The Hmong legacy of honor, tragedy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 31, 1998 | by David Wagner

Thirty years ago, as Ho Chi Minh advanced communism through Southeast Asia, the Laotian Hmong stood with America. Their reward? Abandonment, then persecution.

It has taken a long time, but the "secret war" at last is coming to be known. The Hmong mountain-dwellers of Laos, a courageous and oppressed minority that stuck with the United States and the anticommunist cause -- only to be betrayed -- are starting to get their day in the sun.

In May 1997, the entire Hmong-American community -- and in particular Gen. Vang Pao, its leader -- was honored by Congress in a ceremony on The Mall in Washington. More recently, Jane Hamilton-Merritt, the foremost U.S. chronicler and advocate of the Hmong and author of Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with that brave people.

Hamilton-Merritt "has resolutely told the true story of the Hmong people and the atrocities they have suffered" wrote GOP Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey in a letter supporting her nomination, "even at times when many high-profile organizations (including the United States Department of State and officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) were ignoring or downplaying the existence of persecution" in Laos.

Hmong culture and national identity is estimated to be some 4,000 years old. During the 18th century the Hmong migrated to the misty mountains of northern Laos from southern China in the face of persecution by the Manchu emperor. They built a life for themselves in the Laotian mountains and also in parts of Vietnam, Burma and Thailand. They maintained trade relations with the ethnic Lao who live in the flatlands and in the cities of Vientiane and Luang Prabang, but they never diluted their tribal ways of life as they continued to live, in proud independence, in their mountain redoubts.

When Ho Chi Minh began his multidecade crusade to force communism on all of Southeast Asia -- and the United States began its blundering effort to stop him -- the Hmong stood with America. Working closely with the CIA, they rescued downed American pilots, disrupted the Viet Cong's supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail and guided U.S. soldiers through the jungle to safety. They saved many American and South Vietnamese lives, and they delayed -- though they did not prevent -- the descent of the communist pall upon South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Yet all this was kept secret.

"Gen. Vang Pao kept [North Vietnamese] Gen. Giap bottled up for 10 years at great cost to the Hmong," Hamilton-Merritt tells Insight. "[Former CIA Director] Bill Colby testified that the Hmong kept some of Gen. Giap's best divisions at bay."

But when the last Americans pulled out of Saigon and left Southeast Asia to the communists, the Hmong were abandoned. Perhaps the American policymakers who had worked with them hoped they would just fade back into their independent mountain existence, like a sort of Asian Switzerland.

But it didn't work that way. The Hmong had not been neutrals: They had been loyal to the United States and the anticommunist cause. The SouthAsian communists and their Soviet backers did not forget.

April 1975 saw victories by three Southeast Asian communist parties: the Viet Cong in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao in Laos. The horrific crimes of the Khmer Rouge, though initially disbelieved in the West apart from committed anticommunist circles including American Opinion, Human Events and National Review, eventually were memorialized in the movie The Killing Fields. Today, the very name Khmer Rouge is a byword for brutality. The carnage in Laos, however, went completely unreported at the time except for Hilaire du Berrier and Patrick Mahoney in American Opinion and Review of the News. It was tragic.

Hamilton-Merritt -- or "Dr. Jane" as she is known to her Hmong friends -- urges us not to imagine that Cambodia was unique. "During the mid-1970s things were just as bad in Laos as in Cambodia, only nobody made a movie about it" she tells Insight, "Also, Laos has no major tourist attraction, like Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so it lacks even that much contact with the outside world. The Pathet Lao had a very radicalized leadership, influenced by the Vietnamese communists. The first Pathet Lao premier, Kay Sone, was trained by hardliners in Hanoi. His regime killed the royal family and its staff, closed the border and began ripping out all old institutions to build the new Marxist man."

Because of their wartime loyalties, the Hmong were singled out for especially cruel treatment. Soon after the U.S. withdrawal and the Pathet Lao takeover, Hmong refugees reaching Thailand told of colored "rain" that was dropped on their villages from helicopters -- causing massive hemorrhaging and quick, painful death for those it touched directly and a slower but equally painful death for others. Years later, "yellow rain" came to be well-known because of the Soviets' use of it in Afghanistan, and scientists figured out the particular venom it contained: triochothecene mycotoxin. But its first known use on humans, says Hamilton-Merritt, was as part of the Laotian communists' vengeance on the Hmong.