos from Thailand
without approval from its Bangkok embassy.
Vang Pao, a gung-ho military collaborator
for French colonialists, was selected by the CIA
in 1961 to lead thousands of Hmong mercenaries to
fight against Vietnamese and Lao communists who
were competing for power in the country. The CIA's
Hmong, which included child soldiers, were
allegedly paid pennies a day.
Vang Pao was
named as "a despotic warlord" in Alfred McCoy's
authoritative book, The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia, for smuggling opium on the
CIA's Air America flights and operating a heroin
factory in Long Tieng, Laos in the 1960s and 1970s
- while commanding the CIA's Hmong during a
widened US-Vietnam war.
Former US officials
confirm the former general's controversial
history.
"Vang Pao [would] ship his dope
out, which was made into heroin, which was going
to our [American] troops," CIA officer Victor
Marchetti told PBS's Frontline TV news show in
1988.
"Vang Pao had a heavy hand in the
production of heroin in that area," former chief
counsel for the US House Select Committee on
Narcotics, Joe Nellis, told the same show.
Nowadays, with the US entrenched in new
conflicts where it plays on ethnic divisions to
pursue its agenda, the CIA's use and subsequent
abandonment of the Hmong in Laos has once again
become a sensitive subject within the intelligence
agency.
The CIA's online "World Factbook",
which was most recently updated on July 11, says,
"In 1975, the Communist Pathet Lao took control of
the government, ending a six-century-old monarchy
and instituting a strict socialist regime closely
aligned to Vietnam."
The passage notably
fails to mention the CIA's former role in the
country - or even America's 15-year-long war
against the communists in Laos. When Lao
communists kicked out the CIA and achieved victory
in 1975, an estimated 300,000 Lao, many of them
Hmong, fled to Thailand to escape punishment,
which included brutal reeducation camps where many
victims perished.
Most of those who fled
Laos eventually gained entry to the United States,
Australia, Canada, France and elsewhere. There is
a strong argument to be made that 4,500 more Hmong
should be resettled. And it is still unknown
exactly how many Hmong are still fighting against
the Lao government in remote areas with the belief
that they still have the United States' backing.
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 Columbia University's
Graduate School of Journalism's Foreign
Correspondents Award.
