For many people, especially my parents generation, its horrifying to learn that the U.S. would be willing to return them to the very country that they fled due to threats of violence, torture and death, she said. We Family members pray during the Buddhist ceremony for Vang. Although Vang Pao's supporters portrayed him as a father figure uniting all his people, the Hmong (an ethnic minority in Laos), on the side of the US against the communist world, his critics regarded him as a charismatic but ruthless opium warlord, who made arrogant and misleading claims to speak on behalf of all Hmong. A deeper view that unites instead of divides, connecting why the story matters to you. VP, as he was known to the CIA, personally trained thousands of irregular soldiers. Later, as a major general he commanded the Royal Lao Army's Military Region II, which he fought to . That year, Gen. Vang Pao was charged with plotting to provide $10 million in arms to antigovernment forces in Laos in a conspiracy of such dimensions that American prosecutors compared it to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. "Gen. Vang Pao, an iconic figure in the Hmong community and a key U.S. ally during the Vietnam War, died Thursday afternoon in Clovis [Calif.] after spending days in the hospital with pneumonia. "He had been getting better for the last few days, but last night he was getting worse and now he has left us.". Prior to his arrest, Vang Pao was slated to have an elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin named after him, a proposal that met with opposition over Alfred W. McCoys allegations that Vang had been involved in war crimes and drug trafficking, with Gary Yia Lee and other scholars strongly disputing his claims. There are many more secrets and tales from the past, so Lee and I call on the eldest sister. [33][34] By 200405, independent journalists investigating complex financial relations, ethics probes, and scandals surrounding Cha Vang and various lawsuits. Congressional committees discussed the war in secret sessions at the time it was being fought, and the press uncovered significant details. [14][15][16][17], Throughout Vang's residence in the U.S., the Hmong leader diplomatically opposed human rights violations by the communist government of Laos against the Hmong and Laotian people. Would they be like my grandmother? [9], Vang emigrated to the United States after the communists seized power in Laos in 1975. He was a leader in the Hmong American community in the United States. contact customer service His eldest son Chao Francois Vang said he had been admitted to the hospital on December 26, 2010, after attending Hmong New Year celebrations in Fresno. [30][31][32], Many of Vang's former veterans and their families, whose relatives were still being persecuted and killed in Laos, opposed Vang's change of stance on the issue of Normalized Trade Relations (NTR), or Most Favored Nation Trade Status (MFN), with Laos. Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, said Vang did not express any embarrassment over this cheating. Now they Desperately Battle for their Own Survival", "Vang Pao Met with Senior State Department Official", "Hmong Hero Faces Trial in California (audio), "Against All Odds: The Laotian Freedom Fighters", "Hmong American Leadership and Unity in the Post-Vang Pao Era", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vang_Pao&oldid=1151957156, Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale), Articles with dead external links from July 2021, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2010, Articles with unsourced statements from June 2021, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from May 2017, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2013, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Senator Norm Coleman, at the special Congressional Forums on Laos held in the U.S. Congress and Library of Congress. hide caption. May Song Vang - Wikipedia Family, friends and members of the Hmong community crowd the Fresno Convention Center for the funeral. Some historians argue that he allowed his "secret army" to be used as cannon-fodder, played as pawns on a CIA geopolitical chessboard. At the funeral hall, I meet the other two surviving sisters, Xai and Der. General Vang Pao (Vaj Pov) The defendants face possible life prison terms for violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act and various weapons charges. She didn't mince words. hide caption. Vang . [28][29] The Lao Marxist government, and hardline Pathet Lao elements in the Lao military and government, backed by the military in Vietnam, continued to engage in military attacks and human rights violations against the Hmong in Laos. This included the Lao Veterans of America, the Center for Public Policy Analysis and others. General Vang Pao lived more recently in Southern California and Minnesota, where many of the 200,000 Hmong that followed him to the United States or were born here live. Col. Wangyee Vang (right) president of the Lao Veterans of America Institute, reunites with other veterans at the funeral procession for Gen. Vang Pao. Chan. [49] Pao's June 2007 arrest later led the Madison School to reopen discussion on the school's naming. She even claimed to scare ghosts. Sucheng ed. Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. Death. Vang Pao, Laotian General, Has Died - CBS Sacramento [50] On 18 June 2007, the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education voted to drop Vang's name from the new school, in light of the federal charges against him and the previous allegations. As a teenager, he had been recruited to fight communism alongside the United States. When the CIA needed an ally, they found a charismatic, passionate young man not afraid to die. If he didnt leave, he expected to be sent to a labor camp where he would have been worked to death. The live pig they offered was not enough for the tax collector. She was the widowof General Vang Pao, a former member of the Royal Lao Armyand prominent Hmong American leader, who died in 2011. In this 45th year anniversary, it is this history of resilience and love that reminds us that we are all in this together not just to provide relief today, but to repair the systemic harms that led us here in the first place - so that together we're building a better today and tomorrow for the next generation, she said. Like a traditional Hmong girl, she begins her story with the name of her parents, their occupation, farming and the name of their village. Throughout Vang Paos residence in the U.S., the Hmong leader has diplomatically opposed human rights violations by the communist government of Laos against the Hmong. log out. Vang, an ethnic Hmong, was born on 8 December 1929,[3][4] in a Hmong village named Nonghet,[5] located in Central Xiangkhuang Province, in the northeastern region of Laos, where his father, Neng Chu Vang, was a county leader. [25][26] Vang, in close cooperation with one of his highly controversial sons, Cha Vang, reversed his long-standing position and began to publicly advocate normalization of U.S.-Laotian trade relations with Laos in a highly controversial move that involved secret meetings with communist Vietnamese military and political officials and complex and questionable financial dealings involving Cha Vang and others. On June 4, 2007, following a lengthy federal investigation labeled Operation Tarnished Eagle, warrants were issued by U.S. federal courts ordering the arrest of Vang Pao and nine others for allegedly plotting to overthrow the communist government of Laos, an enemy the United States government trained Vang Pao to fight some thirty years ago, in violation of the federal Neutrality Acts. Vang Pao (Hmong: Vaj Pov, born 1929) is a former Major General in the Royal Lao Army. A portrait of Vang sits amidst funeral wreaths at the Fresno Convention Center. The six-day funeral ended on Feb. 9. logged you out. That's why I never told friends and neighbors about my family's history. That following month, on 11 May 2009, Vang Pao returned to federal court in Sacramento, California with his lawyers to argue the motion. He and his wife, May Song Vang, whom he married in 1973, initially moved to Montana before settling in California. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Vang, aided by his adviser, Philip Smith, and influential American diplomatic allies, Members of Congress, and vast numbers of Hmong-Americans, helped halt the forced United Nations-sponsored repatriation back to Laos of thousands of Laotian and Hmong refugees in Thailand. [52], On 12 July 2007, the California federal court ordered the release of the Hmong leader on a US$1.5 million bond secured by property owned by members of his family. General Vang Pao was born in December 1929 in a village in northeast Laos, had six years of sporadic schooling and worked as an interpreter for French colonial forces fighting the Japanese in World War II. Yang and his family initially fled to a refugee camp in Thailand, then to France, before ultimately relocating to Rhode Island in 1991. His lawyers claimed that the charges were fabricated and had no bearing in court. hide caption. They were among the thousands attending the general's funeral. Their resilience today -- particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic -- has taken the form of advocacy for the vulnerable, Dinh said. [23] Despite the U.S. Secretary of the Army's unpopular and widely criticized decision, the CPPA, along with the Lao Veterans of America Institute, Lao Veterans of America, Inc. (LVA), and others helped to organize national veterans ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery in May 2011 to honor Vang's contribution to U.S. national security efforts during the Vietnam War. More than 10,000 Hmong mourned on the first day of the funeral. All 12 have pleaded not guilty since their arrests in 2007. Following this appearance, on April 6, 2009, federal prosecutors denied all allegations of fabrications in the motion. Later, in the United States, he was so revered that some of his people believed he had supernatural powers. Federal prosecutors alleged [that Vang], then 77, and several colleagues were funding guerilla fighters still living in Laos. With the help of . [citation needed], On 18 September 2009, the federal government dropped all charges against Vang Pao, announcing in a release that the federal government was permitted to consider "the probable sentence or other consequences if the person is convicted. In 2001, Vang Pao began to moderate this position, publicly advocating normalization of U.S.-Laotian relations in hope of alleviating the human rights abuses by the Laotian government against the indigenous Hmong people. Later, he fell under suspicion by both Hmong groups who supported the Royal Lao Government (including members of Vang Pao's army) and by those Hmong who supported the communist Pathet Lao. Many, like Yang, received little to no assistance in rebuilding their lives, were resettled in underresourced neighborhoods and faced racism. But he has been unable to return and has been blacklisted because of his association with the U.S. during the war. He was 81. Tou Long Yang served alongside Vang Pao, a general in the Royal Lao Army at the time who led the CIA's "secret army" during the Laotian Civil War -- also known as the Secret War -- for nearly. I tell them I promise to be the keeper of their stories, so they smile proudly and agree to meet again soon. [60][61][62][63][64], Vang Pao reportedly had at least 25 children by several wives, and spoke English besides his native Lao, although in later years in interviews he did not seem to use the language as much anymore. William Colby, the director of the CIA in the 1970s, called Vang Pao "the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.". Fadiman added "it is worth noting that in this incident, far from tarnishing Vang Pao's reputation as, for example Ted Kennedy's fudged Spanish exam at Harvard University tarnished his merely added to his mythology: this was the sort of man who could never be held back by such petty impediments as rules."[6]. At that time, during the war, it's either they kill me or I kill them, he told NBC Asian America through his son, Toufu Yang. "As a young man, he had fought against the Japanese during World War II, and with the French against the North Vietnamese in the 1950s. Though he is somewhat less influential among younger Hmong-Americans who have grown up primarily in the United States, he has generally been considered an influential leader of U.S.-based Hmong, enjoying great loyalty for his position of leadership and respect for his military accomplishments. ", Baenen, Jeff, Associated Press (AP), (28 May 2004)"Hmong Military Leader's Influence Waning", Estrada, Heron Marquez and Xiong, Chao, Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, (2 May 2004) "Attacks on Hmong a puzzle; The roots of recent violence aimed at a general's affiliates are being probed. The youngest sister, Der, agrees. General Vang Pao's House in Long Tieng Laos | Now in Lao General Vang Pao, who battled diabetes and heart problems, died aged 81 of pneumonia with heart complications on January 6, 2011, at Clovis Community Medical Center. General Vang's son, Chong Vang, spoke at the ceremony along with Colonel Wangyee Vang, Philip Smith, Captain D.L. Following the issuance of the warrants, an estimated 250 federal agents representing numerous U.S. federal law enforcement and other agencies conducted simultaneous raids on homes, offices and other locations throughout central and southern California, arresting Vang and nine other individuals. Hmong general denied Arlington burial True for all or most cases. (NEWS)", P. McEnroe & Brown, Curt (27 February 2005), Smith, Philip, Center for Public Policy Analysis, Washington, D.C. (2 September 2013) "Lao Hmong Refugee Crisis", U.S. Congressional Record, US GPO (27 October 2000), U.S. Congressional Record, U.S. Government Printing Office (24 October 2002). Five years later, Vang Pao's name was removed from a new school in Madison after opponents said it should not bear the name of a man with such a blood-stained history. Our work isn't possible without your support. General Vang Pao, who battled diabetes and heart problems, died aged 81 of pneumonia with heart complications on January 6, 2011, at Clovis Community Medical Center. Thousands of sobbing mourners in military uniform and traditional Hmong dress paid their final respects Friday to the late Gen. Vang Pao, a U.S. ally in the Vietnam War whose proposed burial at . It has been reported Vang Pao fathered more than 20 children. Nope. [65], Diana Aguilera of the Fresno Bee wrote that May Song Vang, who was Vang Pao's wife at the time of his death, "became the face of the Hmong community" after Vang Pao died. you are agreeing to our, We underestimated China, US official says after reports of J-20 stealth fighter, Defense budget: to cut $100 billion, Army and Marines will shrink, Spain welcomes Chinese investment even with strings attached, One month free trial to the Monitor Daily. [67][68][69][70], Traditional Hmong funeral services for Vang were scheduled to be held for six days, starting 4 February 2011, at the Fresno Convention Center. Certainly his attempt to align all the Hmong clans with the US military and its war strategy divided his people, with the Hmong tribal minority clans fighting on both sides, for and against the communist-led Pathet Lao movement. In the US, Vang Pao assembled anti-communist exiles under one banner the United Lao Liberation Front and sent funds and weapons to be ferried across the border from Thailand to the bands of hardcore Hmong determined to resist the new regime. Some have called him the "George Washington of the Hmong." As an adult, it was just as hard to talk about the war. In her youth, she was so tough that she'd ride on horseback down deep valleys before dawn to barter alone with Chinese and Burmese merchants. Vang Pao | Military Wiki | Fandom The CIA, the Hmong, and the Secret War - Minnesota Remembers Vietnam But when communist forces won in nearby Vietnam in 1975, Yang had to flee. He led a guerrilla army into battle against communist troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail relieving U.S. forces of that burden and saving the lives of countless American soldiers. Hmong Veterans | The Museum [23][24], In late November 2003 and early 2004, Vang shocked many of his closest advisers and supporters, and began to mysteriously, and abruptly, reverse his previous position in opposition to U.S. economic sanctions against the communist government of Laos. Though she's newer to Minnesota and less well-known in the community, she shares a name with her father, the legendary General Vang Pao. Vang Pao dies at 81; exiled Hmong general - Los Angeles Times During the 1960s and 1970s General Vang commanded the Secret Army, a highly-effective CIA-trained and supported force that fought against the Pathet Lao and Peoples Army of Vietnam. At the time, he held the highest rank ever achieved by a Hmong in the Royal Laotian Army, major general. U.S. Drops Case Against Exiled Hmong Leader", "Parents Pack Meeting To Object To New School's Name", "McCoy challenged on Vang Pao; he fires back", "Sen. George Asks UW For Probe On Vang Pao", "Board To Revisit New School's Name After Hmong General's Arrest", "School Board Drops New School's Name, OKs Teacher Contract", "General Vang Pao Elementary School: A First for Fresno", "Federal charges dropped against Hmong leader Vang Pao: The exiled general was accused of plotting to overthrow the communist regime in Laos", "IMPORTANCE OF THE ONGOING U.S. CONGRESSIONAL FORUM ON LAOS", "Statement of the Honorable Patrick Kennedy: US Congressional Forum on Laos", "Laos: Massacre of unarmed Hmong women and children", "Laos Regime Urged to Release Hakit Yang, Hmong Tortured in Vientiane Prison", http://www.centerforpublicpolicyanalysis.org, "Fearing a Forced Return: The Situation of the Lao Hmong Refugees in Petchabun, Thailand", "Lao People's Democratic Republic: Hiding in the jungle - Hmong under threat", Fresno New Year festivities honor Hmong 'mother', "Hmong leader remains in critical condition", "AFP: Vietnam War 'secret army' chief dies in US hospital", "Vang Pao, Guerilla Fighter and Hmong Leader, Dead at 81", "Laos general and Hmong leader Vang Pao dies in exile", "Thousands mourn Gen. Vang Pao in Fresno", "Vang Pao Gets Arlington Ceremony After Burial Snub", "Vietnam vet to get US honors after burial snub", http://www.thefreelibrary.com/California+funeral+planned+for+Hmong+general-a01612410970, http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20110513-278644.html, "Arlington ceremony honors Gen. Vang Pao". Tou Long Yang, left, and General Vang Pao of the Royal Lao Army, right, at the Plain of Jars in 1971. (NEWS)(SERIES: THE COVERT WARS OF VANG PAO)", Lovering, Daniel, Associated Press (AP) (13 January 2014)"Former enemies wage battle over U.S. trade with Laos", Kennedy, Tony and McEnroe, Paul, Minneapolis Star Tribune (5 July 2005)"THE COVERT WARS OF VANG PAO; Ex-guerrilla's gamble for peace backfires; With his empire unraveling, Gen. Vang Pao met with the enemy, a tactic that to his people felt like a total betrayal. In the 1970s, Vang led Hmong guerrillas in a CIA-backed battle against communist forces in Laos and helped tens of thousands of Hmong immigrants resettle in American cities. Reality soon dispersed that dreamworld. They include retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Youa True Vang and 11 members of California's Hmong community, many of whom fought for the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Vang Pao, a revered former general in the Royal Army of Laos who led thousands of Hmong guerrillas in a CIA-backed secret army during the Vietnam War, has died. [73][74][75], In March 2011, following Vang's death, the CPPA issued an editorial, published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, critical of the decision by the U.S. Secretary of the Army not permitting Vang's burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The case, which drew outrage, was later dropped. Against All Odds: The Laotian Freedom Fighters Pao Former Laotian General Vang Pao at the Hmong International New Year's Celebration in Fresno, Calif. Pao, a former general in the Royal Army of Laos who led thousands of Hmong mercenaries in a CIA backed secret army during the Vietnam War, has died. General Vang Pao. All photos by Lianne Milton for NPR/Photos by Lianne Milton for NPR. Read FULL Criminal Complaints Against General Vang Pao HERE. Bibliographies - The 1st Hmong General: General Vang Pao "Pappy Hicks", U.S. Special Forces Association, and others.[75][79]. in those biography that one person write about their experiences, there would. [citation needed], While taking an entrance examination, the captain who was the proctor realized that Vang knew almost no written French. Many Southeast Asian American refugees continue to struggle nearly half a century later, but have also made strides in various spheres. The charges against Vang Pao were dropped in 2009, "after investigators completed the time-consuming process of translating more than 30,000 pages of pages of documents," then-U.S. Attorney Lawrence G. Brown said in a written statement. or call us at 1-617-450-2300. Luke Frazza /AFP/Getty Images Plus we visit the last king of Laos' holiday residence and other key attractions in.
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general vang pao biography