The Hmong of Laos: CIA's Forgotten Army..

I struggled long and hard with which forum to place this thread in, finally determining that this would likely be the best, considering these people are being hunted to extinction by the Communist Laos Armed Forces for supposedly being 'terrorists', but not the typical, anti U.S. Islamic kind. They get hunted for being "terrorists funded by America". Read more below in this epic article, the best I've read all week, presented by Al-Jazeera English:

Part 1: The Lost Tribe of Laos: english.aljazeera.net...
Part 2: The Lost Tribe of Laos: english.aljazeera.net...
(This is a two part article with an excerpt below..)

"This is so sorrowful," he said. "We would like to be civilised like these pictures. We escaped and hid ourselves until today. Living so poorly. The people in these pictures are dressed in beautiful clothes, but we just live like animals."

They have lived cut off from the outside world for more than three decades, ever since the end of the Vietnam War.

Then 60,000 Hmong fought for America as part of the CIA's so-called secret army. They fought the Vietnamese and Lao communists and attacked the communist supply routes through Laos that became known in the West as the Ho Chi Minh trail.

But when the Hmong army disbanded there was a new fight, with the newly installed communist government of Laos. Many fled, and many were killed.

It was a day before I had a chance to meet the leader, the spiritual head of not just this village but of the 7,000 people I was informed are still in the jungle hiding from the Laos army.

Vang Che Chi entered the village with a procession of young fighters and blessed me, asking the spirits to keep me safe. The Hmong are animists and worship nature.

The people look to the leader for guidance to solve their misery. The leader, though, was looking to me.

The plight of these people is just unreal, once funded and armed, trained by the United States CIA to be an army to combat the illicit funneling of supplies and arms through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which in its' majority extended through the country of Laos, which was strictly neutral supposedly, and the United States was definitely not allowed to have any military deployments there. The North Vietnamese used this to their advantage to funnel their supplies into the south for the war effort.

Thirty plus years later, after the United States has established official diplomatic ties with Vietnam, and at a time when veterans of both sides meet in Vietnam or in the United States to discuss their experiences and losses, others who fought in the era, their children, women and relatives are all being hunted to extinction, even today, at this very moment, by a brutal Laos government accusing them of being terrorists. I advise you to read this excellent article and discuss it here.

If this is the wrong forum to post this in, would the moderator kindly move it to the proper forum? Thank you.

[edit on 3/13/2008 by runetang]