Vietnam War continues to haunt the Hmong in Laos
WASHINGTON - Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, a little known ethnic group in Laos which stood behind American troops until the bitter end is still languishing in the jungles of the Southeast Asian state.
The plight of the Hmong, a fiercely independent tribal people who recovered downed US pilots and protected radar sites that guided US bombing raids in North Vietnam, was highlighted Tuesday in a Washington event to commemorate the end of the Vietnam War in Laos in May 1975. The North Vietnamese overran Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and ousted the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on April 30 that year but took control of neighbouring Laos only about week later.
When American troops fled, the thousands of Laotians, mostly Hmong, whom the United States recruited, armed and trained in a secret operation to interdict the North Vietnamese, were left on their own. The communists went on a rampage, punishing or eliminating those who allied with the United States and the Hmong bore the brunt of the reprisal.
"Today, 30 years after the war, the LPDR (Lao People's Democratic Republic) is still chasing, killing the innocent people in the remote areas and across the country," said Wangyee Vang, once a demolition expert for the covert CIA - backed Hmong army fighting the North Vietnamese. "More than 200,000 Laotians disappeared or were arrested, jailed and killed by the LPDR and North Vietnamese army from 1975 to date," Vang said as he led dissident groups in a protest rally in front of the Laotian embassy in the US capital.
Vang is among half a million Laotians who fled abroad or won asylum after the war, mostly in the United States, which only last year normalized trading relations with impoverished Laos. He called for a stop to what he termed "ethnic cleansing" of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities in Laos, whose government has vehemently denied the charges and called them slander and part of efforts to split the country.
"Human rights violations and religious persecutions are still going on against our people, who once helped the United States," said Vang, the president of the Lao Veterans of America. The Hmong received US Congressional recognition for their part in the Vietnam War in 1997 and have a site in Washington's Arlington Memorial Cemetery dedicated to their participation in combat.
Xoua Kue, an official of the Hmong Women's Association of Rhode Island, said she had submitted to Amnesty International a report on alleged human rights abuses involving the Hmong but the Lao government had refused to allow the group into the country to carry out an independent probe. She cited a case involving several Hmong girls allegedly raped and then killed by Lao government soldiers.
"We know you have been trying to hide what you do in Laos by limiting journalists and where they are allowed to go," Kue shouted across a narrow street to the embassy, where staff were seen filming the demonstration from windows. Houmphanth Rattanakhom of the Free Laos Campaign urged the United States and the United Nations to use "your powers" to press the Lao government to allow human rights monitors and humanitarian aid groups into the country.
"We have heard that the strategy of the Lao military is to surround the Hmong in the jungles and starve them to death," said Philip Smith, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Policy Analysis. "The military has become more emboldened and want to just finish off the Hmong problem, now that the country has already received normal trade relations with the United States," he said.
Agence France Presse - May 11, 2005
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