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SAN FRANCISCO: Charges against a revered former Hmong guerrilla leader accused of plotting to overthrow the communist government of Laos have been dropped, justice officials said Friday.
A spokesman for the United States Attorney's office in Sacramento, northern California told AFP all charges against ageing warlord Vang Pao, 79, who was arrested in 2007 in Sacramento, had been dismissed.
A statement said that while 12 other people will be prosecuted for attempting to bring down the Laotian government, charges against the CIA-trained Pao had been dismissed as a "matter of discretion."
"In our measured judgement and based on the totality of the evidence in the case and the circumstances regarding defendant Vang Pao, we believe that continued prosecution of this defendant is no longer warranted," US Attorney Lawrence Brown said in a statement.
Pao's lawyer John Keker said in a statement Pao "was grateful and very happy the government has finally recognised his innocence."
"At the same time he's very distressed the case that we believe is an unfair government sting operation is proceeding against a number of fine people," Keker told the Sacramento Bee.
Pao is a prominent figure in the Hmong community in the United States, a former general in the Royal Lao army in the 1960s and 1970s who fled to the United States in 1975 after communists ousted Laos' royal rulers.
His arrest two years ago outraged Hmong in the United States, with large protests outside government buildings in Sacramento against his detention.
Pao and his former co-accused were arrested in June 2007 after authorities allegedly "interrupted a plot to overthrow the government of Laos by force and violence" the justice department said.
The remaining defendants are accused of conspiring to acquire weapons, munitions, personnel and money for insurgents in Laos seeking to wage war against the government, a statement said.
The investigation arose following a series of meetings involving several of the accused and an undercover federal agent, it added.
Pao was born in 1931 in central Xieng Khouang province. His community, the Hmong, are a mountain people from China who practiced slash-and-burn farming, grew opium and were known in Laos by the pejorative Meo, or "savage."
A teenage soldier against World War II Japanese troops, he underwent French-run army officer training from age 20 and later fought against communist rebels. He rose in the Royal Lao Army and in 1964 became the first Lao Hmong to achieve the rank of general.
The United States was then stepping up its undeclared war against Lao and Vietnamese communist forces in the landlocked country, training a proxy army and flying missions in unmarked aircraft of the CIA-run Air America.
From the mid-60s, Pao commanded the irregular army of Hmong, other Lao fighters and Thai mercenaries from his mountain headquarters in a campaign that some historians contend was part-financed by the opium trade.
"Operational advice was given by a small number of CIA operatives, writes Australian historian Grant Evans. "All was paid for by US aid."
Pao could supply rice and medical supplies to villagers and even control US air power, gaining him "the status of a minor deity" among his soldiers, writes another author, Christopher Robbins.
"But mostly his leadership rested on the force of his own personality, which was energetic, volatile, direct and fearless," Robbins writes in "The Ravens - Pilots of the Secret War in Laos."
After 1975, the new Lao government jailed tens of thousands people, and around 300,000 Lao, about half of them Hmong, fled the country. Some of Pao's fighters continued a low-level insurgency that has since been all but crushed.
Their descendants have paid a high price, with up to 3,000 Hmong men, women and children still in hiding and under attack, according to overseas Hmong and international human rights groups.
Minnesota lawmaker Cy Thao said Friday that Hmong had protested against Pao's arrest out of a sense of "betrayal" felt by many after the US left Laos.
"This trial represents the betrayal by the US government of one of its staunchest allies," Thao told the Sacramento Bee.
- AFP/yb
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