Hmong: After the War, The Killing

Hmong in Laos: After the War, The Killing

Review of "HUNTED LIKE ANIMALS,” a Documentary by REBECCA SOMMER
JANUARY 2008:

Question: What do you call it when a war is over but the killing goes on?
Answer: Communism

The advent of Communism has ushered in things the world had never seen before the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 and instituted the 'Soviet.'

Since then, the bloodletting has not ceased.

Hitler is a piker when compared to Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro...all Communists and purveyors of the greatest violence the world has seen.

Nazism passed away at the end of WWII. Communism, the other side of the socialist coin, persists, its brutality undiminished, its thirst for blood unquenched, its march toward world revolution refueled, replenished, and strengthened by integration with the world’s economies and therefore remains unopposed to devour its new victims.

Socialist Fascism/Nazism took a fraction of the lives that Socialist Communism has consumed and continues to swallow (see: 'Death By Government,' by Rudy Hummel, U. of Hawaii, and, 'The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,' authored by several scholars and edited by Stéphane Courtois.).

This documentary by Rebecca Sommers is witness to the ongoing reality of Communism. It provides details of a largely unknown war against civilians, a genocidal war waged against the Hmong Lao by Communist Laotian and Vietnamese military forces. These forest dwelling Hmong live their entire lives running and hiding from the Communists in the remote mountains of Laos.

Every day since 1975, Communist forces have carried out their aggressions against this largely unarmed, defenseless, simple, and abjectly poor people who remain in the forests because to venture out is to invite rape, murder, and death by execution, torture, and dismemberment, the typical tools of Communist repression. Once employed against the host population, this parasitic form of government can rely on the calculus of fear inspired by such atrocities to do whatever it wants.

Many Hmong fought the communists during the Viet Nam War and retreated back into the inaccessible mountains of Laos after the U.S. pulled out of SE Asia in 1975, the war supposedly over with a Communist victory.

Never ones to practice magnanimity towards vanquished foes, Communists only promise - and deliver- the bloodbath and the 'peace of the cell, the shackle, and the grave’ to those whom they defeat. Communism demands human sacrifice.

The Hmong became targets of persecution and retaliation by Communist forces because they fought as soldiers against them. Whether or not they sided with America is almost irrelevant, as the NVA, on its relentless, 30 year march (by 1975) to revolution and the domination of all IndoChina, would have swallowed them up anyway. The NVA, proxy army of Communism, meant to have Laos, and Cambodia, and Viet Nam and deliver the populations of those countries into the Revolutionary furnace.

While most Lao-Hmong were re-integrated into their country after 1975, many other Hmong faced the Vietnamese and Laotion gulag, of persecution, enslavement, and execution after they surrendered. Those who remained in the jungle with well justified fears are forced to starve and bring children into an uncertain world.

Transgressions against the Hmong by the Lao Communist authorities and Vietnamese soldiers have persisted over a span of more than thirty years since 1975. So have the reports of such abuse, only to fall on deaf ears.

A generation after the Viet Nam War supposedly ended the free Hmong hide from those who use every opportunity to attack their little groups of families with military weapons that include aircraft, artillery, chemical weapons, and ground forces.

They are chased like wild animals and killed when caught by Laotian and Vietnamese soldiers. The women, even very young girls, are raped and often mutilated and killed when the soldiers are done with them.

They understand that those who surrender face an uncertain fate. Therefore, with no options and mostly for their children, only the most desperate drizzle out of the jungle. Many simply disappear. Knowing the fate of those who have been lured by false promises, the desperation must be very great for them to leave their jungle hiding places...never to be seen again after surrendering to Communist forces and bureaucrats.

The Hmong are also used as targets by communist forces in SE Asia who train their armies by conducting military exercises against them.

Facing this genocide, many escape to neighboring Thailand as refugees.

This documentary by Rebecca Sommers is a story of human rights violations on a scale and intensity that is hard to imagine for those who live comfortable, secure lives. But it must be told, and "HUNTED LIKE ANIMALS” tells it, in the words of the victims themselves.

Even the 'Diary of Anne Frank' was not told with more poignancy, sadness, and fear.

Where are the Jews, who say, "Never again?"

Filmmaker Rebecca Sommers traveled in 2005 and 2006 to the Hmong refugee camp of Ban Huay Nam Khao, Petchabun, in Thailand, where she focused on the Hmong Lao who fled military aggressions against them in their beloved homeland, the beautiful Laotian mountains.

The testimony of these Hmong refugees, with footage filmed by the Hmong themselves who carried digital camcorders back to the danger zones inside of Laos, is woven into the documentary like a tapestry and reveals the human face of contemporary genocide.

These 'human rights violations' occur daily in the remote mountains of Laos, where the gentle Hmong, marked for extinction by the Communists who hate them, are Hunted like Animals. Where is the UN?

Never again?

For more information and to obtain copies of the film, contact:
sommerfilms@gmail.com