Vang Pao

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Vang Pao ( Hmong : Vaj Pov , born  December 8, 1929 in Ha Ta Sheng , Muang Nong Het , Xieng Khouang Province ; †  January 6, 2011 in Clovis , California ) was a Lao general who served in the Royal Lao Army and during worked closely with the US government during the Vietnam War and the related Lao Civil War . He belonged to the Hmong minority . On behalf of the CIA , he raised a so-called secret army made up of fighters from his own ethnic group, who fought with guerrilla tactics against the procommunist Pathet Lao and the armed forces of North Vietnam . So the use of American ground troops in Laos should be avoided. After the Communist victory in 1975, he fled to the United States, where he served as a leader of the Hmong American community .

Life

Vang Pao was born in a village in northeast Laos. He belongs to the ethnic group of the Hmong , who settle in the highlands of the Laotian mountains. He attended school sporadically for six years. During the Second World War he joined the French colonial troops, worked as a translator and rose to sergeant. After independence from Laos he was taken over into the Royal Laotian Army, in which he rose to major general. He was the first member of the Hmong to achieve such a high military rank.

Role in the Lao civil war

In 1960 he was commissioned by the US foreign intelligence service, the CIA, to raise a rebel army which, on behalf of the United States , was supposed to fight the pro-communist Pathet Lao active in northern Laos and, after their intervention in the Laotian civil war from 1961, also the North Vietnamese people's army (“Secret Army”) . Vang Pao quickly set up a guerrilla force of 7,000 men, which he increased in the following years to a strength of 39,000. The general had great influence among the Hmong. He represented a unifying figure for the various Hmong tribes. To support this position, he married five women from different tribes (which was permitted under Laotian law at the time), with whom he fathered 25 children.

Despite its inferior personnel and technology, the "secret army", which was supplied by American air units and supported by bombing, achieved some considerable success. However, 35,000 Hmong fighters also fell. To compensate for these losses against the North Vietnamese army, which used superior technology such as tanks and artillery, Vang Pao recruited more and more rebels. Since there were hardly any young men left, he increasingly used child soldiers . In 1968 the North Laos program director of the US development aid organization USAID estimated that 30% of Vang Pao's fighters were 14 years of age or younger (some even 10), 30% 15 or 16 and 30% older than 35 years. The men in the intermediate age group are "all dead". As a result, there were almost no men of marriageable age who could start families or work the rice fields. The Hmong villages were therefore very dependent on American food aid, which in turn was administered by Vang Pao. He was able to put pressure on villages so that they would be cut off from supplies of food if they refused to provide their young sons for his troops. Vang Pao was also able to mark villages that opposed his demands to the US armed forces as Pathet Lao villages, thus exposing them to American bombing attacks.

Vang Pao financed his work to a large extent from the heroin trade . The CIA approved this, even if the target group for the drug included US soldiers deployed in South Vietnam. The CIA camouflage airline Air America even helped transport the raw opium. The then CIA director William Colby distinguished Vang Pao as the "greatest hero of the Vietnam War".

According to various estimates, between 10% and half of the previously 300–400,000 Laotian Hmong died during the war and the acts of revenge against the ethnic group after the victory of the communists, whose members were branded as helpers of the Americans.

Exile in the USA

After his escape to the USA, Vang Pao lived on a ranch in the state of Montana , and later in Minnesota and southern California , where many of the 200,000 Hmong who fled Laos to the USA settled. They continued to regard him as a leader, with some even attributing supernatural abilities to him.

In 2007, American law enforcement agencies initiated proceedings against Vang Pao on charges of conspiracy to violently overthrow the Lao government. Allegedly, he and other Hmong leaders tried to buy $ 10 million worth of weapons and to hire mercenaries. He has therefore been detained in the meantime. Two years later, however, the US federal government dropped all allegations against him.

Vang Pao died in January 2011 at the age of 81 years in a hospital in California's Fresno County at a pneumonia . A request from his family for an exemption for a funeral at the American National Cemetery in Arlington was not granted.

Movie

  • Marc Eberle : America's Secret War in Laos . Documentation, Germany, 2008, 52 min.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Pacyinz Lyfoung: General Vang Pao Short Biography ( Memento of the original from November 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Clovis Unified School District, Jan. 11, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cusd.com
  2. ↑ a b c Diana Marcum: Vang Pao dies at 81; exiled Hmong general. In: Los Angeles Times (online), January 7, 2011.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Douglas Martin: Gen. Vang Pao, Laotian Who Aided US, Dies at 81. In: The New York Times , January 8, 2011, p. A19.
  4. ^ John Prados, Safe for Democracy. The Secret Wars of the CIA. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago 2006, pp. 356-357.
  5. ^ Edgar "Pop" Buell, 1968. Quoted from: Anne Fadiman : The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1997, p. 132.
  6. ^ Hugh DS Greenway: The pendulum of war swings against. In: Life , Vol. 68, No. 12, April 3, 1970, pp. 32-36, here p. 36.
  7. ^ A b Kenton Clymer: Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War. In: The Columbia History of the Vietnam War. Columbia University Press, New York 2011, pp. 357-381, here p. 363.
  8. ^ Arnold R. Isaacs: Without Honor. Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimor 1983, p. 167.
  9. ↑ Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. 1997, pp. 132-133.
  10. ↑ Jesse McKinley: US Drops Case Against Exiled Hmong Leader. In: The New York Times , September 19, 2009, p. A12.
  11. ^ Vang Pao Denied Burial at Arlington. In: Sacramento Bee , February 4, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Vang Pao
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Laotian military officer
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Nong Het , Xiangkhouang Province
DATE OF DEATH January 6, 2011
Place of death Clovis , California