Hmong people walk two paths
Hill warriors struggle to adapt to dislocation
By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES December 1, 1997
SOUKSALA, Laos - Dzo Vang stands in his muddy field in one of the Hmong villages that lie at the foot of the cloud-draped mountains of northern Laos. The rice stalks are thigh-high and bright green. Mr. Vang casually snatches a few weeds, ripping them out of the drying earth.
On this sunny afternoon, his mind is not on the rice but on his nephew Xeng Ly, now living in a comfortable American suburb just 30 miles from Washington.
Mr. Ly was one of 125,000 Hmong - nearly half the total Hmong population
at the time - who were brought to the United States after the Vietnam War.
Many Hmong spent years in refugee camps in bordering Thailand and then in
inner-city American slums before congregating in recent years in California
and Minnesota.
Like most Hmong families, Mr. Vang's was divided by the initial migration
in 1975. In addition to Mr. Ly, who works as a building engineer at Washington
Dulles International Airport, he has a cousin, Ser Lee, who is an insurance
agent in Minneapolis.
Mr. Vang, 51, is one of those who came back to Laos, to a one-room home in this village of repatriated refugees some 30 miles from the capital, Vientiane.
Standing next to his bed, he took a long look at a photograph a visitor had brought from the United States showing Mr. Ly and his wife, Si Ly, sitting on a couch in their Sterling, Va., home with wall-to-wall carpeting and glass-topped coffee table. "That's my nephew and niece. They came here once," he said finally, passing the photo to his son Fong, a stringy 15-year-old who stares unsmilingly at strangers.
Mr. Vang's house symbolizes the difference between life in Laos for the Hmong and life in America. Mr. Vang's home has dirt floors; Mr. Ly's has wall-to-wall broadloom. Mr. Vang needs candles for light; Mr. Ly has electricity. Mr. Ly has professionally framed prints on the walls; the only thing on Mr. Vang's wall is a chalk drawing of an airplane and a helicopter. Still, Mr. Vang's home is clean and surrounded by a lush garden of banana and other fruit trees.
"I didn't want to go to America like Xeng Ly - I had my cousins and uncles in Laos," Mr. Vang explains. Like many Hmong, he says he was afraid he would lose his culture in America after stories reached the refugee camps about poverty, crime, racism and language barriers in America.
In Sterling, Va., one evening this fall, Mr. Ly relaxed in his living room as his two children prepared their homework. "We were disappointed that Dzo Vang didn't want to come here," said Mr. Ly. "We sent him money to come to America, but he wanted to stay."
In their highland villages near the Vietnamese border, the Hmong raise black pigs, water buffalo, chickens, corn and rice but have little land to support a rapidly growing population of about 350,000.
Thia Cher, a mother of 10, describes the problems as she sits sewing on a low chair outside her rough wooden cottage in the village of Ban Boua Kkob.
"There is not enough rice to eat - the children cry because they want rice," she says without missing a stitch. "I want to clear a big field to grow rice, but the government won't let us."
Surrounded by her children and neighbors, some sitting on old ammunition boxes, Thia Cher says she also fears the thousands of U.S. and Vietnamese bombs that remain in the soil around her village.
"Every time the children go out to the fields, we are afraid they will die," she says.
In America, the 300,000 or so Hmong face different problems. Relegated
often to inner-city slums, more than 70 percent of them are on welfare,
even after 20 years in America, and many do not speak English or know how
to read, even in Hmong.
Dr. Touxa Lyfoung, 58, the first Hmong to become a medical doctor, treats
mainly Hmong patients at the King's Winery Clinic in Fresno, Calif. In the
waiting room one day in September, patients watched a music video of a young
couple in Hmong costume singing a love duet in a mountain valley.
"A lot of people are still consumed with the events of the war and its aftermath - over 25 percent of Hmong adults have depression or anxiety," Dr. Lyfoung says.
The Mekong River was the Berlin Wall of Asia after 1975, separating the booming, capitalist Thai economy from the moribund socialism of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Today, much has changed as the Laotian government tries to open its economy and clean up its image in search of foreign investments.
Hmong now fly legally to visit their families in the United States, and some of those who fled in terror by night have returned by plane with U.S. passports. The Hmong survived centuries wandering in central Asia, China, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. Fleeing persecution in China during the last century, they settled in remote Laotian mountains, burning forest patches to grow rice, corn and their traditional cash crop - opium.
Tough and disciplined hunters, they were brought up to obey the leaders of the 18 Hmong clans with such names as Vang, Lee and Her. In their hilltop communities, they spoke a distinct, singsong language and worshiped the spirits of their ancestors. In the lowlands, the dominant ethnic group - the Buddhist Lao or "Lao Loum" - looked with disdain on the Hmong and called them "Meo," or barbarians.
It was the Hmong's traditionally intense and alert attitude that isolated
them from their fellow Laotians but won them the friendship of the Central
Intelligence Agency, which found them the bravest and most efficient warriors
in Laos.
In the early 1960s, the Hmong and their military leader, Gen. Vang Pao,
had joined forces with the U.S.-backed Royal Lao government to resist what
was then a rising communist insurgency backed by Vietnam. Some 40,000 Hmong
eventually took up arms in the war and, by its end, fully half of those
had died fighting.
Gen. Pao still rails against the communists from his exile in California. In an interview in Fresno, he accused the Americans of abandoning his people after 1973, when North Vietnam broke an agreement under which both countries were to have withdrawn all their forces from Laos.
By 1975, the Laotian communists held full power.
"The king and 46,000 civilians were put in jail and re-education camps, where three-quarters of them died," the general said. "I don't know why Kissinger did not say anything," he added, referring to Henry Kissinger, who was U.S. national security adviser at the time.
Gen. Pao said his forces suffered a casualty rate in combat 30 times higher than that of the United States during the Vietnam War. "How did I accept 50 percent dead?" he asked. "We had obligations. The whole thing I did for the United States." The Hmong also endured one of the fiercest rain of bombs in history; U.S. planes dropped nearly 2 million tons on Laos, much of it over the fiercely contested Hmong regions, to try and halt North Vietnam's troops and cut supply lines to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Mr. Ly recalls: "The sky rained shells and bits of metal" after U.S. bombers mistakenly attacked his village. "Every house in the village was damaged."
Mr. Ly later joined Gen. Pao's army and was trained as a medic.
A total of 300,000 people fled Laos in the decade after the communists seized power, half of them Hmong. When most of those were resettled in the United States, it left a divided people struggling to rebuild their lives in ruined villages of Laos or the strange new world of urban America.
And each night in Sterling, Mr. Ly spends hours on the telephone talking to his relatives and friends across the country, keeping alive the Hmong heritage of family bonds, loyalty and sense of community.
Tomorrow: Life in Laos today
The only home they have - Hmong in Laos come to terms with bias, poverty
By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES December 2, 1997
PHONSAVAN, Laos - Hundreds of Hmong villages dot the highlands around
this city, built amid the ruins of the Vietnam War. Pieces of metal grating
that once covered an American airstrip now bridge the rain ditches in front
of shops and houses.
Neat rows of B-52 bomb craters follow the river through the rice fields
outside town. In some, fish spawn. In others, weeds grow.
At the village of Ban Boua Kkob east of Phonsavan, the Hmong grow onions in metal cluster-bomb casings still bearing stenciled U.S. markings.
On the Plain of Jars, named for the hundreds of mysterious 2,000-year-old stone jars that dot the ground, aging MiG fighters line a military airfield, a memento of vanished Soviet aid.
While half the Hmong sided with the Americans and fled as refugees to the United States after the communists defeated the CIA's secret Hmong army in 1975, about 300,000 Hmong remain in Laos.
In their highland villages, the Hmong still build thatched-roof houses as they have for centuries. But on the tables inside those houses today, one will occasionally see an airmail envelope that brought letters and money from relatives in California and Minnesota.
The Hmong here are mostly poor and need all the help they can get from their U.S. relatives. They depend heavily on growing rice and corn, but the land available for farming is restricted by both geography and the government.
"We want to clear a big field to grow rice. But in some places the government prohibits it," said Thia Cher, pointing to the wooded hillside with the pink cloth she was embroidering.
Surrounded by children and neighbors during a one-hour interview, Mrs. Cher never took a break from the sewing that has become a vital source of income in the Hmong villages.
Hmong embroidery is shipped from the busy Phonsavan post office to American
Hmong communities in Fresno and St. Paul, where it is sold for festival
clothing. But the money makes only a small dent in the poverty of the Hmong
in Laos.
Even the good intentions of Western nations seem to work against the Hmong.
Under pressure from environmentalists in European donor countries, Laos
has pushed the Hmong to stop their slash-and-burn or "swidden"
agriculture -an ancient system of burning forest lands to clear and fertilize
fields to grow rice and corn.
To meet U.S. anti-drug policies, Laos also is pushing the Hmong to halt
their traditional growing of opium poppies.
Both policies mean the incomes of the minority Hmong - already the lowest
in Laos - will shrink further.
"I have to say that the Hmong are the poorest group in Laos,"
says a Hmong who has a good professional career in Vientiane, the capital.
He first closed his office door, saying it was dangerous to discuss the
issue, and insisted on anonymity.
The Hmong history of fighting alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War
has not been forgotten.
"The government doesn't trust Hmong officials," said the professional. "In some places Hmong groups try to fight the government, so some officials believe we promote such opposition."
He ran his fingers through his thinning hair as a pot of sugarless green tea steeped and a passing colleague's footsteps faded away in the hallway.
"I feel that [ethnic] Lao with lower academic degrees get better jobs than Hmong," he said. "But I don't oppose the Laos government. We Hmong are a small ethnic group and have to be tolerant."
Like other Hmong who have moved to the cities, his children have learned to speak and read the Lao language, and he fears they will become assimilated and lose their native Hmong language and culture.
The Hmong in the remote hills also face big cultural changes. To stop slash-and-burn farming and opium production, the government plans to move nearly 100,000 Hmong down to the lowlands.
Many Hmong are reluctant to leave their traditional highlands and fear they will be moved forcibly. A few welcome the prospect of moving to new places where there are roads, schools, clinics and jobs.
Flat farmland is precious and resettlement money is lacking. So, many Hmong remain in limbo, continuing to scratch out a living with their black pigs, their chickens and their cows.
Instead of playing or studying, Hmong children are constantly in search of food. The children fish with nets and traps or collect fruit and berries. They catch birds and small animals. They haul firewood and corn, they tend cows and buffalo. Six-year-old girls carry babies on their backs. At 15, many girls are married and bearing children.
And they continue to die from the bombs that have lain in the ground since the Vietnam War.
"We tell the children not to touch them," said Mrs. Cher. "When we hoe the upland farms, the ones on the surface are no problem. But some below the surface we can't see."
U.S. military officials told The Washington Times in August that they had tripled their estimate of the number of U.S. bombs that continue to threaten Laotians. "In the last year, feedback from people on the ground raised our estimate of unexploded ordinance from 10 percent to 30 percent," said Sgt. David Stroup, attached to the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane.
U.S. Special Forces stationed near the capital have begun training Laotians
to clear the bombs. A British nongovernmental organization, Mines Advisory
Group, still travels the rutted roads of Xieng Khouang province clearing
away bombs.
"Sometimes I get 20 hits per meter on the detector," said Don
MacDonald, a Scot who has spent three years in Laos. "Most of the hits
are shrapnel," he said, "but you have to dig it all up. I've found
everything up to 2,000-pound bombs."
There have been about 14,500 accidents from 1975 to 1996 from bombs left over from the war, according to a foreign health care worker. The Phonsavan hospital is reported to receive about 35 bomb victims a year, but it is said many more die at the scenes of the explosions.
Not all Hmong live the largely illiterate village life. In order to make socialism more attractive, the government has encouraged minority groups such as the Hmong to attend school and enter the mainstream.
Somechai Mouawangyang, a Hmong, is education director of Xieng Khouang province.
"Only half the primary-school-aged children are in school," he explained over a meal of rice and green vegetable stew at his home in Phonsavan.
"Each teacher has 1,000 students," said Mr. Somechai, whose 8-year-old daughter squirmed onto his lap to watch Donald Duck play ice hockey on television. "We don't have teachers. We don't have money."
He said he hopes that a new teacher-training college nearing completion
outside Phonsavan will improve things.
Some Hmong war veterans in the United States accuse the Laotian government
of far more than prejudice or ethnic discrimination. They say thousands
of Hmong are being killed or imprisoned each year.
The U.S. State Department says, however, it has found no evidence of such abuse or persecutions. In its most recent annual human rights report, the State Department said: "There were no reports of political or other extrajudicial killings."
However, Laos remains a one-party state, dominated entirely by the secretive communist party. The media are totally controlled by the state and there is no public criticism of the government.
For a Hmong like Dzo Vang, who returned three years ago to Laos from a Thai refugee camp, the problems are very much down to earth.
In his village of Souksala, a lowland area where Hmong refugees have been repatriated since 1990, there are no steep forests to clear and opium poppies do not grow.
Land rights are not clear, malaria poses a continuing threat, and irrigation is needed for the rice paddies. Although Mr. Vang's son, Fong, is in school, he is not learning Hmong but the national language, Lao.
The Hmong professional man in Vientiane says that assimilation into the majority Lao language and culture was a sad but necessary way to form a single nation.
"We love this country. We will live here forever," he said.
COPYRIGHT 1997 THE WASHINGTON TIMES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
'We share a lot of pain in our heart' U.S. Hmong face new problems in their new land
By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES December 3, 1997
MINNEAPOLIS - Ser Lee described the day he hid in the branches of a maple tree and pointed a shotgun at two men about to throw eggs at his clapboard house in a nightly ritual of intimidation.
"Why are you doing this? What did I do to you?" the Hmong refugee recalled asking them. "I won't call the police or hurt you. But if you have a problem, come and talk to me."
The two men had no answer. But they never returned again to bother Mr. Lee, one of some 300,000 Hmong from Laos living today in the United States.
The Hmong were brought over from Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War, in which they fought with American forces. Typically, Hmong families are widely split since the war. Mr. Lee's uncle, Dzo Vang, lives in Laos, trying to get along with the communist regime and farm rice. Another uncle, Xeng Ly, lives in Sterling, Va., and works as a building engineer at Dulles Airport.
Mr. Lee, 37, was a child during the war. His father was a captain in Gen. Vang Pao's CIA-backed anti-communist army. "After 1975, when the communists took power," he explained, "we ran into the jungle and ate leaves to survive the Vietnamese attacks. Finally we swam the Mekong River to Thailand."
In America, Mr. Lee has become adept with computers and earns a living selling insurance and financial services in the Twin Cities.
Sitting in his living room as three of his daughters did their homework on the kitchen table, Mr. Lee described his struggle for acceptance in the United States.
After facing down the vandals, he said, he joined with his black, white and Hmong neighbors to form a block committee that drove out crack dealers and won city help rebuilding his north Minneapolis neighborhood.
Now he earns enough to move to a nicer area, he said, but won't abandon his neighbors.
The estimated 60,000 Hmong in the Twin Cities area have come a long way from the illiteracy and poverty of their mountain villages of Laos. But they still face ethnic prejudice as well as gang problems among their own children.
At a Hmong funeral in September, gunshots sailed over the heads of the mourners; no one was ever arrested. In the Minnesota forests that month, white deer hunters robbed and beat a group of Hmong hunters at gunpoint.
At least as disturbing to the Hmong is the violence among their own youth gangs.
The gangs took root around Fresno, Calif., and nearby towns, where some 70,000 Hmong live in a culture of high unemployment and welfare dependency. Many of those gang members have joined a new migration to Minnesota since last summer, when California cut back public assistance.
In Fresno on a hot September night, a police cruiser beamed its spotlight on the alleys and street corners around the Asian Village Shopping Center but was unable to locate members of the Oriental Ruthless Boys, a Hmong gang.
"They might have left town since the welfare cuts this summer," said Pia Vang, 27, the third Hmong to join the Fresno police force. "I've heard half the Hmong population in these neighborhoods has moved to St. Paul. Only the ones with jobs are staying here."
Those who have moved to the Twin Cities since the summer seem to be finding jobs. With unemployment at 3 percent in Minneapolis-St. Paul compared with 13 percent in Fresno, welfare officials say only half a dozen Hmong have applied for public assistance. But the Hmong who stay in California must still deal with the welfare cuts.
"People are panicked," said a Hmong medical aide at the Kings Winery Medical Clinic in the Asian Village Shopping Center. Dr. Patricia Walker, a St. Paul physician who specializes in treating the Hmong, also has seen an impact from the welfare changes.
"I've seen an increase in psychiatric difficulties - anxiety, post-traumatic stress, insomnia, nightmares, chronic pain syndrome. People are traumatized by the potential for the loss of benefits," she said.
The Hmong earned a reputation as resourceful and courageous fighters during the Vietnam War, suffering the deaths of half the 40,000 soldiers who fought in a secret CIA army and worked to rescue American fliers shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. After the communists took over Laos in 1975, more than 125,000 Hmong fled across the Mekong River to Thailand, where many spent years in refugee camps before being resettled in the United States. The Hmong were scattered by U.S. refugee planners into urban slums from Philadelphia to San Diego.
But the effort at rapid assimilation into America's melting pot clashed with Hmong culture and psychology. The Hmong faced racism, family separation, isolation, illiteracy and great difficulty in learning to speak and read English.
Many refugees, closely knit into 18 clans, packed their possessions into car convoys and joined secondary migrations that concentrated them in the Fresno and St. Paul areas, where clan leaders lived. There, the elderly found other Hmong they could talk to, the young found marriage partners, and the children began to enter the American mainstream.
One group of Hmong began concentrating in North Carolina in the early 1980s after a Hmong leader, Kue Chaw, drove around the United States in search of an escape from inner-city and urban tensions.
The Smoky Mountains reminded him of Laos, so he settled near Morganton, N.C., and started farming. Hundreds of Hmong followed him to the area, which is close to jobs in furniture factories.
The leader of the CIA's secret army, Gen. Vang Pao, said in a recent interview in Fresno that he had hoped the United States would provide land for the refugees to farm. But no land was offered.
Around Fresno, 800 Hmong such as Phen Vue, president of the California
Highlander Cooperative, managed to return to agriculture on leased land.
But they have had to learn entirely new practices from the subsistence farming
they knew in Laos.
Although Fresno lies at the heart of the San Joaquin Valley breadbasket,
the Hmong have largely been unable or unwilling to compete with Mexicans
who dominate jobs in the almond, citrus and peach orchards.
Two-thirds of the 40,000 Hmong in Fresno were still on welfare in August when the exodus to the Twin Cities began in earnest. Minnesota's reputation for grueling winters does not seem to have been a concern.
"Cold is not a problem, even snow. What is important for the Hmong way is to live together and to help each other," said Nhia Vang Lee, 67, leader of the Lee clan in Minneapolis and father of Ser Lee.
For some, the culture shock in the United States has been traumatic.
"I'm not too happy here," said one 35-year-old man in Fresno, sitting in a living room with his aged mother and an 11-year-old cousin who takes care of her. "I earn minimum wage putting spices in bottles and I speak hardly any English. Here, I'm nobody." Dr. Touxa Lyfoung, administrator of the Kings Winery Clinic in Fresno, said more than 25 percent of Hmong adults suffer from depression or anxiety.
"A lot of people are still consumed with the events of the war and its aftermath, especially the 1975-1980 period that nobody knows about," he said.
It was during those years, after the war ended, that the communist victors settled scores. An estimated 40,000 Laotians, including many Hmong, were jailed in re-education camps, where many died of hunger and disease. Hmong villages that resisted the communists were attacked by North Vietnamese artillery, aircraft and ground troops. Dr. Lyfoung's own father, the noted Hmong leader Touby Lyfoung, died in a communist re-education camp in 1983.
Over a 10-day period this year, Dr. James Stone, medical director at the Kings Winery Clinic, interviewed patients and found 50 to 60 who reported they had been exposed to "yellow rain" toxic gas attacks before fleeing Laos.
"They said that after gas attacks by planes or artillery, the fish died, the leaves yellowed and when they ate vegetables they got bloody diarrhea and had problems breathing," he said.
"It is hard to drag it out of them. Some break down crying."
Dr. Stone described the Hmong as "a culture at risk."
"By the age of 40, people are burned out by work and by toxins. There is high incidence of diabetes, nephritis, stomach and peptic ulcers, asthma, chronic pulmonary disease. Men and women complain of short memory, memory lapses, nightmares and inability to retain new material."
New insecurities have sparked a revival among the Hmong of shamanism - the ancient Laotian religious practice of contacting spirits of the dead.
"Shamans are always busy here - it can take two or three weeks to find one free for a ceremony," said Dr. Lyfoung. "People are looking for some help."
Ying Lao is a shaman. Some of her 14 children gathered quietly in the living room in Fresno in September as she spent nearly three hours chanting, jumping and shaking a ring of metal discs in front of an altar.
Peter, her first-grader, draped an American flag around his shoulders as he bounced around the room watching his mother chant Hmong and Chinese words he barely understood. Two plucked chickens lay on the floor and a live one noisily escaped from a paper bag for a brief moment of freedom.
Mrs. Ying Lao said she conducted the ceremony after having a dream about one of her spiritual teachers.
Even for the many Hmong who have become Christians, belief in shamanism is strong. But while many will go to shamans for spiritual or psychological healing, a few will go to a shaman instead of a Western doctor in the case of a serious illness. The split between modern America and an ancient culture -without knowledge of science, reading or writing - is tearing at the Hmong, testing their ability to cope, adapt and retain their identity.
At the funeral in St. Paul this September of Xai Phia Lee, a former commander in the Hmong army, his nine daughters and many granddaughters and nieces wept and wailed around his open coffin. Later they discussed their life in the United States. "Some people here don't like us, so I want to go back to Laos," said one granddaughter, too young to have more than scant memories of life there.
"Socially and economically we are happy - but not psychologically," said another. "We share a lot of pain in our heart." Across the country in a well-tended Fresno neighborhood, Dria Chang, 24, has another view of America. He has just bought his first home. Although his parents cannot speak English or read and write even in Hmong, Dria Chang earned a bachelor's degree at Fresno State College and is in the management-training program for a car rental agency.
"I was 7 when we left Laos and I saw the war," he said over a plate of spicy rice noodles and squid in a Lao restaurant downtown. "My parents brought me all this way to have an education. I owe my parents a lot. They said, 'Stay in school.' It's a question of control."
His father is a clan leader who holds meetings in Fresno to try to settle disputes over marriage, theft and business without resorting to police or lawyers.
Amid these personal struggles, a political divide is also troubling the Hmong community, as Congress considers whether to normalize trade relations with Laos.
Older veterans largely follow Gen. Vang Pao and oppose improving relations
until Laos proves to their satisfaction that the abuses of the Hmong have
ended. Some say there should be no trade relations until Laos becomes a
true democracy.
But other Hmong - especially the young - listen to St. Paul public school
official Yang Dao and other leaders, who believe the Hmong should focus
on improving their lives in America and end the hostility of the war years.
U.S. policy toward Laos divides Hmong community in America - War veterans' claims of genocide disputed Part IV: Politics and the Hmong
By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES December 4, 1997
The Hmong were tenacious fighters on the U.S. side during the Vietnam war. They are proving to be just as tenacious these days in their new role in American politics.
In October, about 80 aged Hmong warriors and their wives demonstrated on the steps of the Capitol against Clinton administration efforts to improve trade and other ties with the communist Lao Peoples' Democratic Republic.
They accuse the Vientiane government of genocide against the 300,000 Hmong who remain in Laos. The American Hmong are adamant, despite findings by the State Department, the United Nations, foreign aid workers and many Hmong in Laos that there is no evidence of systematic human rights abuse against the Hmong in Laos.
"There were no reports of political or extrajudicial killings ... there were no reports of politically motivated disappearances," said the State Department's 1996 Human Rights Report on Laos.
Nonetheless, Hmong leaders here denounce those who favor trade and aid for Laos as "communist collaborators," including some American Hmong who argue that opposing reconciliation with Laos will bring more suffering to the Hmong who remain in that country.
In Congress, conservatives have sided with the veterans, accusing the administration of a sellout of America's brave allies, who suffered 20,000 dead in combat during the war. Many more civilians also perished.
"A genocide of the Hmong people continues," said a July statement by Reps. Duncan Hunter, Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Dana Rohrabacher, California Republicans. The statement also accuses Laos of failing to help account for American soldiers missing since the Vietnam War. Several U.S. veterans groups supported the accusations.
The charge was disputed by U.S. military officials involved in search and excavations in Laos, who said in Vientiane that Laos cooperates with U.S. searches, has opened some archives and had just begun its own searches for U.S. dead.
Ann Mills Griffith, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, also disputed the congressional statement, saying "increased cooperation has occurred and continues to expand" on accounting for the missing Americans from the war.
Says Col. Wangyee Vang, president of the Lao Veterans of America: "The administration's recent policy to fully normalize relations with the communist regime in Laos, lift the ban on foreign assistance to Laos, work to provide most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status and repatriate the remaining Hmong refugees [in Thailand] is a disaster for the Hmong people." Vang Pobzeb, a Hmong human rights activist from Eau Claire, Wis., said "about 25,000 Hmong and Lao people were arrested, imprisoned and killed by the communist government from 1990 to 1997. ..
"Any person who speaks out to support the Laos government or support MFN and foreign aid for Laos, they are communist agents," Mr. Pobzeb said.
Despite the charges, MFN for Laos was approved this summer by the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade.
There is no dispute that Laos remains a one-party communist state, where news media are strictly controlled. Amnesty International has asked President Nouhak Phoumsavan for the release of three men who were jailed for 14 years in 1992 because they called for political reforms.
But charges of genocide and mass killings are hotly and widely disputed.
The State Department Human Rights report on Laos for 1996 said: "The Government repressed many [Hmong] who had fought against it" but in recent years "an increasing number of those who fled the country after 1975 have repatriated to Laos without suffering persecution."
"There have been no allegations concerning the detention of citizens for political reasons for several years," the State Department report said.
Freedom House, in its 1994-95 report on human rights in Laos, said "both the Hmong guerrillas and the government are accused of extra-judicial killings."
Wendy Chamberlin, a young volunteer development worker in Laos during the Vietnam War, returned recently to Laos as U.S. ambassador. She is pushing the Lao government to allow international human rights monitors into the country to investigate the charges of attacks on the Hmong.
"Frankly, I believe there is a great deal of misunderstanding regarding human rights in Laos on all sides of the issue," Miss Chamberlin said in a speech to businessmen in Vientiane this spring.
"In essence, the Lao government is responsive to its people, and works diligently to provide development opportunities to all levels and ethnic groups of the nation. ... We believe the 'planets are in line' this year for achieving Lao MFN."
Mr. Pobzeb's answer to that is a dramatic color photo showing what appears to be five dead children lying on the ground. "Soldiers of the communist Lao government had massacred and killed eight Hmong civilians in the village of Muong Ou, Muong Cha area, northern Laos on January 16, 1997," says an accompanying statement.
A State Department official said it was aware of the report and others like it but they could not be verified. "Our embassy in Laos tried to run down reports and did not find any attacks on villages or any of the things charged," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"In places where we have been able to go out and verify we haven't found any evidence of human rights abuses." Al Santoli, an aide to Rep. Rohrabacher, said the reports had not been verified because "most persecution takes place in rural areas, not near the main road - where Westerners do not have easy access."
An investigation by The Washington Times in the Hmong regions of Laos, without a government "minder" listening in, produced no evidence of systematic human rights abuses of the Hmong.
Interviews were conducted over a two-week period with Hmong villagers, former members of the CIA army, repatriated refugees, businessmen, academics, educators, Hmong-American visitors and Laotian government officials - often speaking behind closed doors and on condition of anonymity.
There were clear signs of lingering prejudice against the Hmong by the majority Lao Loum, who have run the country for centuries. And there have been some attacks, both by and against Hmong, which Western diplomats and Lao officials describe as a mixture of banditry, local feuding and resistance by a handful of remaining anti-communist fighters.
Vice Foreign Minister Soubhan Srithirath, in an interview in Vientiane in August, said "there are some remaining [resistance] groups - insignificant groups -who try to survive by stealing, plunder, banditry."
He said there were only "one or two attacks which killed two or three people per year." He blamed them on Gen. Vang Pao, charging that the California-based Hmong leader has links to infiltrators coming from a 17,000-strong Hmong refugee community at the Thai monastery Tham Krabok, two hours north of Bangkok.
"Vis-a-vis the Hmong minority," said Mr. Soubhan, "those who left the country are not our enemy." He said about 500 Hmong-Americans returned to Laos last year for visits. All but about 30 Laotian exiles -who have been sentenced in absentia for activities during the Indochina war - were welcome to return for visits, he said. Gen. Vang Pao, who led the CIA-armed Hmong secret army in Laos during the war, is on that list.
This summer the first group of Hmong-American college students visited Laos under a program run by the California State University at Sacramento.
"They were hesitant at first because of all those tales about Hmong disappearing," said Robert Phillips, a retired geography professor who accompanied them. Some traveled to traditional Hmong areas in Xieng Khouang province and met with relatives they had never seen.
Mr. Soubhan insisted the Lao government has "no policy of oppression" toward the Hmong. "We encourage them to live their way of life."
The vice foreign minister said a reporter for The Washington Times was the first accredited journalist allowed to travel freely in Laos without a government "minder" since the 1975 communist victory.
On unscheduled visits to Hmong villages near Vientiane and in Xieng Khouang province, Hmong residents seemed largely free and safe, saying they could safely travel throughout Laos - on roads or on foot through the countryside.
Most were reluctant to publicly discuss anything political but, when asked in private, where no neighbors could listen, they said they did not fear the police or government. But they complained about hunger, prejudice and other issues.
An international refugee official, who closely monitors human rights treatment of the 27,000 Hmong and Lao repatriated from Thailand and China since 1989, said the Hmong have little reason to fear the government.
"Laos has changed," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The people of Laos respect the returnees and try to do their best to receive them. But no one is perfect. Generally speaking, people are happy. They don't go back to Thailand." In Phonsavan, the capital of Xieng Khouang province, German, Dutch, British and American foreign aid workers who travel widely to clear unexploded bombs and deliver aid said they had not seen or heard of any government attacks against the Hmong.
However, there are remote areas that few outsiders visit because there are no roads, or because of dangers posed by continued Hmong resistance to the government. Hmong veterans say human rights abuses take place in these areas.
Gen. Vang Pao said in an interview that he would drop his opposition to improving U.S.-Laos trade ties if Amnesty International and other human rights monitors were allowed to check on the Hmong in these areas and if aid and trade benefits reached the Hmong.
"I am not opposed to foreign aid as long as it gets to the people," the general said. "Myself, I want to help too. But the Lao leaders ... don't do anything to develop the country.
"We don't worry if they want to continue communist control. But they have to give human rights and democracy - not let the people be hungry and die."
Other Hmong-Americans, including Gen. Vang Pao's son Cha Vang, insist that Laos must hold free and fair elections before getting MFN - a condition that Laos is unlikely to accept.
Rep. Bruce Vento, Minnesota Democrat, said he would back improved U.S.-Laos ties if Amnesty or other independent groups monitored the safety of the Hmong.
"But I don't expect them to get constitutional rights like us,"
he said. "My concern is that you don't have outright persecution."
Dr. Yang Dao, a Hmong leader and a Southeast Asian culture specialist with
St. Paul Public Schools, supports American aid for education in Laos, which
has led some Hmong to attack him as pro-communist.
"In the past, some members of Gen. Vang Pao's organization pressured people to give money for the Chao Fa [resistance fighters]," he said. "Those who do not agree with their political views are accused of being communist. Like myself. But I am not a communist."
Dr. Yang Dao said he was worried that the young generation of Hmong could
become "the last victims of the Cold War."
"I want all people to lay down their weapons and find a way to talk,"
he said. "Education is the way for the future of Hmong and for Laos.
Both sides, inside and outside the country, need to forget the past and
work for national development and reconciliation."
COPYRIGHT 1997 THE WASHINGTON TIMES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
