Three days after giving birth, Mai Xiong returned with her infant daughter behind the bars of a Thai detention center where she lives crammed into two dank, dark rooms with 157 others.
Mai Xiong has committed no crime. Her confinement is the legacy of a conflict that ended long before she was born — the Vietnam War, when members of her Hmong ethnic group fought alongside covert US forces in Laos, incurring the wrath of the communist authorities.
The 22-year-old fled persecution in Laos, has been classified as a refugee by the UN, and has been offered a home in Australia.
But instead of preparing her baby for a new life, Mai Xiong has spent nearly two years detained in dismal conditions, as Thai authorities keen to maintain good relations with Laos refuse to let the group of Hmong leave.
“Inside here it is very packed and easy to get diseases and it is not comfortable for a little baby,” she said.
Beside her, Bao Yang rocks her three-month-old daughter Siriam, unable to keep her eyes off the sleepy newborn swaddled in a pink towel.
“We would like to get out from here so that our children can have a good education and future,” said Bao Yang. “We are really afraid to go back to Laos.”
All 158 Hmong at Nong Khai have been listed as refugees and offered resettlement in the US, Canada, Australia or Holland, says Kitty McKinsey, regional information officer with UN refugee agency UNHCR.
“These people are not guilty of anything, they are not criminals, they have not committed any crimes, there is no reason for them to be locked up — they are simply refugees who are waiting to go to a third country,” she says.
“It would simply be a matter of issuing them exit visas and they would be out of Thailand,” she adds.
The Laos Hmong have long been a sticking point between Thailand and its communist neighbor to the north.
Some members of the ethnic group fought alongside the US in the 1960s and 1970s when the Vietnam War spilled into Laos, a conflict often referred to as “the secret war.”
When the war ended in 1975, Hmong fighters feared the victorious communist regime would hunt them down for working with the Americans. About 150,000 fled and found homes abroad, mostly in the US.
Others hid in the dense Laotian jungle where a handful of fighters have until recently fought a low-level insurgency which, their supporters say, has been met with brutal repression.
In a March 2007 report, human rights group Amnesty International said that Laotian forces were still launching deadly attacks on the jungle-dwelling Hmong — findings denied by the authorities.
For the group now incarcerated at Nong Khai, life has become increasingly difficult.
“We were unable to live in the jungle anymore. Since 2000, we couldn’t plant anything, we had to eat roots,” says Blia Shoua Her, 61, a Hmong leader.
So in October 2006 he led a group into Thailand, where they made it as far as Bangkok before being rounded up by the authorities and sent to Nong Khai.
The group was due to be shipped back across the border in January last year, but the men barricaded themselves in the cell and threatened to commit suicide, and as the UNHCR stepped in, the deportation was called off.
“It was a great loss of face for them,” said one Western official following the situation, referring to the Thai authorities. “They are anxious not to repeat a loss of face.”
Blia Shoua Her’s group is just a handful of the thousands of Hmong who have crossed the border into Thailand.
The Thai government claims they are economic migrants seeking work, and up to 8,000 have been rounded up in the last few years and put in a detention camp in northern Petchabun Province, where the UNHCR is refused access.
But while Thailand is slowly shipping back the Petchabun Hmong to Laos — to the horror of human rights groups who say that some may be genuinely in danger of persecution — the Nong Khai group remains in limbo.
Thai officials say the Hmong are illegal immigrants and so Thailand has no legal obligation to recognize their UNHCR refugee status.
In a written answer to questions, the foreign ministry’s social division said Thailand had suspended any decision on the Nong Khai Hmong because of “the great sensitivities involved,” and discussions were ongoing.
“We hope to reach a durable solution for this group that meets the concerns of all parties involved, including the country of origin,” it said.
“To speculate at this time on a return to Laos or otherwise would not contribute to the solution.”
Thailand has lately been cultivating Laos as a key regional ally, with the energy-hungry nation buying increasing amounts of electricity from Laos.
Thai officials have also in the past voiced concerns that if some Hmong are resettled, more might flood over the border in the hope of being sent to rich nations.
And so the 158 Hmong remain at the stuffy Nong Khai detention center, only allowed out of their dark prison rooms for two or three hours in the morning and up to one hour in the afternoon.
“We just sit inside here, we cannot see the sun or the moon,” says Chong Lee Lor, a 44-year-old detainee.
When the few visitors arrive, children gather behind the bars at the bottom of a flight of stairs, most in dirty T-shirts and barefoot.
More than half of the detained Hmong are children, and 11 babies have been born since the group began their incarceration.
“This is just like a prison, I don’t like it here,” says 11-year-old Chalou, who has never been to school.
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