June 15, 2007
SE Asia hill tribes fight back with new weapon - YouTube
Vast areas of mountainous jungle in Vietnam and Laos are strictly out of bounds to journalists and human rights monitors, but the hill tribes who have taken refuge there have found another way to tell the world about their plight, tthanks to YouTube. Alert Net reports.
"Graphic footage filmed last year in the Lao jungle and posted on the popular video sharing website YouTube shows a young Hmong boy, his belly sliced open and his intestines hanging out.
Other footage in the same YouTube video, taken on May 19, 2004, captures the aftermath of the killing of a group of five Hmong children, including showing their mutilated bodies.
... Another video on YouTube, posted this time by the U.S.-based campaign group The Montagnard Foundation , features members of Vietnamese hill tribes, known collectively as Montagnards, telling of beatings, torture and imprisonment.
Scott Johnson, advisor to The Montagnard Foundation, said the U.S.-based organisation is using modern technology to monitor human rights violations in Vietnam's Central Highlands and to spread news of Montagnards who have been jailed, killed, or injured.
"YouTube is indeed proving to be a useful new weapon. Cell phones and the internet are also very important. But any Montagnards caught with cell phones or video recorders are likely to be detained, put under surveillance, tortured or worse," he said.
The descendants of America's so-called "forgotten allies" are still paying with their lives, but thanks to YouTube their stories are not dying in the jungle with them."
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