California Lawyer Magazine

A Grim Picture Gets Grimmer

August 1, 2008

    
When the leaders of Hmong advocacy groups in the United States speak of the military campaign being waged by the Communist government in Laos against their countrymen, they describe it as nothing short of genocide.

      Philip Smith, for one, who heads a group in Washington, D.C., called Lao Veterans of America, maintains that Lao government forces have killed some 10,000 ethnic Hmong over the past 14 months. "I think the best way to characterize it is the Lao government is seeking the final solution to the Hmong," he says. "They wish to exterminate all those Hmong who have sought to live independently from the government."

      Vaughn Vang, who is director of the Lao Human Rights Council in Wisconsin, offers a similar assessment. "Currently, there is an all-out ethnic cleansing war that has been launched by the Lao military to wipe out the remaining 9,000 to 15,000 unarmed Hmong civilians hiding in the mountain jungles of Laos," he declared in late January during a congressional forum in Washington, D.C.

      Judging from the eyewitness reports that have trickled out of the country over the past few months, the embattled Hmong clearly are suffering. Moreover, there is widespread suspicion that the Laotian government interpreted the arrest of its old enemy, Gen. Vang Pao, and other Hmong exiles in California last year as a green light to step up their attacks against the Hmong, who decades ago threatened to take over the country.

      But both human rights groups and journalists have been banned from the region, and with so little information to go on it is difficult to estimate the true scale of the violence. T. Kumar, the director of advocacy for Asia at Amnesty International, calls the situation "dire" and notes that the Lao government appears to be trying to starve out the Hmong. "The situation is bad, there's no doubt about that," he says. But the actual number of casualties, he adds, "is very difficult to confirm." So far, at least, his organization has refrained from using the word genocide.

      Meanwhile, across the Mekong River in Thailand, where several thousand Hmong exiles are living in refugee camps, there is growing concern over the Thai government's efforts to forcibly send the exiles back to Laos, where presumably they would be in serious danger. In May, eight U.S. senators, including Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging her to exert U.S. influence on the Thai government to halt such repatriations. And on June 12 four members of the House of Representatives introduced a resolution appealing directly to the Thai government to let the refugees stay. Less than two weeks later, however, a Thai official announced that the government had sent 800 Hmong back anyway, insisting that these particular refugees "wanted to go home."