The Forgotten Domino: A Lonely Lao Fight for Freedom

By Claudia Rosett
The Wall Street Journal, 06/13/90

{First of two articles}

NAN, Thailand — “I think that communist rule is at the
end of its century. I want democracy for my people,” says
Shoua Xiong. He speaks for what is perhaps the world’s most
obscure anti-communist movement, an army of several thousand
guerrillas who are risking their lives to overthrow the
Vietnamese-backed government of Laos.

The 40-year-old Mr. Xiong hopes that if the West remembers
this forgotten domino of Indochina, it might help his cause.
He is a Lao resistance officer, who has just trekked into
northern Thailand from an area inside Laos that he says is
held by his anti-communist guerrillas. A trim, short man
wearing a light polo shirt and gray slacks, Mr. Xiong
(pronounced “Shong”) pauses midway through our conversation
to strip off his shoes and socks. “Restless,” he apologizes
in his fluent English. “Too much time in the jungle.”

Mr. Xiong is one of the Hmong tribesmen who in the days of
the Vietnam War fought in Laos under Gen. Vang Pao against
the communist Pathet Lao. He says that when Laos went
communist along with Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, he was
working as an interpreter for the CIA. He fled with his
family to America, and like some 180,000 other Lao refugees
became a U.S. citizen. Settling in Milwaukee, he worked at
such jobs as carpentry and typewriter repair.

He knew that back in Laos there were terrible events
taking place. “The brothers and sisters we left behind after
the war, they’ve been tortured, murdered,” says Mr. Xiong.
It’s a statement bolstered by human-rights reports and the
flight since 1975 of more than 300,000 refugees — almost 10%
of the country’s 3.5 million people. Vietnamese troops and
advisers, backed by the Soviet Union, helped to entrench the
Pathet Lao regime of Premier Kaysone Phomvihane — who has
led the Lao Communist Party since its founding in 1955.

Starting in the late 1970s came reports that along with
the usual communist means of repression, Mr. Kaysone’s regime
was using chemical weapons, the infamous “yellow rain,” to
kill rebels inside Laos. The resistance was disorganized and
discouraged. The world had not yet witnessed the overthrow of
a communist state. “We thought most of the Free World had
forgot Laos,” says a resistance spokesman, Xia Kao Vang.

Then came the uprisings in Burma in 1988, China last
spring, and finally the collapse last winter of communism in
Eastern Europe. Inspired by these events, the fragmented Lao
resistance got together, and last December declared a
provisional government for a free Laos. Mr. Xiong returned to
Southeast Asia, and now commands some of the guerrilla forces
operating inside Laos. They call themselves the Lao
Liberation Army, or LLA. Most are Hmong, still led by Gen.
Vang Pao.

Since December the LLA guerrillas have been carrying out
the fiercest attacks on Pathet Lao troops since 1975.
Vientiane has been fighting back hard enough to imply that it
takes the resistance seriously. “The Laos government has made
it a number one priority to try and make an offensive against
the resistance movement,” says a Western relief official
based on the Thai side of the Mekong River.

The government offensive has included heavy shelling along
the border, and air raids against resistance areas both near
the Mekong River and deep inside northern Laos. According to
a number of Western diplomats in Thailand, the government
forces have been using artillery, high explosives and napalm.
Mr. Vang, one of the resistance spokesmen, spreads out a
sheaf of photos showing bomb fragments, burned huts and
scorched bodies. He says they were taken in Laos this January
after an air attack on villages near the old northern capital
of Luang Prabang.

The resistance says the government also has been using
poison gas. “They are not just using bullets,” says Mr.
Xiong. “They are using chemical weapons.”

He adds that thousands of Vietnamese troops remain in
Laos, “some in Lao uniforms.” Vientiane has denied this. But
other members of the resistance, as well as observers in
Thailand, say that the People’s Army of Vietnam still fields
an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 troops in Laos, and is still
fighting alongside the Pathet Lao. Citing Thai army
intelligence reports, a diplomat in Bangkok says, “There’s no
doubt that the PAVN was involved, both air and ground
elements, in pounding the resistance in January.”

Little of this war makes its way into the world news. Lao
resistance tales tend to vanish in the jungles of Thai border
politics, which treats the Lao resistance as one more tool in
the craft of surviving while surrounded by nasty armies in
Burma, Cambodia, Laos — and the traveling troops of Vietnam.
Guerrillas such as Shoua Xiong serve Thailand as a handy form
of border defense. To that extent, says one Western diplomat,
they get help: “The Thai army is the godfather of the Lao
resistance.”

This diplomat adds, however, that the past year and a half
the Thais have generally pulled back their support for the
Lao resistance, even as it has become more effective. Thai
Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan — who will visit
President Bush in Washington tomorrow — has been sparring
with his own country’s restive military. Part of the spat
stems from his wish to improve Thailand’s relations with its
neighbors, by replacing hostilities with trade. Over the
reported misgivings of some Thai army officers, the Lao
guerrillas have been shunted into a diplomatic no man’s land.
They are allowed to operate out of Thailand, provided they do
not make too much noise about their activities and do not
force a showdown between the Thai and Laotian governments.

So the Lao resistance alternates between trying to
broadcast its new strength and flitting back to semi-secret
safe houses in Thailand or perilous camps inside Laos. On
Dec. 5, in a grand bid for support, resistance members held a
flag-raising ceremony on a hilltop a few miles inside Laos.
There they announced their new provisional government. They
invited along a Bangkok-based reporter, Robert Karniol, who
described the event in the March International Defense
Review. He concluded, “The Lao nationalists are risking
Bangkok’s ire and Vientiane’s retribution, but they hold that
a range of factors has recently combined to provide them
their first opportunity in 15 years of silent struggle.”

The resistance claims wide support among the people of
Laos. The Lao government in April banned all public rallies,
apparently afraid that anti-government demonstrations might
break out. Resistance spokesmen say they have more than
10,000 guerrilla fighters, and are getting defectors from the
Pathet Lao army. They also say they can call up reserves and
find shelter in villages where the Lao people are sick of
being overtaxed and ordered around by the state. This rings
true, say Western diplomats, one of whom adds that the Pathet
Lao have turned to air strikes against resistance areas
because “in many cases the Laotian army didn’t cooperate”
with government orders.

Laos-watchers in Thailand doubt that on its own the
resistance could soon topple the government. Some diplomats
in Bangkok think the resistance army may be much smaller than
its leaders claim. And its fighters are working with a motley
arsenal that ranges from World War II rifles to AK-47s
captured from the Pathet Lao.

But it looks like the resistance is also, as one diplomat
says, “in this for the long haul” — not least for historical
reasons. Politics in Laos tends to split along ethnic lines.
In this war, the basic factions are the highland and the
lowland Lao.

Most of the resistance fighters are drawn from the Hmong
ethnic minority, a group of highland Lao whose ancestors
immigrated to Laos from southern China about 200 years ago.
They are a tough bunch; back in 1918-22 the Hmong rebelled
with some success against the taxes and conscript labor
imposed by the French colonial government. Their name,
“Hmong,” means “free,” but they are also known as the “Meo,”
which means “savage.” Long before communism mauled Indochina,
the Hmong already had their turf quarrels with the lowland
Lao. These quarrels took on anti-communist overtones when the
Vietnam War spilled over into Laos along the Ho Chi Minh
trail.

Today, the Hmong still want an end to what one of them
calls “Vietnamese law.” Resistance spokesman Xia Kao Vang
says he and his colleagues “want the country to change like
all countries change these days.” Mr. Vang comes for an
interview in Bangkok armed with a yellow legal pad on which
he’s scribbled the crib note “We need democracy.” Like Mr.
Xiong, he explains that the first goal of the resistance is
to get the Vietnamese out of Laos. “Then the Pathet Lao and
we can negotiate,” says Mr. Vang.

This is where the resistance hopes the U.S. might offer
some help. Beyond Thailand’s jittery tolerance, and donations
from the Lao diaspora, the Lao guerrillas get little support.
The Reagan-era policy of backing anti-communist guerrillas in
places such as Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Cambodia was never
extended to Laos. Instead, the U.S. shuns all official
contact with the Lao resistance. Washington prefers to
burnish its links to the communist regime in Vientiane. The
idea seems to be that good U.S. relations with Laos might
help lure the neighborhood bully, Vietnam, toward liberal
ways. The official argument is that happy Lao communists
might cooperate in fighting drug traffic and in yielding up
prisoners of war, or their remains. This policy has flopped.

It’s time for the U.S. to rethink its approach to this
resurgent war. Interviewed in Thailand’s Ban Vinai refugee
camp near the Mekong River, a Lao resistance general, Xiong
Leng Xiong, asks: “Do you have any help for us? We are in a
hurry to change Laos.” Asked what the U.S. government knows
about these outcast freedom fighters, a State Department
officer in Washington lays out the official line, “We’re not
interested in knowing.”

Miss Rosett is editorial page editor of The Asian Wall
Street Journal.