Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 9. 1ts May 1973
Shoot trouble-makers on sight
Shoot trouble-makers on sight
To be a "neutralist" is, in Thieu's terms, to be "pro-communist". The fusion of terms such as "communist", "neutralist", "pro-communist", and "undesirable elements" is a recurring theme in Thieu's speeches. But his rhetoric contains a very real message. In a recent speech Thieu "called upon 500 police officials to help him crush communist subversion. He again ordered the policemen, who were attending a national police convention, to shoot on sight 'trouble-making elements" (International Herald Tribune, January 26, 1973).
Five days after their release on December 29, after 18 months in Chi-Hoa prison, Jean-Pierre Debris, a mathematics professor, and Andre Menras, a teacher, held a press conference in Paris, at which Debris expressed fears for the plight of political prisoners. "The coming weeks", he said, "will indeed be critical for all political prisoners in the south. We forsee a liquidating operation that could begin in the prisons. As a matter of fact, three days before our departure, there were mass deportations to the Poulo Condor prison". Debris and Menras testified to the "tortures, violent acts and assassinations carried out between 1968 and 1972 against the patriots imprisoned in Poulo Condor, Phu-Quoc, Chi-Hoa" (Intercontinental Press, January 22).
Many political prisoners are being rapidly reclassified as "common criminals" to avoid the need to release them under the Peace Agreement. In a report headed "Saigon's Instant Criminals", the March 24 issue of Newsweek notes the concern of the P.R.G. that the number of political prisoners held in Vietnam is so much smaller than expected. "One reason is that even before the ceasefire, Saigon's nilitary courts began trying and sentencing large numbers of political detainees on criminal charges, thus making them ineligible for exchange with North Vietnam. In one camp alone, more than 1,000 political prisoners were reported converted to criminal status in this fashion."
Starvation as a Political Weapon
"Besides carrying out a policy of arresting and exterminating political prisoners . . Thieu is intentionally starving the population detained in the so-called 'refugee camps'. This situation has become so bad that Saigon newspapers have finally spoken out against the inhuman tactic . . . On October 23rd Song Than, a Saigon Daily, reported that since September 9th each person in the camps of Binh Dinh province received only 3 kilograms of rice each. There was nothing else, not even salt. Yves Henry, a French economist, in a book entitled Economic Agricole de I'Indochine writes that the average necessary consumption of milled rice per capita should be 225 kilograms a year or about 20 kilograms a month. The three kilograms of rice given to the refugee population over a month and a half would last a week at most. This is not all. According to the October 1 2th issue of Dai Dan Toc, another Saigon daily, more than 25% of the rice given to the 250,000 'detainees in concentration camps' in Da Nang was composed of plastic grains. In a series of articles published in yet another Saigon Daily, Dien Tin, Thieu's henchmen were accused of making a profit for themselves by substituting plastic grains for the rice they pocketed. These plastic grains are manufactured in a factory protected by Thieu, and besides hastening starvation they destroy the digestive system once swallowed". (Thoi-Bao Ga Bulletin, no. 31, January 1973 )
"There's a camp at Dalat, a concentration camp for children, where at the moment 800 young boys and girls are being held . . Dalat is situated on the high plateau, a place where it rains a lot and the nights are cold. The children who are obstinate, who refuse to salute the flag and sing the 'reeducation' song, are put into a cell. They are bound so that they cannot move, and then twice during the night, they are drenched with water and left like that to dry".
('Terror in Thieu's Prisons' by Andre Meuras, American Report, February 26th 1973)