Acts of betrayal - persecution of Hmong

National Review, Oct 23, 1995 by Michael Johns

Mr. Johns, formerly a foreign-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, served as a speechwriter in the Bush Administration.

MENOMONIE, WISC.

THIS charming Midwestern town could be an advertisement for contemporary Americana. Spacious farmhouses with large porches sit a comfortable fifty yards off the road. Pickup trucks are parked in long gravel driveways, and at the town's lake, the locals settle into folding chairs and sip from Budweiser cans as they cast their lines for bass and walleye.

As summer comes to an end, Menomonie looks like an updated Norman Rockwell painting. Yet this small town has become an intriguing scene in a geopolitical drama. Menomonie has become a place of refuge for some 1,500 Hmong, the highland people of Laos who bravely allied themselves with the United States war effort in Southeast Asia. Before landing in Menomonie, the 1,500 faced two formidable hurdles: escaping the brutal Communist regime of Laos, and getting permission to immigrate to the United States.

With American policy leaders increasingly concerned about the flood of immigrants, the inclination may be to close the door on further Hmong immigrants. But unlike the many cases in which the line between political and economic reasons for emigration is blurred, the Hmong are indisputably refugees from the persecutions of one of the world's last surviving Stalinist regimes. Additionally, to a degree probably unmatched among other would-be immigrant groups today, the Hmong have spilled their blood in defense of American geopolitical interests.

During the Vietnam War, the Hmong were encouraged and paid by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the so-called secret war in Laos, designed to halt the advance of Communism in that nation and to block the North Vietnamese Army from using Laos as the site for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which it sent its troops to fight American troops in South Vietnam. The Hmong rescued downed American pilots, interdicted Communist convoys on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and, even after the fall of Laos in 1975, continued to resist the newly installed Communist regime.

One late-summer day in Menomonie, several hundred Hmong have gathered at the University of Wisconsin - Stout for a conference designed to address the human-rights crisis confronting their relatives half a world away. The Hmong estimate that over the past 18 months some 5,000 of their people have been arrested or murdered by the Communist Pathet Lao regime. Many carry hand-written lists of relatives and friends, names followed by the details of their killing. "Pathet Lao soldiers went to house and shot whole family," reads a typical entry.

As the conference opens, the chairman of the Lao Human Rights Council, Dr. Pozheb Vang, stands at a podium and points to a blown-up photograph of Yong Neng Vang, a Hmong refugee repatriated to Laos and then reportedly assassinated by the Lao regime. The picture, taken in June 1994, reveals a middle-aged man whose hands and legs are tied in front of him and whose head is bleeding from an apparent bullet wound. "This is evidence of murder in Laos," Dr. Vang sternly declares, "and there are many thousands of cases like this." The crowd nods its approval, many weeping over their own family members persecuted or killed.

The event also features a speech by Major General Vang Pao of the Royal Lao Army, the war hero who for two decades led the Hmong in their fight against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces. Today, looking a bit out of place in an auditorium in Middle America, the general tells his compatriots about recent communications that he has received from Hmong in Laos. "If the United States won't help us," Vang Pao quotes his Hmong sources as saying, "they should drop a bomb on us so we won't suffer any more."

THE story of the Hmong has been a story of neglect and betrayal. Though they were paid and encouraged by the United States to resist the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia, most of them were left to a precarious fate when the Laotian domino collapsed in 1975. Now the Hmong betrayal appears to be continuing, with the support of the Clinton Administration: the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and the government of Thailand soon may be closing the Hmong refugee camps and sending many of the 40,000 refugees still in Thailand back to Laos, where they are certain to face ruthless persecution.

Fortunately, Congress now is resisting the move and is mobilizing to assist the Thai-based Hmong in receiving permission to immigrate to the United States. In May, the House of Representatives authorized financial support for the resettlement of Hmong and other Southeast Asian refugees in the United States (though President Clinton promises a veto). Similar legislation may soon be adopted by the Senate.

Even if the repatriation of the Hmong is halted, reports from the camps in Thailand raise questions about the involvement of the UNHCR and Thai authorities in pressuring and even forcing Hmong to go back to Laos against their will. Staffers affiliated with Reps. Ben Gilman (R., N.Y.) and Lee Hamilton (D., Ind.) led a fact-finding mission to the Thai refugee camps in September 1994; Tim Bartl, a staff assistant to Rep. Steve Gunderson (R., Wisc.), and Hmong human-rights advocate Philip Smith visited the camps in December. Both groups found that, in an attempt to pressure the Hmong into returning to Laos, the UNHCR keeps them in prison-like conditions, including severely restricted food and water rations and a ban on communications with the outside world.