Word: va
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...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...
...Va Char says that he walked about 50 meters behind Mao's lead group. About 30 minutes after leaving the camp, he says, he heard a gunshot. Soon came a fusillade of fire that he estimates lasted two minutes. Va Char says he leapt off the path and dived to the ground. He says he could hear the terrified screams of the young girls and persistent gunfire. Although grass and trees partially obscured his view of the scene, Va Char says he could make out what he estimates were 30 to 40 Lao soldiers standing in a loose circle...