[Tlc] L-Hmong rebels

[justinm at ucr.edu]

2007-0820 - Asia Sentinel - The Last Gasp of Resistance

http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=646&Itemid=31

The Last Gasp of Resistance

Chandler Vandergrift
20 August 2007

The arrest and upcoming trial of ethnic Hmong in the United
States might just mark the end of armed resistance in Laos.

Today, the streets of Vientiane and Luang Prabang are alive
with cafes and shops that hark back to the days when Laos was
a stop on the so-called hippie trail. The landlocked country,
still a mysterious destination for westerners, is teaming with
tourists drawn by a combination of inexpensive travel and
exotic culture. Expanding by almost 30 percent a year, Laos
now draws more than a million visitors annually. The easygoing
ambience that attracted tourists decades ago has returned.

The economy is also on the move and is set to grow by a
respectable 6 to 7 percent over the next two to three years,
mainly on construction of the controversial Nam Theun 2 dam on
the Mekong River and eventual sale of electricity. Increasing
commercialization of agriculture and new mineral extraction
projects, according to the Asian Development Bank, are also
helping to wake the country up from years of slumber caused by
war and the torpor of a socialist regime.

In Vientiane, the internet cafes are bustling with students,
travel agents are busy organizing tours across the country’s
improving highways, and cargo laden trucks ply the trade route
across the large and modern Friendship Bridge linking Thailand
and Laos. Thus the idea that a violent rebellion, launched by
overseas Hmong refugees and supported by a disenfranchised
population, seems more than a little remote; it seems impossible.

Yet, 32 years after fleeing the communist takeover of Laos for
the United States, one-time CIA warrior General Vang Pao is
facing trial by his former ally for plotting a rebellion
against the Lao government. In the coming months a federal
court in Sacramento, California will hear the case against
Vang, along with 10 other ethnic Hmong and an American
veteran, on charges of violating the US neutrality act and
conspiring to possess missile systems in a complicated plot
against the communist government. The group was arrested in
June. The trial is expected to begin in October.

Despite the growing picture of a nation at peace pursuing its
economic fortunes, out in the remote tropical rainforest of
the Annamite Cordillera, a handful of armed Hmong remain. They
are the remnants of the “secret army” paid by the US and led
by Vang to fight against Vietnamese and Laotian communists.

As a figurehead of overseas Hmong, especially the war
generation, and a supporter of his version of revolution in
Laos, Vang’s aging and weak appearance, being led in and out
of court in a wheelchair, has done little to lend credibility
to the coup plot. And indeed, the appearance might best
summarize the state of resistance in Laos. What had once been
a serious threat has now been virtually extinguished.

Back in the tumultuous years following the 1975 communist take
over of Laos, the country seemed ripe for rebellion, at least
to Vang and fevered anti-communists who could not accept
America’s defeat in Indochina. Thousands of Hmong, the remote
hill tribe recruited by the CIA as allies in the war, and
Laotians who had sided with the Americans fled across the
border into Thailand or up into the mountains to escape a
questionable fate in government re-education camps.
Anti-communists like Vang helped fuel the exodus and the
resistance with dire warnings that the Hmong were slated to be
exterminated en masse by the Laotian communists. That did not
turn out to be the case, but eventually some 300,000 Hmong
refugees settled in the United States.

In 1977 Hmong soldiers, using weapons and ammunition left over
from the war, were not just hiding in the jungle but were
rumored to have battled government troops to within 60
kilometres of Vientiane. Hmong refugees in Thailand were
reported to have rearmed and returned to Laos where they
engaged in sporadic clashes with government forces. The
shadowy Vang, back in the US, claimed for years to be on the
verge of seizing control of the homeland and he compelled vast
numbers of Hmong refugees to donate money to his rebellion
through a community organization that was eventually charged
with extortion by officials in a number of states.

According to a New York Times article in 1990: “For years,
some members of the most primitive refugee group in America,
the Hmong, have complained, mostly in whispers, that the
anti-Communist leader who fled here with them from the remote
mountains of Laos has been extorting money from them.

“Now the California Department of Social Services has given
substance to those grievances, charging that Gen. Vang Pao’s
resistance organization has demanded contributions from Hmong
refugees in return for welfare assistance through a
state-financed social service group he controls.”

Vang was eventually forced to split off from his above
ground-charity, Lao Family Community, as younger leaders
stepped forward more interested in life in America than the
dreams of an old cold warrior. Madison, Wisconsin, home to a
large Hmong community, dropped a plan in 2002 to name a park
in his honor after University of Wisconsin professor Alfred
McCoy, an expert on the secret war in Laos, cited numerous
published sources alleging that Vang Pao had committed summary
executions of his solders, enemy prisoners and political
enemies during the war. Vang denied the charges.

The rebellion has been in a state of decline since the late
seventies. Vietnamese troops, supporting the Lao government,
responded to the insurgent threat by launching a brutal
campaign to eliminate the rebels. Reports of the fighting vary
from a few thousand insurgent fighters dying to claims by
Vang, impossible to confirm, that upwards of 50,000 Hmong,
mostly civilians, were killed.

During the 1980s pockets of resistance continued to fight yet
their ability to seriously challenge the government was
doubtful. Constant harassment by Lao and Vietnamese troops
scattered resistance into isolated bands of fighters more
often in a state of retreat than attack.

By the 1990s support for the resistance was waning due to
geopolitical changes that made complicity with the rebels
impossible. Sino-Lao relations had been fully restored by 1989
and Thailand and Laos were forging stronger and stronger
economic links. Thai authorities also began forcibly deporting
thousands of Hmong refugees back to Laos.

With the closure of major refugee camps along the border, the
ability of insurgents to slip in and out of Laos was severely
curtailed.

The United States also began rebuilding political relations
with Laos. The Lao government's efforts to eradicate opium
cultivation along with allowing US military teams to recover
the remains of soldiers lost during the Vietnam War started
negotiations that would eventually lead to the normalization
of trade relations between the two countries.

By 1995 tourism was quickly becoming the country's fastest
growing industry, Hmong living in the US were largely free to
visit and Laos was welcomed into the political neighborhood
when it became an official member of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations in 1997. With market forces taking
control, cold war ideology, once a cornerstone of support for
the insurgency, was becoming an anachronism.

Through it all, Vang, a hero to older Hmong because he was a
tribesman who rose to the highest echelons of the
pre-communist society, kept at it. Despite declining support
for revolution even in his own diaspora, some aging Hmong
cling to the dream. Leading the campaign has been Vang, who
has raised funds, engaged in extensive lobbying against the
Lao government and championed the cause of retaking Laos by force.

As the Cold War was no longer inspiring support in the US,
Vang and those advocating revolution logically turned to human
rights issues to fill the ideological vacuum and garner
sympathy for their cause. The United Lao Council for Peace,
Freedom, and Reconstruction – an overseas organization of
"ethnic representatives and Laotian peoples" with Vang as vice
president – has claimed that "Since 1975, over 300,000
Hmong-Lao loss (sic) their lives at the hands of the Lao PDR."
Essentially, they have blended allegations of genocide with
their rallying cry for armed revolution.

Vang's allegations of genocide are almost certainly not true
but human rights abuses in Laos do continue. Amnesty
International has long reported that the Lao government and
has singled out the Hmong bands in for harsh treatment.
“Thousands of men, women and children from the Hmong ethnic
minority are living in the mountainous jungle to avoid abuses
by the Laotian military,” the group said in a report earlier
this year. “The Lao army continues to mount violent attacks on
them, even though the jungle-dwellers' military capacity is
all but depleted decades after some Hmong fought in the
CIA-funded ‘secret army’ in Laos during the Vietnam War.”

The few intrepid journalists who have risked breaking the
government's media restrictions and trekked into the jungle
have brought back harrowing stories of starvation, disease,
and a grossly prolonged military campaign that has decimated
the dwindling numbers of Hmong still running from the from the
government.

The Laotian government has denied allegations that it is
trying to exterminate the jungle-based Hmong and has claimed
to have pardoned and resettled many Hmong. Amnesty
International agrees, stating that "in the 1990s and early
2000s, authorities assisted such groups (Hmong hiding in the
jungle); offering amnesties and enabling them to join planned
resettlement schemes." Yet, the report continues; "at least
two large groups of mostly women and children ‘surrendered,’
after which reports about their whereabouts came to an end."

It could be exactly that kind of ambiguity over the safety of
those emerging from the jungle that keeps the resistance on
life support. American photographer Roger Arnold, one of the
few journalists to witness first-hand the Hmong resistance in
2006, says that their fear of the government is legitimate.
"They are caught in a difficult situation; if they surrender
they are likely arrested or worse, if they flee to Thailand
they will just get deported."

Yet it is not just the Lao government to blame for prolonging
the Hmong resistance. According to Professor Martin
Stuart-Fox, an expert on Lao history, "Those who have kept the
insurgency alive have done so with the encouragement, for
their own selfish political reasons, of Hmong in the US."
Another source, who requested not to be named due to previous
trouble with Lao authorities, when asked why the insurgents
remain in the jungle responded; "they are extremely isolated
from the rest of the world and easily lied to by the Hmong
Americans, they are naive pawns in a larger game."

The game is the political life of Vang. Court documents
against him and his co-accused show how the Neo Hom, also
known as the United Lao Liberation Front, conducted extensive
fundraising efforts to buy almost US$10 million worth of
military equipment on the pretext of support for “resistance
fighters.”

According to the indictment, the Minneapolis Star Tribune
reported, “The suspects ‘issued an operations plan to a
contractor to conduct a military strike in downtown
Vientiane,’ the complaint said, ’against specifically
identified military and civilian government personnel and
buildings.’ It said the suspects told their mercenary force
‘to reduce [the targets] to rubble, and make them look like
the results of the attack upon the World Trade Center in New
York on Sept. 11, 2001.’"

Court documents also reveal that the would-be coup makers had
an overly optimistic evaluation of the current strength of
antigovernment resistance in Laos. Exhibit 2 in the federal
prosecutors’ case is a document prepared by one of the
defendants which details their plan for overthrowing the Lao
government. If the document is to be believed, all those
travelers sipping espressos in Luang Prabang better watch out,
because Laos is already at the cusp of armed revolt. “People
may rise up against the government at any time,” it reads.

Nonsense, say most experts who follow Laos. "This is total
fantasy. Laos is as stable as it has ever been. There is zero
support for any coup," says Grant Evans, a senior lecturer at
the University of Hong Kong. "I really think this is the
result of the loss of perspective which comes from exile. They
even failed to understand that if you talk about buying guns,
etc in the US these days you attract the attention of the
authorities who in this case stung them. That's how out of
touch with the world around them they are."

After the coup plot emerged, Thailand announced a fresh round
of forced repatriations of Hmong refugees. Approximately 8,000
Hmong from a refugee camp in Phetchabun province will be
forced back into Laos and how they are received could reveal
the future trajectory of the conflict. If the refugees are
resettled by the Lao government without any major incidents,
Vang and his supporters face political oblivion. Without
championing the human rights cause their argument for armed
revolt will be rendered into little more than a hollow war cry.

The Lao government might be able to coax the remaining Hmong
out of the jungle if it can demonstrate a willingness to
peacefully settle the refugees. Vang's arrest has removed a
major cause that kept the Hmong in hiding but the Lao
government's past behavior hasn’t helped. By demonstrating a
genuine willingness to resolve the crisis, Vientiane could end
the insurgency while simultaneously undermining the lingering
claims that overseas supporters of revolution have relied upon.
__._,_.___

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu