Former refugee investigating disinterment
A former Hmong refugee who has found a home in Spokane will travel to Thailand this week to find out why the graves of some of his people have apparently been desecrated at what once was a sanctuary there.
Such desecration would be a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international covenants, according to Hmong leaders and their supporters in the United States.
Vangtou Xiong X. Toyed, an English language development specialist with Spokane Public Schools, will join a delegation of former Hmong refugees from throughout the United States on the trip arranged through the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.
The delegation, which will spend a week in Thailand, will ask the Thai government to allow the bodies that remain at a makeshift refugee camp at Wat Tham Krabok in the Saraburi province to be disinterred and reburied at a suitable site, either in Thailand or the United States.
The Hmong, an ethnic group indigenous to China, migrated into Southeast Asia in the 19th century. Many aided U.S. Special Forces in Laos during the Vietnam War era. An estimated 300,000 Hmong, including Vangtou, his wife, and two infant children, fled across the Mekong River into Thailand during the communist takeover of Laos in 1975.
Wat Tham Krabok was never a recognized refugee camp. But as many as 20,000 Hmong sought sanctuary at the Buddhist temple and monastery there when the Thai government began closing refugee camps in the 1990s and threatening to repatriate refugees to Laos.
In 2004, many of these refugees were accepted into the United States, leaving behind the graves of some 2,000 relatives who died while at Wat Tham Krabok.
In 2005, hundreds of Thai workers began exhuming the Hmong graves, according to a document filed with the United Nations seeking intervention on behalf of the Hmong by the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota.
Video taken at the scene shows workers disinterring bodies and scraping flesh away from bones with knives. Witnesses said the bones were later stripped in large vats of boiling water or over open fire, then hauled to an unknown location.
As many as 900 corpses are believed to have been disinterred as of December 2005, according to the Human Rights Program.
In Hmong culture, three events are held sacred: birth, marriage and death. According to Vangtou, grave desecration is inconceivable.
“We have never heard this term before,” Vangtou said. “It is a humiliation.”
The Thai government said the bodies were being treated with respect, but that they were being removed to protect the water supply. The Human Rights Program report asks why the bodies were not considered a threat to Wat Tham Krabok water while 20,000 refugees were living there.
“We don’t know why they are digging up graves,” said Michael Yang, who is helping to organize the delegation to Bangkok. “Thai and other ethnic graves were not touched.”