SPEAKING FREELY Even Dirty Harry can't fix Hmong mess
By Roger Warner
Speaking ' is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
Director-actor Clint Eastwood's latest film, Gran Torino, is the gritty
story of an old racist (played by Eastwood) and what he does when Asians from
an obscure immigrant group, the Hmong, move in next door.
An inner-city gang tries to get the neighbor's teenage son to steal Eastwood's
prize car, a Ford Gran Torino. The old coot bonds with
his Hmong neighbors, but the gang keeps making trouble, and Clint takes justice
into his own hands with a rifle, a pistol and bare-knuckled moral outrage. It's
a good Hollywood movie about vengeance and justice, an updated Dirty Harry.
But in the real world, there are 200,000 Hmong in this country, and although
they face a serious and deep crisis they don't need an old white vigilante to
save them. They need help from their government, and they aren't getting it.
The Hmong are a tribe from the mountains of Laos, in Southeast Asia. They
fought for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a little-known sideshow to
the Vietnam War. For a people that didn't even use the wheel in their old
country, the Hmong have done phenomenally well as immigrants to America.
A solid Hmong-American middle class - soldiers, lawyers, accountants, chicken
farmers, store owners and college students - far outnumbers the urban hoodlums.
What haunts Hmong-Americans as an ethnic group is that the war they left behind
in Laos has never entirely ended. And what frustrates them is that the US
government, while occasionally pretending to care, has made the problem worse
instead of solving it.
A third of a century after US armed forces pulled out of Southeast Asia,
Laotian soldiers of the old-line communist regime still hunt and kill men,
women and children belonging to the last few Hmong resistance bands. The
leaders of the resistance bands were all trained by the CIA when they were
young. Most of them are grandfathers now. They have satellite phones, gifts
from their American relatives. From remote jungle mountainsides, they call
family members in Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or California, and forlornly ask
when the US military is going to come back and save them from their enemies.
This poignant leftover conflict in Laos has also spawned subsidiary conflicts
in two other countries. Thousands of Hmong have fled from Laos to next-door
Thailand, but the Thai government is forcibly repatriating them. And in the US
itself, the Justice Department has brought terrorism charges against a group of
Hmong-Americans for allegedly planning to overthrow the Laotian regime. What's
going on? Why are Hmong - generally likable and industrious people - getting in
so much trouble?
While the Hmong are famous for their stubbornness, and a few of them are real
troublemakers, most of the harm done to them has come from national
governments. The Lao People's Democratic Republic, one of the last communist
regimes in the world, tops the list, followed by the government of Thailand.
But the US government also plays a huge unacknowledged role in perpetuating
this tribal crisis.
When I visited the US Embassy in Laos in August 2008, for example, the staffers
there told me they were deeply concerned about human-rights violations against
the Hmong. But it turned out they weren't keeping track of Hmong resistance
factions systematically, nor had they mapped out any strategies for ending this
decades-long conflict through negotiations with the Lao regime.
In fact, the embassy people eventually admitted that their proudest achievement
was an exchange of military attaches with the Lao regime. This new program will
allow the US government to aid the Lao army - the same force that is hunting
the CIA-trained resistance leaders. That's right: the US government has not
only abandoned its old tribal allies but is helping those who are trying to
kill them. It's hard to see how a reputation for this kind of betrayal can help
us recruit new tribal allies in our current wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The same kind of State Department doublespeak can be heard in Thailand, the
country that is sending Hmong refugees back to Laos in violation of
international law. When I visited the US Embassy in Bangkok, a diplomat working
in an elegant, high-ceilinged office told me that human rights for the Hmong
was terribly important to him, both personally and professionally.
In fact, he said, he'd heard from a lot of US congressmen about it. But he also
admitted that he'd spent several days with the Thai general directly in charge
of the repatriations without raising the subject of the Hmong even once. And
why not? "Because he's not at the same level," the embassy official said. In
other words, rank and protocol were more important to this diplomat than
rolling up his sleeves and protecting the Hmong refugees he'd promised
congressmen he would help.
To see the practical effects of this State Department neglect I visited Hmong
refugees in a detention center in Nong Khai, Thailand. The 150 refugees there
are the remnants from two resistance bands that stayed loyal to their old US
mentors and stayed on the run for more than 30 years before fleeing Laos for
Thailand. They showed me their bullet scars. Their stories checked out. Now
these refugees sleep like sardines on a floor of a windowless cell and are let
outdoors two hours a day.
They are going half-crazy from the confinement and from fear of being tortured
when they are returned to Laos. Perhaps if the US Embassy officials lived on
"the same level" as the Hmong in this detention center they'd try a little
harder to improve conditions.
The State Department's unwillingness to help the Hmong of Laos has set off a
curious and self-perpetuating cycle. Historically, the cycle began when Hmong
started arriving as refugees in the US some 30 years ago. Because the US
government wasn't doing anything to stop the violence against Hmong in Laos,
Hmong-Americans matter-of-factly undertook their own ethnic self-defense.
Beginning in the 1980s, they raised money in their own communities and sent it
to the resistance in Laos along with a few Hmong-Americans to help with the
fighting. All of this violated US laws, but the Justice Department didn't crack
down because the Hmong were old allies, and because American interests weren't
being hurt, or so it seemed.
As time went by without US law enforcement pressure, or any meaningful contact
from the federal government, however, the Hmong-American support network grew
bolder and less scrupulous. Fundraisers developed sticky fingers and lived off
the money they collected. Hmong-Americans factions competed for the loyalties
of resistance factions, promising US military help that would never arrive.
A succession of white Americans - Lawrence of Arabia wannabes, and military
veterans suffering from "lost honor" syndrome - joined the Hmong cause, made
promises, then drifted away. And Hmong-Americans started paying fees to
smugglers so their relatives could enter Thai refugee camps, in hopes of free
rides to America. Nobody was telling the Hmong-Americans they couldn't. They
were like investment bankers and mortgage brokers - under-regulated and
opportunistic.
By the beginning of this decade, it was hard to tell how much of the Hmong
resistance in Laos and the Hmong refugee influx to Thailand was indigenous and
legitimate, and how much was being bought and paid for by Hmong exiles in
America. Hmong-Americans funding had enlarged the Hmong phenomenon in Southeast
Asia, and this made the State Department's task of dealing with the Hmong
overseas even more difficult. The cycle of futility was complete. Nobody was in
charge, and nobody was getting what they wanted, not even the Hmong-Americans,
because after all, their relatives were still being hunted down and shot in the
mountains of Laos.
By 2007, after repeated offensives by the Laotian army, the Hmong resistance in
the mountains of Laos was down to its last thousand or so members, most of them
women and children. It had no offensive capability and controlled only a few
villages in the boondocks. Resistance leaders spoke openly of wanting to
surrender, if only their safety could be guaranteed. But in June 2007, when the
Justice Department finally acted, it didn't have their interests in mind.
In Sacramento, California, a federal anti-terror task force that needed to
justify its existence and couldn't find any al-Qaeda sleeper cells to bust
helped create an improbable US$26 million plot to overthrow the entire country
of Laos. The undercover agent in the case tried to lure nine Hmong-Americans
and a US military veteran named Harrison Jack into signing up with the plot.
(The case is known as US vs Harrison Jack et al.) Although the
defendants never committed to the plot, the prosecution is seeking multiple
life sentences for those who nibbled at the bait.
This poorly timed and sloppy attempt at government entrapment has so outraged
retired CIA operatives who worked with the Hmong in Laos long ago that these
spooks have promised to testify for the defense if the case goes to trial.
That's right - the CIA versus the Justice Department in a terrorism trial.
Convictions seem unlikely, but the case has already had an international
effect.
The US Justice Department's branding the Hmong with the "terrorist" label has
hardened the resolve of the governments of Laos and Thailand to get rid of
their Hmong problem once and for all. It has given these governments yet
another excuse to treat tribesmen there as sub-humans, to be hunted down or
repatriated at whim. And so the Hmong crisis goes around and around, with
nobody in charge.
Back to the new Eastwood film, Gran Torino. Movies are satisfying
because they distill broad social trends into small, tight human dramas. A
family is threatened. A neighbor responds. We are wired to appreciate those
neat, concise stories. The real-life Hmong crisis is much bigger and messier.
It cannot be solved Hollywood-style by an old white guy with a gun, even a cool
old white guy like Clint Eastwood. But in real life, there is a son of a
tribesman - a Kenyan tribesman - who could bring justice to the Hmong, or at
least give it an honest try.
The Barack Obama administration has a lot on its plate, but it could certainly
diminish and probably end the Hmong crisis if it chose. Basically, it could
offer the Laotian government a deal: the US government would guarantee an end
to Hmong-American meddling in exchange for Laos' guarantee that the last Hmong
resistance forces could surrender peacefully - without punishment, under the
watchful eyes of international monitors. And the most deserving Hmong refugees
in Thailand could be resettled in Western countries that have already expressed
interest in taking them in.
Would this work? Well, it sure wouldn't hurt to try. Conditions for an overall
settlement are better now than they have been in the past 30 years. So let's
hope Obama can hit the re-set button. Start fresh, with new thinking. If he and
his national security council could knock sense into the State Department and
Department of Justice, and get these bureaucracies to work together on a
sensible peace-mongering policy, this leftover insurgency, which is in nobody's
interests, could be brought to a peaceful end.
Roger Warner is a frequent traveler to Southeast Asia, and is the author
of Shooting At The Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in
Laos, which won the Overseas Press Club's book of the year award. He is
currently writing a new book, Otherworld: How a CIA Operative and a
Tribe of Shamans Changed Each Others' Destinies, and is also at work on a
companion documentary film. His short video piece about the Hmong terrorism
court case may be seen
here.
Speaking ' is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
