Word: va
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Va Char is not a Hmong, but a Lao trader who for years made a comfortable living selling supplies to remote mountain communities around Phonsavanh. "He was very well liked and respected," says a villager in the district. "He always helped people out if he could." In 1993, says Va Char, a Hmong business contact told him about a remote community in the jungle that needed supplies. "I had never been political until I went to the jungle," he says. "I went there carrying salt and shoes, expecting to find a normal mountain village. Instead I was faced with thousands...
...Va Char says he returned to his village determined to help. For the next four years he recruited family and friends into a network that occasionally ferried supplies to the Hmong. In 1997, he was arrested and jailed for two years. "I was so angry," he said. "I was helping people who were suffering, who were not bad. Children were dying. It was not right." Released in 1999, he made contact with the Fact Finding Commission, a Hmong human-rights group in the U.S., which was trying to make contact with the Hmong trapped in the mountains. They supplied Va...
...After his escape in 2003, Va Char moved from house to house, sleeping occasionally in rice fields. But the net was closing around his family, and the Blackbird network had been compromised. Va Char says he was faced with a grim choice: to try to sneak out of Laos undetected or join those on the run in the jungle. He decided to return to the Hmong with his video camera. "I knew if I left the country, or was killed, no one would hear from the Hmong again," he said...
...Va Char says that the children he filmed in the summer of 2003 all soon died. It took another 10 months, he says, to smuggle more batteries into the jungle, during which the community was constantly on the move. In late April 2004, he says, he started filming again. On May 19, he told TIME, the band was scattered along the banks of a creek, at the bottom of deep gully inside the mountainous Xaysomboune Special Zone. The group numbered almost 200-roughly 30 families-and had been camped for two days. In the past six months, says Va Char...
...summer, he told TIME that on May 19 his girlfriend, Mao Lee, 14, ignored warnings from the camp's armed guards that there might be Lao patrols in the neighborhood and went looking for cassava root along a mountain path. Mao's elder sister Chao, 16, went along, says Va Char, with a group of 12 young men and women. They set off up the mountain path. None of them carried weapons. Behind them, says Va Char, four or five other groups, perhaps 40 people in all, followed. Va Char was among them. "None of us was thinking about...