What you're not hearing
Jun. 10th, 2005 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lurkittyMy brother-in-law is a tall, cheerful chain smoker who rarely talks about his experiences in Vietnam. So I was really surprised when he opened the conversation the other day with a comment about the Thai closing the Lao border due to a Hmong uprising. He is still really angry about what we did to the Hmong, and now this chapter is finally coming to a close, and we're hearing next to nothing about it.
When the war ended on April 30, 1975, we left alot of people behind despite the helicopter evacuation seen round the world on the 6 o'clock news. Our government paid the Hmong, a tribe living in the mountains of Laos, to carry on an insurgency against the communist government. Thy did their best for us. We continued to fund them covertly for many years after the war. Then we hung them out to dry.
There are some estimated 15,000 men, women and children starving in the mountains. A few hundred just surrendered to the communist government in the hopes they will be treated humanely. I hope they will be treated better than we treated them. Four Americans who went in to aid them were arrested and deported. There have always been racial tensions between the Lao and Hmong, let's hope they can get beyond that and work things out on a humanitarian level. But with everything else going on, I fear the world is largely ignoring the plight of the Hmong, just like we have for 30 years.
When the war ended on April 30, 1975, we left alot of people behind despite the helicopter evacuation seen round the world on the 6 o'clock news. Our government paid the Hmong, a tribe living in the mountains of Laos, to carry on an insurgency against the communist government. Thy did their best for us. We continued to fund them covertly for many years after the war. Then we hung them out to dry.
There are some estimated 15,000 men, women and children starving in the mountains. A few hundred just surrendered to the communist government in the hopes they will be treated humanely. I hope they will be treated better than we treated them. Four Americans who went in to aid them were arrested and deported. There have always been racial tensions between the Lao and Hmong, let's hope they can get beyond that and work things out on a humanitarian level. But with everything else going on, I fear the world is largely ignoring the plight of the Hmong, just like we have for 30 years.
