[Tlc] L-2 Hmong CIA stories

[justinm at ucr.edu]

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2007-1217 - AP - Immigrants protest Patriot Act

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_7741493?nclick_check=1

San Jose Mercury News

Immigrants protest Patriot Act
HMONG FIGHTERS FOR U.S. CAN BE DEEMED TERRORISTS
Associated Press
Article Launched: 12/17/2007 01:32:37 AM PST

STOCKTON - About 1,800 Laotian immigrants, including more than
a hundred Hmong veterans who fought for the United States
against the Vietnamese, gathered Saturday to protest what they
consider the unfair application of certain provisions of the
Patriot Act to Hmong refugees.

State and local officials from the Central Valley heard how
Hmong residents resettled from Laos and Thailand have had
difficulty obtaining green cards, driver's licenses and
passports because they or their relatives aided the United
States, said Srida Moua of Hmong National Development, a Hmong
advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Under the Patriot Act, Hmong aren't specifically listed as
terrorists. But refugees may be denied entry to the United
States if they are found to have provided material support to
terrorists, defined under the act as having engaged in
unlawful activity against their country, Moua said.

"Terrorism's defined as an unlawful activity committed under
the laws of the place where it's committed," Moua explained.
"In the case of the Hmong, those who took up arms to fight
alongside U.S. soldiers fall under this definition."

Two bills are pending in Congress that would remove the
material support from applying to Hmong seeking asylum or
permanent residency.

"We, the Hmong people, are not terrorists and should not be
labeled terrorists," said Noah Lor, the first Hmong city
councilman from Merced.

>From 1961 to 1975, the CIA recruited
Advertisement
thousands of Hmong soldiers to fight against the Vietnamese
and Lao communists. Rocky Vang, 54, who organized a
Sacramento-area contingent for Saturday's gathering that
included four bus loads and more than 100 private cars, said
he was one of them from 1969 until Laos fell in 1975.

"I've been worried about this a lot," Vang said. "We have a
problem with the DMV holding the licenses of our kids until
Homeland Security completes their investigation."

Zang Fang of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center said
many of the 16,000 recently resettled Hmong refugees are
facing long delays in getting their green cards approved.

"Over 4,000 applications are on hold because of material
support," Fang said.

Copyright 2007 San Jose Mercury News

2007-1217 - New York Times - Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding
Deep in Laos

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/world/asia/17laos.html?em&ex=1198040400&en=911214d5fbd47b79&ei=5087%0A

The New York Times

December 17, 2007
Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding Deep in Laos
By THOMAS FULLER

VIENTIANE PROVINCE, Laos — They call themselves America’s
forgotten soldiers.

Four decades after the Central Intelligence Agency hired
thousands of jungle warriors to fight Communists on the
western fringes of the Vietnam War, men who say they are
veterans of that covert operation are isolated, hungry and
periodically hunted by a Laotian Communist government still
mistrustful of the men who sided with America.

“If I surrender, I will be punished,” said Xang Yang, a wiry
58-year-old still capable of crawling nimbly through thick
bamboo underbrush. “They will never forgive me. I cannot live
outside the jungle because I am a former American soldier.”

In a small hillside clearing about nine miles east of the
Mekong River, Mr. Yang and four other veterans scratch out a
primitive existence with their wives and 50 children and
grandchildren. Their hidden jungle encampment is a 15-hour
walk up and down low-lying mountains from the nearest paved
road, across streams that are knee-deep in the dry season but
can become roaring torrents when the monsoon comes.

Mr. Yang said his group had been attacked by the Laotian Army
twice this year. In September, soldiers killed a 5-year-old
boy, whose grave is on the outskirts of the camp. In May, a
predawn raid killed a woman and her 2-year-old child. The
group moves camp every few weeks to avoid attack, he said.

They are often miles from any rice paddies or hamlets, but
sometimes they travel at night, with their AK-47s, to get
supplies from sympathetic farmers. They say they got their
guns and uniforms from Laotian troops who fled a firefight in
1999.

The C.I.A. operation, from 1961 until 1975, became known as
the secret war because, unlike in Vietnam, America’s military
involvement in Laos was covert. Instead of sending American
ground troops to prevent a Communist takeover here, the C.I.A.
hired tens of thousands of mercenaries, most of whom were
Hmong, a hill-dwelling ethnic minority.

Today, the number of Hmong veterans and their families who
remain hidden in the jungle is somewhere in the hundreds to
low thousands, estimates Amy Archibald, a spokeswoman for the
United States Embassy in Vientiane, the capital.

Their plight, though little known, has received more attention
in recent years, as human rights groups have issued reports
condemning the Laotian government for attacking Hmong who
worked with the Americans.

Still, finding the veterans in their camps is an arduous
undertaking, requiring hours of trekking through the jungle. A
recent visit to Mr. Yang’s remote hide-out by this reporter
was the first by an American newspaper, one of about a dozen
people to have visited any camp of veterans of the C.I.A.
operation in Laos.

The former fighters and their progeny clearly welcomed the
visit. When this reporter and a photographer arrived at the
camp, many of the group began weeping and saying, in Laotian,
“America help us, America help us.”

Many in the group said they had not seen a Westerner since the
war ended in 1975.

Each of the five veterans in the camp has relatives in the
United States; they say their fading dream is to be reunited
with them. Mr. Yang’s hope is that Washington will “come back
to help old soldiers like me to leave Laos and make it to
America.”

“We want America to give us a place to live,” said another
veteran, Va Chang, 60. “We want America to give us food and
medicine.

“If the Americans don’t want to do that,” he said, “they
should drop a big bomb on us and end our misery.”

Reports of Attacks

Human rights groups describe a mostly one-sided fight between
the lightly armed and ragged former C.I.A. fighters and a
Laotian Army eager to dislodge them from their jungle hide-outs.

An Amnesty International report released in March said that
Laotian troops had been involved in numerous attacks on the
veterans and their families across northern Laos in recent
years, an assessment shared by American diplomats.

“We find these reports very credible, and we know that there
are human rights abuses by security forces,” Ms. Archibald
said. “What we can’t tell you is who fired the first bullet.”

The State Department’s annual human rights report, released in
March, cited increased efforts by security forces to eliminate
scattered pockets of Hmong fighters. Pressure by the Laotian
Army, the report said, “was intended to starve the remnants of
insurgent families from their jungle dwellings.”

The Laotian government, perhaps wary of the effect the
conflict might have on the country’s thriving tourism
industry, denies that any clashes have occurred or that any
C.I.A. veterans are still in hiding.

“There are no Hmong C.I.A. in the jungles,” said Yong
Chanthalangsy, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “There are no
clashes. As you may notice by traveling in our country, there
is a peaceful atmosphere.”

He said Mr. Yang and his group were probably just “bandits.”

On the run for the past three decades, the five men have no
documents proving they fought in the war. But they can cite
the code names of C.I.A. landing strips they guarded and some
of the Americans they served with, including a “Mr. Tony,”
possibly Tony Poe, the onetime leader of the C.I.A.’s
operations here who died in 2003.

Shrapnel is still visibly embedded in some of their bodies,
and one veteran, Jangwang Xiong, 57, has a damaged leg, from a
clash in 1971 with forces backed by North Vietnam, he said.

Missions for the C.I.A.

The C.I.A. initially hired the Hmong to back the Laotian
government in its fight against a Communist insurgency. Later,
during the course of the Vietnam War, the Hmong were
instructed to intercept convoys of supplies on the series of
jungle paths known as the Ho Chi Minh trail, much of which ran
through Laos.

Mr. Chang said he was ordered to defend Lima Site 258, one of
dozens of mountaintop landing strips that the C.I.A. used to
hopscotch around the country with supplies and men.

The group is indigent even by the standards of rural
Indochina. Its members’ diet consists mainly of wild yams
collected from the jungle, bamboo shoots and small animals
hunted with bows and arrows. Occasionally they obtain rice
from villagers willing to risk secretive association with them.

Surrounded by their worn-looking children and grandchildren,
the five men appear older than their years and today bear
little resemblance to the young Hmong tribesmen who
collectively earned a reputation as capable fighters.

Colin Thompson, a C.I.A. officer in Laos from 1963 to 1966,
remembers the Hmong recruits as rugged and loyal.

“There were some extraordinarily brave Hmong,” he said in a
telephone interview from his home in Maryland. “They were a
little tougher to beat back than were the other tribal groups.
They stood their ground.”

Mr. Thompson’s job included carrying stacks of Laotian
currency for the Hmong soldiers’ salaries. He is sympathetic
to the plight of the remaining fighters but said Washington
need not feel obligated to bring them to America.

“It wasn’t as if we dragooned them into anything,” he said.
“Their choice was to defend themselves and we provided the
means. We provided the weapons and the courage.”

That view is not shared by the Hmong, many of whom felt
betrayed by the United States when the war ended. Using
battered radios, the veterans here have followed what to them
are the confusing events of recent years: the friendship
proclaimed between Vietnam and the United States and the
arrest in June of Vang Pao, the former Hmong general who faces
charges in the United States of plotting to attack the Laotian
government.

Mr. Pao’s indictment in California, after a federal sting
operation in which a government agent posing as an arms dealer
offered him weapons, is bewildering to the veterans here.
Attacking Communists was the very job Mr. Pao was paid to do
by the C.I.A.

Mr. Yang and his group say they still hope for a democratic
Laos but have given up any notion that they can assist in the
overthrow of the Communist government.

Mr. Yang said he occasionally spoke with one of his daughters,
Mao, a postal clerk in California, who moved to the United
States 27 years ago after a year in a refugee camp in Thailand.

“I love my father,” Mao Yang said in a phone interview from
her home in Yuba City in the Sacramento Valley. “He is hungry
and he says he has no clothes.”

She said she that recently sent him $1,200 through
intermediaries but that he received only $600.

About 250,000 Laotian refugees moved to the United States in
the decades after the 1975 Communist takeover, including more
than 115,000 Hmong. Many Hmong stayed in Laos after the war,
living normal lives in cities or as farmers. And others,
including some members of the group visited here, had the
opportunity to seek refugee status in Thailand in the years
after the war but chose to remain in the jungle. With the
newfound friendship between Thailand and Laos, that window has
now closed.

Thousands on the Run

Boon Thang Van, a veteran of the C.I.A. operation who is an
adviser to a United States-based Hmong activist group, the
Fact Finding Commission, says 5,060 people — veterans and
their families — are still in the jungles, most of them in
northern Laos.

The group keeps track of them through 12 satellite phones it
has distributed. It has compiled a list of clashes with
government troops and has video showing the bodies of five
Hmong children after what it says was an attack by government
troops in May 2004.

Many Hmong have left the jungles in recent years and fled to
Thailand, including 7,800 refugees now in a camp in Phetchabun
Province. Of those, 181 have battlefield-type injuries,
according to Doctors Without Borders, the international aid group.

“It’s clear that the wounds are recent and caused by guns,”
said Gilles Isard, chief of the group’s mission in Thailand.
Mr. Isard said many of the people in the camp who claimed to
be former C.I.A. fighters had photographs of themselves as
young soldiers and documents from the 1960s and 1970s that
they say confirm their service.

But their renowned fighting spirit has all but disappeared.
Nou Chue Xiong, 68, another of the veterans here, seemed
resigned to die in the jungle.

“I guess you will leave here and try to help us,” Mr. Xiong
told his visitor. “But if you can’t, don’t be sad.”

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