History > 2007 > USA > Hmong-Americans (I)

Arrest Uncovers

Divide in Hmong-Americans

June 14, 2007
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

ST. PAUL, June 9 — Year after year, Vang Pao, the most recognized leader of Hmong people in the United States, described his dream when he appeared at Hmong New Year celebrations, ceremonies for new refugees, memorial dedications. Someday, he said, he would carry his people home to a free Laos.

So when he was arrested on June 4, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government in Laos, many older Hmong-Americans said they were stunned — not so much at the accusations but at the American prosecutors for turning their backs on a war hero.

Vang Pao, a military general in Laos, was lauded for leading forces backed by the Central Intelligence Agency in the “secret war” against communists there during the Vietnam War and had, for 30 years since, made no secret of his hopes for a democratic Laos.

But the arrest of Gen. Vang Pao, 77, has also revealed a split in the Hmong population that has sprung up in this country: between old and young, between those who fled Laos and those who grew up here. A younger generation of Hmong- Americans, more skeptical of Gen. Vang Pao’s fund-raising tactics and controversial groups, said they respected the man but did not wish to return to a homeland they had never seen and worried that the charges might stain the Hmong people here.

Federal authorities said their six-month investigation revealed a plot to purchase AK-47 rifles, plastic explosives, anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air missiles in order to overthrow the government in a violation of the Neutrality Act, which bars Americans from taking military action against countries with which the nation is at peace.

“Candidly, we take no great joy in this,” McGregor W. Scott, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, where the arrests of Gen. Vang Pao and nine others took place, said in a telephone interview. “Our duty is to follow the evidence. These men had crossed the line and had committed very serious offenses.”

[On Monday, a judge in Sacramento ordered Gen. Vang Pao held without bail, even as hundreds of Hmong-Americans gathered outside the federal courthouse to protest detaining the man they know simply as “The General.”]

Cy Thao, 35, a Minnesota state representative, one of the few Hmong-Americans serving in a state legislature, said many of the older generation felt confused, even betrayed.

“For them, too, his arrest signals the end of an opportunity for them to ever go home to a free Laos,” Mr. Thao said. “He was their best hope of ever going back so this is sort of the closing of a book.”

Yuepheng Xiong, who owns Hmong ABC, a bookstore on University Avenue in the heart of this city’s Hmong community, which is one of the largest in the country, fought tears as he described the turmoil Gen. Vang Pao’s arrest had stirred.

“He was arrested by the very people that he trusted and who he had been so loyal to — the Americans,” Mr. Xiong said.

But young Hmong people here, those who grew up in the United States, saw Gen. Vang Pao as an outdated chapter from their grandparents’ memories. Others quietly questioned whether the organizations he helped create — one of which, Hmong people here say, was openly said to raise money for a military return to Laos one day — were properly spending the cash.

“The majority of young people didn’t really care what he was doing about going back to Laos,” said Paul Herr, a Hmong-American who runs an information technology company in Washington. “They just ignored him. America is their homeland.”

Despite the secret war, United States relations with Laos, which is controlled by the communist Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, were never cut off entirely. Diplomatic relations were strengthened in 1992, and in 2004, President Bush signed into law a bill extending normal trade relations to Laos.

Still, reports from human rights agencies about the treatment of the Hmong ethnic minority in Laos have been grim. In March, Amnesty International reported that thousands of Hmong people remain in the mountainous jungles of Laos, the last remnants and descendants of the C.I.A.-financed secret army that Gen. Vang Pao led. They struggle with food and medicine shortages, the report said, and fear attacks from the Lao government.

Gen. Vang Pao, arrived in the United States in 1975, and divided his time between Westminster, Calif., and the St. Paul area. John Balazs, his Sacramento lawyer, denied all the charges, stating that Gen. Vang Pao “has worked actively to pursue peaceful solutions to the problems in Laos and has disavowed violence.”

But the criminal complaint, nearly 100 pages long, alleges that since January, Gen. Vang Pao, eight other Hmong people and an American Vietnam War veteran made phone calls, held meetings in restaurants, hotel rooms and parking lots in California, and raised money from Hmong people around this country, all to buy weapons from a dealer who turned out to be an uncover agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Gen. Vang Pao, a compact man who wears conservative business suits and often travels with a cluster of advisers, is a figure known to nearly all Hmong- Americans. Since Vietnam, 145,000 Hmong refugees, who were traditionally farmers from the mountains of Laos, have been resettled here, many of them in pockets in Minnesota, Wisconsin and California.

His image — cutting a ribbon or meeting with a member of Congress in Washington or arriving at a soccer tournament — appears regularly in Hmong newspapers and on the walls of shops and homes. Sometimes his arrival at events spurs spontaneous standing ovations.

“The community right now is in a wait-and-see approach,” said Ilean Her, the executive director of the Council on Asian-Pacific Minnesotans. Some Hmong people suggested that the general might have been entrapped by the sting operation. “They don’t want to believe that he is capable of this, but they also know his passion and his desire.”

As recently as 2004, as American officials made plans for the arrival of 15,000 new Hmong refugees, Gen. Vang Pao said in an interview that he still longed for a day when all Hmong — those still hiding in Laos or living on their own somewhere in Thailand — might return in safety to Laos.

“That is still our motherland,” he said, “and hopefully we can go back when democracy rules.”

In recent years, Gen. Vang Pao had tempered his comments about Laos, Hmong-Americans said. He stopped talking as much about a military return and spoke, instead, of the need for reconciliation.

Mr. Herr said he attended a meeting in 2002 or 2003 where some among Gen. Vang Pao’s top aides were reminded by a State Department official that any violent plans for insurgency would be illegal. (State Department officials said they could not comment on Gen. Vang Pao’s case but said the department had long publicly discouraged insurgent action against countries, including Laos, with which the United States is at peace.)

Around the country, Hmong people said they feared that the arrest of Gen. Vang Pao might taint their image as a group.

“This isolated incident should not reflect on the Hmong community,” said Blong Xiong, a city council member in Fresno, Calif.

In Wisconsin, though, the echoes were already being felt. Long before the arrests, school officials in Madison had struggled over naming a school in Gen. Vang Pao’s honor. Alfred W. McCoy, a history professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, raised concerns, saying that Gen. Vang Pao had been controversial during the Vietnam War, linked to drug running and executions. He warned that the choice would embarrass the city.

Late last month, school officials held a groundbreaking. Dozens of Hmong residents proudly took photographs of themselves holding gold-painted shovels stamped with the words “Vang Pao Elementary.” Some carried home clumps of dirt from the site; they wanted to preserve such a crucial moment of recognition for a Hmong hero.

The board now says it will reconsider its choice next week.

Arrest Uncovers Divide in Hmong-Americans, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/us/14hmong.html