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Tragic Mountains: The
Hmong, the Americans and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 is the
culmination of fourteen years of experience and research of the Indochina Wars from
journalist, war correspondent, photographer and human rights activist Dr Jane
Hamilton-Merritt. Since the 1960s, Hamilton-Merritt has covered war in
Indochina and its aftermath, taking a particular interest in the role of the Hmong,
an ethnic minority group that live in highland areas of Laos and Vietnam.
The Hmong are a four thousand year-old culture that
originates in southern China, but which extended southwards to Thailand, Laos
and Vietnam in a mass migration to escape Chinese persecution in the eighteenth
century. During the Vietnam War- more accurately described as the Second
Indochina War- thousands of Hmong were recruited by the CIA to assist and
rescue American soldiers as a part of the USA’s covert operations in Laos to
disrupt the Ho Chi Minh supply trail and to counter insurgency by the communist Pathet Lao. Promised by the Americans that with their help the communists
would be defeated, the Hmong, led by General Vang Pao and in many cases trained
to become pilots through US and Thai support, became loyal and fearless allies
of the United States. However,
the Nixon administration’s inauspicious negotiated peace settlement of 1972 left
the doors open for rolling communist victory across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos
in 1975, without allowing proper provisions to defend their allies in Laos, the
Hmong.
Kaysone Phomvihane’s Pathet Lao came to power in Laos with
an open declaration to “wipe out” the reactionary Hmong who had fought alongside
the Americans for decades. The United States Government’s shameful abandonment
of their former allies is detailed harrowingly by Hamilton-Merritt, who became
a voice for the refugee Hmong community in Thailand that grew as Hmong fled
their homeland in fear of persecution. The author, who shows immense respect
and sympathy for the plight of the Hmong, worked for the US State Department as
Expert Consultant on Highland Lao Refugees in the 1980s and has several times
testified before US congress on issues regarding refugees, human rights abuses
and genocide in Asia. Furthermore, she has twice been nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize for her work on behalf of the Hmong, in 1988 and 2000.
At over five hundred pages, this edition does justice to the
many years of dedicated research that went into it. Personally, I found myself
losing interest in the details of military operations throughout the American
war in Laos, a focus that takes up much of the middle part of the book. Where
Hamilton-Merritt’s work really comes into its own is in the explanation of
events after the American withdrawal and communist takeover; when Laos became
one of the world’s most secretive totalitarian states. “Extinct Destruction
Operations”, a genocidal campaign by the newly-formed Lao People’s Democratic
Republic (LPDR) to eliminate the Hmong minority, passed almost totally ignored
or denied by the international media. The most startling element of this came
in the reports from Lao Hmong who had escaped to Thailand of poisonous rains
dropped over Hmong settlements in their home country, causing acute sickness
and death to those infected by it. The theory that the Soviet Union had
been violating the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in providing
the LPDR with chemical weapons to attack the Hmong- later discovered to
be true- was denounced by the US government and international media, who preferred
the explanation of scientist and politician Matthew Meselson that the ‘yellow
rain’ reported by the Hmong was in fact bee faeces. Hamilton-Merritt’s dynamic journalistic skill
allows that the wider issues pushing US policy- in this case, the Carter administration’s
wish to pursue better relations with the Soviet Union- are
examined as closely as the individual cases of Hmong families, to which the
author applies great care and interest. This allows the reader a broad
understanding of the context of US policy decisions, as well as a deeper
appreciation of the impact these decisions had on Hmong lives.
The USA’s ‘secret war’ in Laos is not widely known of, a
consequence of the reticence that surrounded American actions in Laos at the
time and for years following the end of the war. Even less understood is the role
played by the Hmong as allies of the USA, and the horrifying consequences this
kinship brought. The first edition of Tragic
Mountains was published in 1993; in the 1999 edition, Hamilton-Merritt’s
introduction describes the moment, on 15th May 1997, when the Hmong
contribution to the USA’s anti-communist fight in Indochina was finally given
official recognition by members of Congress, at a procession of three thousand
Hmong and Lao veterans who served under General Vang Pao. Nonetheless,
Hamilton-Merritt wrote in 1999, “it is true that the identity of the Hmong
people is not yet established among all US policymakers, and that the American
public remains largely uninformed [about the role of the Hmong in
supporting the USA in Laos]”.
Ban Vinai was the largest Hmong refugee camp in Thailand, accommodating
the thousands of Hmong who fled over the ‘Berlin Wall’ of the Mekong River that
marks the border between Laos and Thailand. Following a programme agreed by
Thailand, Laos and the USA in regards to these refugees, Hmong in Ban Vinai began
to be forcibly repatriated to Laos without proper security measures in place to
ensure that they would not automatically be pushed into ‘seminar’ forced labour
camps. As recently as 2010, TIME magazine reported on the fears of Hmong refugees
still living in Thailand of being forcibly returned to Laos, where sporadic insurgency
by Hmong groups against the communist government has been ongoing.
Tragic Mountains
is highly commendable for its comprehensive analysis of the Hmong-CIA relationship
and its terrible consequences for the Lao Hmong. I did not learn as much about
Hmong society from Hamilton-Merritt’s work as I did from The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, another book written by a
woman with many years of experience of the Hmong; however, it provides sufficient
information on the Hmong lifestyle, character and history for an understanding
of how and why this group became involved in the CIA’s covert operations and
the impact this has had. Reading Tragic
Mountains has significantly developed my understanding of the recent
history of Laos and has opened my eyes to a shocking and shameful element of the
Indochina War- the abuse and betrayal of America’s former allies, the Hmong-
that continues to be overlooked and uncompensated.
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