Hmong caught between rock, hard place

BAN KHEK NOI, Thailand (AP) — It was the fear of persecution that drove Yang Pahua to flee her native Laos — twice.

Yang Pahua, 17, is one of 21 girls and five boys whose stories have drawn new attention to the plight of the Hmong, an ethnic minority. Their families first fled Laos in 2004 for an informal refugee settlement in the Thai province of Phetchabun. The youths were sent back to Laos in December 2005.

In June this year, it emerged that a dozen of them ran away again. They have since made it back to Phetchabun.

The youth share the tragedy of thousands of Hmong who are hiding in the jungles of Laos or living in limbo in Thailand. The Hmong are viewed with suspicion by Laos because they fought in the CIA-backed “secret war” of the 1960s and 1970s against the communists who are now in power. Some, including the youth, also are Christian at a time when the government in Vientiane views proselytizing as a challenge to its authority in a mostly Buddhist country.

Yet the Hmong who escape across the border risk a hostile reception in Thailand, which has deported more than 300 of them over the past year. Thai officials reserve the right to send back all the Laotian Hmong, whom they no longer consider political refugees.

“Now, I am being sought after by both the Lao and Thai governments,” Yang Pahua said. “I would like to plead for help from humanitarian agencies … I can’t continue to live like this.”

Yesterday, almost 150 Hmong refugees from Laos, including 90 children, went on hunger strike in a Thai detention center, saying they would rather die than be repatriated to the communist state.

“Asking for a free life,” said one placard written in Thai and hung on the bars of a cell at an immigration detention center in the northeastern province of Nongkhai, near the Lao border.

The refugees were seen on close-circuit television, shouting and shaking the bars before journalists were asked to leave.

The 149 refugees “decided to starve themselves and die in prison due to the fact that they have been tortured for the last eight months without a date to be released,” said Laura Lo Xiong of the U.S.-based Hmong International Human Rights Watch.

“The message they sent to the world is, if the Thai and Lao governments desperately want to deport this group, they may take the dead bodies,” she wrote to reporters.

Yang Pahua, her mother and her four siblings were among the Hmong who formed an early refugee community at Huay Nam Khao village, about 60 miles south of the Lao border, in 2004. Their numbers grew fast, with the latest survey by the Thai military putting them at 7,700.

Yang Pahua first fled to Thailand after her father was killed upon his return from a six-month visit to his brother in the United States, she said. She claims Laotian security forces suspected him of channeling funds from Hmong Americans to anti-government rebels.

Shortly before Christmas 2005, the youths left the camp for choir practice at a nearby church, and unwittingly strayed too far. Thai officials jailed them, then secretly deported them and their teacher back to Laos.

For more than a year afterward, neither Thai nor Lao officials admitted knowledge of their whereabouts. Yang Pahua said she and 20 other girls were detained for two months in Paksan, 125 miles east of Vientiane. Then they were transferred to Khammouan province, where they were forced to do farming and housework in harsh conditions.

The five Hmong boys and the female teacher were held in separate locations, and their fate remains unknown.

Tears flowing, Yang Pahua charged that she was tortured and sexually harassed by Lao police officers.

“He [a police officer] pushed my head against a cement wall and took off my clothes,” Yang Pahua said in an interview in Thailand. “He touched and squeezed my breast and neck and kicked me.”

“He said to me that ’don’t think that I dare not kill you. You are just a minority group member living in this country. I can kill you any time.’ ”

She said police beat her for several days, deprived her of food and detained her in solitary confinement to make her falsely confess she conspired with Americans and Thais in anti-government activities, partly through spreading Christianity. About two percent of Laos’ 5.8 million people are Christian.

In April, Lao officials said they found the missing girls and sent them to live with relatives in various parts of the country. The Lao government displayed the girls, aged 13 through 18, to U.N. officials, diplomats and journalists at a ceremony marking their release.

But even while with relatives in Vientiane, Yang Pahua felt her life was under threat from police.

About a dozen of the girls then fled Laos again for Phetchabun. They are keeping a low profile for fear the Thai government will send them back to Laos, but some talked to outsiders in hopes of getting help.

Their stories cannot be independently verified, and the Lao government said only that they were happily reunited with their relatives.

Yang Pahua said she stayed in hiding with her friend, Vang Paku, 17, who she claims suffers mental problems as a result of police beatings. Her friend’s answers to questions were at times barely coherent.

“The communist Lao bar the Hmong from making a living and bar Hmong children from studying,” said Vang Paku. “They killed my father.”

The story of their group remains one of the saddest legacies of the Vietnam War. Some 300,000 Laotians, many of them Hmong, fled into Thailand after the communists took over in 1975. Many resettled in the United States.

In the meantime, thousands of Hmong retreated to the jungles — some in fear, some to fight a hopeless rear-guard battle against the communists.

The desperate struggle for survival whittled their numbers down to scattered bands of starving men, women and children with a handful of rusty old guns who are constantly on the run. Some surrender, and some make their way across the border into Thailand.

The tale of these ragtag remnants from the war garnered rare international attention in early June when Vang Pao, 77, who formerly led the Hmong guerrilla force and fled to the U.S. after the 1975 communist victory, was arrested in California with 11 other Hmong for plotting the violent overthrow of the Lao government. They denied the accusation.