Visiting the Hmong, America's Forgotten Refugees

By Pha Lo, Pacific News Service

Fifteen thousand Hmong may soon come to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Thailand, where they have lived suspended lives since fighting for the CIA in Laos during the Vietnam War. The writer, whose father fought in the secret war, visits a Hmong family in a small village in Thailand and asks why some Hmong who fought for America get to emigrate, and others do not.

NAN PROVINCE, Thailand-March 31, 2004-In August of 2003, news that America might resettle 15,000 Hmong refugees from a camp in Thailand had reached an unintended audience. C.V. Her heard about it on the sole television set shared by his village in the northeastern Thai province of Nan.

I had come to Southeast Asia to find people like Her, who, much like my own father, had picked up an American-supplied gun, the first gun he had ever seen, and donned a uniform to become an overnight soldier in the CIA's secret army in Laos. My father had watched North Vietnamese convoys sneak supplies through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, been struck by debris from an exploding grenade and lost many good friends. But he was still one of the "lucky" ones who had left Laos and survived life in Thailand refugee camps to be resettled in Salt Lake City, Utah, where I was born.

Why, I wanted to know, were people like Mr. Her still living in Thailand, while others of us made it to America?

Inside his bamboo-thatched home some 15 kilometers from the town center, Her sits on a wicker stool atop his freshly swept dirt floor and motions for me to come inside. At first he is reluctant to talk about the war, fearing retaliation for divulging information. But slowly, he begins to relate a story he has waited 28 years to tell. He shows me black and white photographs of himself as a young soldier. They are his personal documents of service in a secret war.

Her is one of thousands of Hmong men who trained and fought with the CIA-led effort to combat Communist forces in Northern Laos during the Vietnam War. They were recruited in the 1960s to help gather intelligence, rescue downed American pilots and cut off North Vietnamese forces along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Hmong soldiers served in covert guerilla programs until 1975, when the Communists took official control of the country. The new government set out to torture, re-educate or kill anyone who had allied with the United States.

An estimated 30,000 Hmong, including civilians, died in that war, out of an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Hmong people in Laos at the time. Many more fell victim to the genocide that ensued after the Communist takeover. Desperate families fled by the thousands, on foot, by boat, or, if they were lucky, on the few U.S. planes that returned for them. C.V. Her arrived in Thailand with his family in 1975.

Her's wife peers bashfully from behind a cardboard box stuffed with letters from family in the United States. Inspired by the news, she has unpacked copies of her original application for resettlement, dated March 8, 1975, and stamped with a barely legible seal from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has held on to the tattered document, along with the hope that people have not forgotten her. She is sending copies to her family, urging them to remind America that she is waiting for an answer.

But the Her family may have to wait countless more years in vain. The resettlement policy, announced in December 2003 by the U.S. State Department, will not include them. It will allow entry for a maximum of 15,000 refugees and is limited to those now living on the Wat Tham Krobak campgrounds -- a Buddhist temple about an hour and a half from Bangkok by car. That number is only half of an estimated 30,000 refugees scattered throughout Northern Thailand. With direct links to the war, these refugees, just like the Wat ones, are not accepted as Thai citizens, are not allowed to leave their respective provinces and are not welcome back in Laos.

The Wat Tham Krobak refugees were considered for resettlement because many lost UNHCR protection after leaving "established" camps in 1999.

The State Department refuses to speculate on the fate of Hmong refugees outside of the Wat campgrounds. The department now has a list, compiled by Thai officials, of those living at Wat Tham Krobak who will be eligible for resettlement. No new names will be added to that list.

Still, news of the resettlement policy will reach unintended audiences throughout Thailand. Thousands of people like C.V. Her will renew their hopes and wait on a policy that has already decided who will go and who will stay. They will likely spend their lives as squatters, hoping that the Thai government does not forcibly repatriate them to Laos, a country with a deep-rooted history of ethnic cleansing practices against the Hmong.

"It's been such a long time, and we want to see our family," Her's wife says to me as I make my way out of the village. "When you get home, will you tell someone about us?"

"Yes," I say. Soon there will be 15,000 other Hmong refugees coming to America with stories like this family's. They and those still left behind were American partners, cast away as dispensable tools of war in an unfortunate history that has claimed their land and left them stranded. I hope for this new group to never hear the words I have heard countless times: "Go back to your own country." America is their country. They are America's refugees.

PNS contributor Pha Lo, 22, is a writer who traveled to Asia in 2003 to research Hmong refugees.