Allegedly fleeing persecution at home, at least 4,500 Hmong refugees claiming to be from Laos have been living in overcrowded make-shift shelters in Ban Huay Nam Khao village, in Thailand’s Phetchabun province, about 296 kilometers (185 miles) north of Bangkok.
Officials earlier said the group numbered 6,500, but some were sent back to Laos while others blended in among Thailand’s Hmong minority. About 140 Thai soldiers, police and locals were seen guarding the area to block the Hmongs from traveling deeper into Thailand and often hampering deliveries of food and medicines.
The Hmong refugees were reportedly receiving food aid from a Christian group and Doctors Without Borders at an average rate of two kilograms of rice per person per week. But their food aid shipments were delayed for three weeks before they resumed this month, the Voice of America (VOA) network said.
"SECRET WAR"
The 4,500 people claim they, or their relatives, supported CIA-backed General Vang Pao, during America’s so-called "secret war" in Laos from 1961 to 1975.
The Hmongs say they fled into Thailand from Laos to escape persecution as well as imprisonment and even execution due to their former links with Vang Pao and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In addition many Hmong people are known to be Christians and have been
forced by Communists to recant their faith, said Freedom House and other human rights groups.
The Hmong minority also supported the US during the Vietnam war and its spill-over into Laos and Cambodia, so the latest batch of refugees who arrived last year in Thailand seeking resettlement, were optimistic they could eventually receive free air tickets to America.
But Washington has said it cannot accept this new group of refugees because the US already accepted 15,000 Hmongs in 2005, who languished in Thailand for up to three decades, claiming the same CIA-tainted history.
UNSUNG HEROES
They won support in the United States as unsung heroes of what critics claim was America’s poorly executed war, and flew to the US last year. In addition the Communist leaders in Laos, the pro-American government in Thailand, and US officials cannot agree who is responsible for the plight of the 4,500 refugees staying in Thailand.
Laos claims at least some in the group did not originate in Laos, or might be faking their CIA-linked role to get to America.
Whatever the truth, human rights group Amnesty International (AI) shares refugees concerns that a planned forced expulsion by Thailand could mean that Lao authorities persecute or even kill some of them.
AI said 26 Hmongs, mostly women and children, were "massacred" by Lao government troops April 6 this year. Four people were injured in the incident, about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) northeast of the tourist town of Vang Vieng in Vientiane province, AI explained recently.
MORE CONCERNS
The massacre added to concern among human rights watchers over the situation of Hmong refugees already expelled by Thailand. AI said 27, apparently Christian, Hmong refugees arrested November 28 last year on their way back from visiting a church outside the Ban Huay Nam Khao camp, were already detained by Lao security forces after being expelled.
Since December 5 the 27 Hmongs, including 22 children, “have been held incommunicado, reportedly in deplorable conditions, and have reportedly been ill-treated. Some of them may have been tortured," AI claimed.
"They are now known to be held in two separate facilities: 20 girls aged between 12 and 16, and two women, are detained at a prison attached to an army base outside Paksen, 125 miles (200 kilometers) east of the capital, Vientiane,"the group added.
Two boys and three men held in Vientiane, were allegedly moved to a detention facility in Phongsaly, in the north of the country. Lao authorities have not confirmed the whereabouts of the group. Officials also denied claims by refugees about rights abuses.
RESETTLEMENT HOPE
"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," the ambassador said.
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I reject the accusation," the formerly CIA-backed general Vang Pao replied, according to Thailand’s Nation newspaper. "They [the Hmong] continue seeking refuge because the Laos government never loves the people. The government arrests and executes people consistently," Vang Pao stressed.
Vang Pao lives in the United States, where he is a controversial figure. A color poster of Vang Pao, in full regalia, is sold via the Web site of the Hmong Cultural Center, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where many Hmongs reside.
Others perceive him as a corrupt, divisive, former opium warlord who makes it difficult for America and Laos to improve relations. Laos heightened its suspicion about Vang Pao’s current involvement with the Hmong community after an American, Ed Szendrey, said Vang Pao helped finance his illegal trip into Laos in June 2005.
LAOS EXPELLS
Szendrey was expelled from Laos because he bought illegal satellite telephones for anti-communist Hmong guerrillas, set up a "communications network," and aided their armed movement, Szendrey said in an interview at the time.
Based in Chico, California, Szendrey said he met US State Department "Laos Desk" officials in Washington with Vang Pao, before traveling to Laos.
Vang Pao was named as "a despotic warlord" in Alfred McCoy’s respected 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 troops during the widened US-led Vietnam war.
"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.
HEAVY HAND
"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.
The gung-ho military collaborator for French colonialists was selected by the CIA in 1961 to lead thousands of Hmong mercenaries, fighting Vietnamese and Lao communists. Thousands of them died.
The CIA’s Hmong fighters, including child soldiers, were paid pennies a day, according to at
least one US official. "Everyone of them (Hmong) that died, that was an American back home that didn’t die," Edgar Buell, a notorious US Agency for International Development (AID) official working with the Hmong mercenaries, said in 1979.
The CIA’s alleged use of Laos as a massive killing zone remains a sensitive subject within the intelligence agency. For example, the CIA’s online "World Factbook," 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."
CIA CENSORSHIP?
There is no mention of the CIA — 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 reportedly included brutal re-education camps where many victims perished.
Open Doors, a Christian human rights groups, said recently the Communist-victory also impacted the main Protestant denomination in Laos, known as the Lao Evangelical Church – for all of Laos, with tens of thousands of members.
"The change in government in 1975 dramatically impacted the Church. With the Church leadership in the north being largely comprised of Hmongs, and the Hmongs earning a reputation as being the US Central Intelligence Agency’s "Secret Army" in Laos, the Hmong church leadership fled the country as refugees, taking many Hmong believers with them," the group added.
"Hmong society is very hierarchically organized and the formal church government structure… with churches having trained pastors to lead them, fit well with traditional Hmong social structure. As a result, many churches in northern Laos were left floundering without leaders."
IN JUNGLE
An unknown number of Hmong and other minorities have remained in the jungle to this day, hiding from the Lao military, according to AI. Some groups have continued armed resistance to the Lao government, but many are apparently not involved in fighting.
Instead, villagers are building churches in especially rural areas of Laos where Christianity has been spreading, a BosNewsLife team established in the Communist Asian nation. The growth of churches comes despite reports that dozens of ethnic minority Christians are jailed for their involvement in church activities of evangelization. BosNewsLife’s Stefan J. Bos contributed to the story.
(Raad more Ehrlich coverage: http://www.geocities.com/asia_correspondent/news.html Award-winning reporter, photojournalist and author Richard S. Ehrlich has covered Asia for 28 years for a variety of media, including as staff correspondent for United Press International from 1978 to 1984, based in Hong Kong and New Delhi. He also co-authored the non-fiction best seller "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" — Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews. The book, reviewed by Time magazine and other leading publications, looks beyond the red light of Thailand’s nightlife, and gives a rare insight in the often tragic and difficult relationships between prostitutes and their clients. Ehrlich, who was born in the US and is currently based in Bangkok, received he Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Foreign Correspondent’s Award in 1978. He speaks some Mandarin, Hindustani, Urdu, Thai, Spanish and French. Ehrlich can be reached for assignment and information via: http://www.geocities.com/asia_correspondent/news.html ).
