The crowd gathered inside Coffman Memorial Theater, silent and somber. As the Hmong community and their leaders slowly filled the auditorium, tension and energy built among the assembled. These people sought vindication, healing and answers as they came up and sat down at the spot lit table on the stage. One by one, they sat and waited as a translator read their testimonies. One by one, they faced the crowd and the United Nations Special Rapporteur, answering questions. One by one, they asked why the people of Thailand desecrated the graves of their loved ones half a world away.

The hearing on December 10 was the culmination of three years of anguish among the Hmong community in Minnesota. Billed as “Consultation with United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples Professor James Anaya on the Desecration of Hmong Graves,” it was a town hall meeting for the Hmong to seek help. The Hmong believed the souls of their relatives were in peril and there was little anyone could do about it.

The Hmong have been persecuted for hundreds of years. Thought to have originated from China, they migrated across Asia to countries like Laos, Vietnam and eventually Thailand. The Han dynasty in China deemed them barbarians and began their persecution over 2,000 years ago simply because they refused to assimilate into Han culture at the time. Their troubles in the 20th century began when a large number of Hmong decided to fight for the United States against communist forces in Laos. When the communist party took over the Laotian government, the Hmong faced immediate persecution as their villages were razed and their people slaughtered. Many thousands sought shelter in the United States and Thai refugee camps, among other places. Yet in Thailand, there are many whispered stories of corrupt officials mistreating refugees.

Wat Tham Krabok is located in Saraburi province inside Thailand. It is a Buddhist temple where at one time over 20,000 Hmong refugees stayed during the 1990s. They were afraid to return to Laos, yet couldn’t find sanctuary within the U.S. Although the temple grounds weren’t originally classified as a refugee camp, the temple’s abbot, Chamroon Parnchard, allowed them to stay on the land. Due to poor living conditions, about 2,000 people died at the temple between the early 1990s and the present. When the first person died, the temple monks wanted to cremate the remains. Horrified, the Hmong camp leaders protested.

The Hmong believe in the concept of animism, or ancestral worship. One of the basic tenets of their religion is the burial of their dead. They believe each person has three souls. When someone dies, one of those souls goes to live in a sort of Heaven, to join their ancestors all the way back to Xiong Shee Yee, the first healer of the Hmong. Another soul seeks reincarnation. The third spirit stays with the dead body, sealed in a coffin and buried with rituals and spiritual protection. Cremating the body would not allow their souls proper rest, leaving them to wander the earth plaguing their living relatives.

Abbot Chamroon understood the refugees needs, they later testified. He allowed the Hmong to bury their dead on temple land or the land around the temple they could purchase . Whenever a family had to bury their own, the abbot would give them a 100-kilogram bag of rice and let them have free electricity for the week. Sometimes the abbot and his monks would attend the funeral as well. Chamroon died in 1998. His younger brother, Chareun Parnchant, became the next abbot of Wat Tham Krabok. From then on, the Hmong didn’t receive bags of rice when their relatives died, although they were still allowed to bury their dead.

The Hmong lived in peace with the temple and with the towns nearby for several years after Chamroon’s death. In 2003, the U.S. declared that the Hmong at Wat Tham Krabok could resettle in America if they so chose. Most of the refugees have immigrated stateside, with only a few hundred refugees left of the 20,000 or so that once sought shelter at the Wat.

The peace was shattered on Oct. 26, 2005. That day, according to testimony, a caravan of cars came to the Wat, emptying Thai workers onto the temple grounds. They scrambled about, directed by temple monks to dig up the land. The Hmong refugees watched, helpless, as Thai workers dug up the coffins of their relatives, dead for years, months, weeks, even days. They smashed open coffins, ripping the wood away. The workers removed bodies from the ground, one after another. They cut the flesh away from the bones of the dead Hmong, leaving it to rot under the sun in the newly formed pits the workers dug. They took the bones away with them for unknown reasons.

From October 26 to November 18 of 2005, the Thai workers dug up almost 500 graves. The Hmong refugees stood by while the Thai workers took out the bodies of their loved ones, afraid to speak out. Some refugees told Anaya, the U.N. Rapporteur, that Thai soldiers were also present, carrying guns and knives. The Hmong were afraid that if they said something they would be denied entry into the U.S. or jailed. So they did the next best thing: while the workers took the bodies, several Hmong took video footage and sent it to their relatives in America. When a second group of workers picked up 211 bodies between November 26 and December 6, they took video again. They hoped their relatives in America could put a stop to the ruination of their relatives’ souls.

It worked, to an extent. One of the videotapes found its way to Minnesota State Senator Mee Moua, who told the U.N Rapporteur she had to shut off the tape before it ended.

“If I was emotionally distressed by the images I saw, I could only imagine the pain and hurt, the outrage and anger the surviving families must be experiencing,” Moua told Anaya.

Within ten days of the last exhumation, congressional representatives from Minnesota and Wisconsin sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking her to look into the grave desecrations committed at Wat Tham Krabok. At the end of January 2006, U.S. Rep. Martin Sabo received a letter from the Department of State. Thai officials had told the State Department that the graves were being exhumed because of water sanitation concerns. The Hmong were outraged. At no point was there ever a water sanitation concern in removing the graves, they argued. Thus far, no one has found evidence the graves were exhumed for that purpose.

By the end of March 2006, the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Program became involved, helping the Hmong community in Minnesota write letters to the U.N. Special Rapporteurs on Religious Intolerance and Contemporary Forms of Racism. Created in 2001, the Special Rapporteurs to the United Nations give annual reports to the Human Rights Council, along with other councils, on any human rights concerns found around the world. In April 2006, then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visited St. Paul to attend the opening of a new center at his alma mater, Macalester College. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman spoke with Annan about the Hmong grave desecrations, receiving a promise from Annan to look into the issue. On April 24, 2006, the Minnesota State Senate passed a resolution in support of the Hmong community in what was known as the Minnesotans Against Grave Desecration Day in Minneapolis.

At the end of 2006, the Hmong community accomplished several important goals with the help of state and national legislative representatives, the Human Rights Project and the Special Rapporteurs on Religious Tolerance and Indigenous Issues. The Thai government had promised to stop further exhumations of Hmong graves at the Wat. They also promised to cooperate in returning the 211 bodies dug up in the second period. Yet the Thai government argued the Hmong weren’t legally refugees at the Wat and that they weren’t given permission to bury their dead on the temple ground. The Hmong were appalled at this accusation. They had lived in harmony with the monks for years without trouble. The abbot used to give them bags of rice whenever one of their own died, didn’t he?

With little response from the Thai government, the National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee decided to send its own delegation of investigators in September of 2007. The delegation met with Ralph Boyce, the U.S. Ambassador to Thailand when they arrived. They toured Wat Tham Krabok, meeting with Abbot Chareun. Although Chareun told them no further exhumations would take place unless there were environmental concerns, the abbot refused to allow the 211 Hmong bodies still intact to be reburied.

The delegation found further evidence of the abbot’s resistance. They met with the Phothi Paowana Songkhroh Foundation, the Buddhist religious group responsible for the first round of exhumations. They told the delegation they had been commanded by their own god earlier in 2005 to exhume the graves of unknown people across Thailand. They were hired by the abbot of Wat Tham Krabok, who saw an ad for their services in a newspaper. The abbot had told them to remove the graves of the unknown people on the temple ground. Because Hmong graves are marked with sticks or a few stones, if marked at all, they were interpreted as unknown graves. They had no idea what suffering they had caused to the Hmong They had taken the bones to cremate them in an elaborate ceremony, burying what was left in their tomb of the unclaimed. The Bhudda Dharma 31 Nakhon Ratchasima Foundation, responsible for the second round of exhumations, told the delegation they had placed the 211 bodies they had dug up inside cement caskets in a field near Hulin cemetery, also in Sawaburi province.

All of these events led to the hearing on Dec. 10, 2008, coincidentally the 60th anniversary of the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Soua Dao Thao, who immigrated to the U.S. in 2007, testified that during the first round of exhumations, Thai workers dug up the bodies of his 3-year-old son and his 80-year-old mother, both of whom had died several years earlier. He watched as the workers stripped his son’s body down to the bones. He listened as the workers told him 1 kilogram of bones was worth 2 or 3 kilograms of gold. He despaired as the workers pulled his mother’s body out of her coffin, already petrified despite being dead for only three years.

“I don’t have the words to describe the pain watching my son and mother’s body treated this way,” Thao
said through a translator.

Because his mother was petrified, the workers told him they were going to put the corpse in a glass case at their main temple in Bangkok, where they would charge visitors to see her. They said she was going to make them prosperous for at least three generations, according to testimony. The only keepsakes Thao has left from the event are a snatch of his mother’s hair and a piece of the ceremonial cloth used to cover her mouth. He found both of them on the ground as the workers carried her away, burning incense and wads of currency in worship of her.

Thao barely stammered an answer when Anaya asked him a question before breaking down in tears. He couldn’t respond for at least a minute before he regained his composure. He wasn’t the only person to sob during Anaya’s questioning. Lia Thao, who found out five of her relatives had been exhumed, needed several minutes to answer Anaya’s questions, thinking of the husband she left behind whose grave had been desecrated, whose body was supposedly buried as part of the 211 corpses at Hulin cemetery. She, like almost every person who testified during the hearing, had described the terrible dreams that plague her, her children and other relatives. In the dreams, the dead haunt the living, asking why the living relatives do not love them, why their houses have been disturbed, why they could not find peace. Lia Thao demanded justice for her husband and healing for his soul.

“Since the grave diggers dug up the graves and have mixed up all the bodies, we are no longer sure whose body belongs to whom,” Lia Thao said. “I want my husband’s body returned to me and I want to know that the body I am receiving is my husband’s through DNA testing…I want them to do all of this for me because I cannot rebury my husband and they are the ones at fault so they must take this responsibility.”

There is little luck her request will be granted. Although Anaya took their testimony, he will have to investigate further, gathering information from the Thai government before he submits his findings as part of his annual report next September. Even then, the U.N. Human Rights Council may or may not decide to take action. If the testimony and evidence given at the hearing are any indicator, the Thai government could be almost blameless in this situation. Even though it was discovered that a high-ranking government official with ties to the Thai monarchy attended the mass cremation ceremony by the Phothi Paowana Songkhroh Foundation, it certainly does not prove the Thai government was responsible for the grave desecrations.

The Hmong feel otherwise. At times sounding raving mad, each testimony given to Anaya ended with a condemnation of the Thai government, accusing them of allowing or even taking part in the desecration. There may be nothing the U.N. can say to console them. In their minds, the Hmong have already judged the Thai government, based on similar grave desecrations at Camp Nongkhai, a Thai refugee camp, the suffering they felt when their graves were desecrated in Xiangkhouang Province inside Laos and further persecution stretching back into the darkest periods of time. Their shamans and healers say it is almost impossible to heal the spiritual rift caused by these latest desecrations.

“I don’t see anything possible of fixing something of this magnitude,” Nhia Yer Yang, a shaman of Hmong healing ceremonies said through State Representative Cy Thao. “I’ve never performed any ritual of this magnitude, but I could find ways to help this.”

Although the admission of guilt they seek from the Thai government may never come, it may have been enough to address Anaya at the meeting, according to Rep. Thao. Simply shooting for a solution here may be enough to absolve the spiritual demons haunting the Hmong community. It may console Pa Ze Xiong, whose father fought the communists in Laos and whose mother’s, father’s and son’s graves have all been desecrated. Xiong couldn’t stop wiping the tears from his face, couldn’t stop the sobs wracking his heavy frame and couldn’t stop the quiver in his voice as he asked for the United Nations to protect the rights of people everywhere. It might even console Lee Yang, who testified that the spirit of his older brother, whose grave was desecrated during the first round of exhumations, tortured Yang’s niece with illness and visions, causing her to poison herself. Yang was unable to attend her funeral, as she died in Thailand.

While the experience of telling the world their problems might help, it might not make a difference at all.

“Because Hmong cultural and funeral rites are so respected, complex and have a long tradition, the desecration of Hmong graves is the most fundamental and deeply painful violation of all violations against the Hmong,” Shong Ger Thao, a Hmong funeral rights expert, testified. “No shaman can adequately heal the wounds of this kind of violation.”

Tags: Hmong, international