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ShareSACRAMENTO, Calif.—At a recent demonstration at the California state Capitol for Gen. Vang Pao and the other 10 defendants charged with plotting the overthrow of Laos, passing motorists saw teenagers holding a bedsheet with the following message:
“Hear Their Cries
Google It
`Hunted Like Animals.’”
The protesters were trying to get passers-by—and the world—to learn about their cause by Googling a video called “Hunted Like Animals.”
The graphic, gut-wrenching 75-minute documentary has become the rallying cry of Hmong protesters across America.
The film by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Rebecca Sommer captures the stories of several thousand Hmong hiding in the Lao jungle, frightened of being killed or abused by Lao soldiers.
Parts of the film, released late last year, were shot by Hmong still in hiding decades after they fought the Lao and Vietnamese communists in support of the U.S. cause in the Vietnam War.
It includes interviews with dozens of others who managed to escape to Thailand. One woman tells of a sister who was mutilated and raped and of a sister-in-law burned to death in her hut.
Sommer said the film was not meant to be widely distributed but “was an insider film for the U.N. and governments.”
She said she’s been handing out DVDs “like fresh-baked bread” to 1,400 U.N. officials and international policymakers from Manhattan to Bangkok.
The work has inspired demonstrations nationwide. Vang and the other suspects are in Sacramento County jail awaiting trial.
Said Sommer, “It’s galvanizing a new generation of Hmong students and leaders who are not concentrating so much on the arrest, but purely on human rights violations and their wish to make the world know.”
Scenes from the film have been viewed more than 68,000 times in the four months they have been posted on the Web site youtube.com. Sommer said roughly 60,000 viewers a month watch it on her Web site.
“A lot of young Hmong are writing me, saying they saw my film, and it opened a can of worms but brought a healing process to their parents” who had been reluctant to talk about their kin in Laos.
Those in Thailand and Laos are the remnants of Vang’s secret jungle army, recruited by the CIA to battle the Lao and Vietnamese communists from 1961 to 1975.
After the Communist Pathet Lao victory, tens of thousands of Hmong fled to refugee camps in Thailand, then came to the United States. Others died trying, and many of the rest hid in the mountains and jungles.
Amnesty International reported that on April 6, 2006, Lao troops killed 26 Hmong foraging for food, 17 of them children.
The Lao government denies the charges. Phiane Philakone, the Lao ambassador to the United States, told The Sacramento Bee there are “no human rights violations” against the Hmong.
“I deny these things because we don’t have people in the jungle—it’s only a rumor; it’s not accurate information,” Philakone said. “There are no more Hmong refugees (in Laos).”
In “Hunted Like Animals,” Hmong in Thailand and the Lao jungles tell a different story.
“The people in the jungle are the reason why Vang Pao is doing this (allegedly plotting the armed liberation of Laos),” said Crystal Vang. She bought the DVD at the Hmong New Year’s celebration in Fresno last December.
“It was horrible, terribly sad,” said Vang, 36. “I have not seen humans being tortured in such a way.”
Vang, whose father was a doctor for the CIA in Laos, said she’s shown the video to many of her young friends, most of whom “couldn’t make themselves watch the whole video.”
She doesn’t support revolution. “I want to help those people to have a peaceful life and a home and some normal food to eat. But I want to do it legally.”
Pha Lo, a 25-year-old Hmong journalist, couldn’t bear to watch it. But Lo said “it’s educating the younger generation, and it’s getting a reaction from a lot of people in the community who are normally apathetic or ill-informed.”
Phil Smith, Washington director for the Lao Veterans of America, said the film “substantiates what we’ve known is going on for several years and has further aroused and heightened awareness in the Hmong community.”
Smith and other activists worked hard to pass U.S. House Resolution 402, which in 2004 urged the international community and the Lao government “to halt immediately all acts of violence against the Hmong population and provide them with humanitarian assistance.”
But the resolution hasn’t been backed by changes in policy by the United States, which has normalized relations with Laos.
“Hunted Like Animals” isn’t the only footage from the jungles. Lee Pao Yang, a Hmong activist, has several videos made by his older brother Lue Yang, a former taxi driver at the CIA’s secret air base at Long Chieng.
They talk weekly by phone, Lee Pao Yang said. “My brother has about nine children—they’re on the run all the time looking for food,” he said, adding that Lao soldiers hunt them with chemical weapons.
Mary Thandabuth, a Lao activist, has a very different view of the alleged plot to overthrow Laos and the Hmong in the jungle.
“Hmong guerrillas attack our buses,” Thandabuth said, “and civilians get killed and robbed.” She added that many minorities in Laos—including Hmong not in the jungles—live peacefully.
Thandabuth, 54, said that after 1975, she led student protests when the communists failed to keep their promises to eliminate class differences or allow freedom of speech. She was kicked out of college, she said, and fled to Thailand by boat in 1978.
But in recent years, Laos has become a much more open society, she said. “Now it’s 60 percent democracy.”
“It’s nonsense,” she said. “Even Thailand is sending some Hmong people back. We will welcome them. We need to go forward, we want peace, but those people (the plot suspects) don’t want peace—they’re crazy.”
Sommer insists the Hmong in hiding, mostly women and children, are not part of any resistance. One man who escaped said, “We don’t understand anything—we come from the jungle.”
The German-born Sommer has crusaded for human rights since age 16. When she went to Thailand to report for the United Nations in October 2005, “I had no clue about Hmong politics or the history of the Vietnam War.”
Then she met a Hmong woman with a young daughter who shared a big root she’d dug up. Sommer was touched that the starving woman still wanted to offer her something. The woman described for Sommer how she had found a group of relatives who had been stripped naked, mutilated and murdered.
American Hmong hold the key to getting Laos to allow international monitors to help the Hmong come out safely, she said. “What you need is an amnesty plan coming from the Hmong community to verify the Hmong in hiding want to come out. They’re constantly saying they are too afraid.”
She called any overthrow plot an “absurd idea” and said American Hmong leaders must hold talks with Thai, Lao, U.S. and U.N. officials.
“If Laos would treat its people who come out fairly and allow a third party in to ensure it, the problem would be solved,” Sommer said.
