Last week (May 11th) a large group of Hmong, Vietnamese, Vietnam Vets and others (estimated at over 10,000) gathered at the State Capitol to march through Sacramento to the Federal district court. The marchers were protesting the trial of General Vang Pao and 10 others who are on trial for allegedly trying to overthrow the Communist regime in Laos.
Using my Flip Mino (first time) I was able to record a small bit of this as the protesters assembled at the Capitol. I had no idea who Vang Pao was, or that he and others were on trial. For more details on what exactly is going on you can check out the Wikipedia article on the him here. This has been the largest group of people assembled at the Capitol I’ve seen so far this year. I only caught a small bit of the march as I was heading into work and had quite a bit today that morning and so was prevented from talking more footage or talking to the people.
My hopes in the future are to be able to mingle with protesters and talk with them a bit to get their sense of why they’re protesting and what they hope to accomplish by doing so.
So here’s the videos via Youtube (warning 5 seconds in there is a loud whistling!) :
and another short clip to roughly show the size of the crowd:
