Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 9. 1ts May 1973

Political Prisoners — Thousands Langush In Thieu's Jails

Political Prisoners

Thousands Langush In Thieu's Jails

Over the past ten months President Thieu has given plenty of signs that he intends to ignore the terms of the Vietnam Peace Agreement in following a programme aimed at liquidating his political opponents whoever they may be.

On October 24th 1972 Thieu called for the "extermination of what he called the "undesirable elements". The Associated Press and the CBS Evening News reported on October 31st that Thieu had sent out directives and leaflets asking people to "exterminate the Communists" before, during and after a ceasefire.

Thieu's subversion of the Peace Agreement

Thieu has repeatedly reiterated that he will never recognise a government "of 3 parts", a position which subverts article 12 of the Agreement. This article provides for the establishment of a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord of three equal segments, after consultations between Thieu and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

On October 12th 1972, Thieu declared: "Let those who continue to advocate a coalition government of three parts stand up and be counted. I am certain that the people and the army will not let them live more than five minutes". The San Francisco Chronicle reported on November 4th that Thieu had stated that persons who supported a coalition government were "pro-communist neutralists" and would riot be allowed to live five minutes.

That statement was a direct reference to the 'Third Force' of Buddhists, Catholics, students and other neutralists, thousands of whom have been imprisoned, tortured and executed. Don Luce, for 14 years a social worker in the south before his expulsion, writes: "On July 8th 1972 the Far Eastern Economic Review reported that 'reliable Opposition sources estimate that 50,000 people have been arrested throughout the country in the past two months'. Thieu's press secretary announced in May of last year that: 'We've arrested the entire student body of Hue' "

Nearly 2% of the population imprisoned

After the announcement of a possible ceasefire in October the number of arrests soared. Most of them were carried out under the F-6 edict which sets quotas for the arrest of "suspected communist agents and draft dodgers". The pretext for an arrest under F-6 is tenuous: hundreds of South Vietnamese have been arrested for "failure to produce on demand a South Vietnamese flag", and a high U.S. official is quoted as saying that Thieu is "arresting anyone who has a third cousin on the other side". (Newsweek, November 13th 1972)

Estimates of the number of prisoners vary. The Committee for Reform of the Prison System claims that "nearly 2% of the entire population of South Vietnam, some 350,000 persons, are politica1 prisoners". Respectable organisations like the International Committee of Conscience and Amnesty International have produced figures which agree with this estimate.

Michael Klare writes of the 20,587 persons executed under the U.S. sponsored Phoenix Programme from 1968 to May 1971, that "all of these people, it must be remembered, were civilians suspected of political crimes (i.e. opposition to the Thieu regime), and not soldiers belonging to either the NLF or North Vietnamese forces".

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)

American aid helps repression

A report in the Australian of January 1 gave indication of fresh mass arrest. The report noted that he had "ordered the arrest and neutralisation" of thousands of people if ceasefire negotiations were successful. The report noted that the word 'neutralisation' "can mean anything from covert execution to a brief period of detention. American officials discount the likelihood of executions, although they admit they are possible and the word neutralisation has ominous overtones".

Buddhist monks and women tear at a barbed wire barricade with their bare hands during an unit-government demonstration in Saigon

Buddhist monks and women tear at a barbed wire barricade with their bare hands during an unit-government demonstration in Saigon

A later report from Thomas Lippman and Peter Osnos (Washington Post, January 24th) indicates how such a scheme might be put into operation. They write that part of the Agency for International Development (AID) Public Safety Programme was "assisting the National Identity Registration Programme (NIRP) to register more than 12,000,000 persons 15 years and over by the end of 1971".

The size of the numbers targeted for identification suggests the extent of the opposition to the Thieu regime. Saigon Judge Tran Thuc Linh writes that "during the last two decades about one million people have had an experience of the prison regime. Each detainee of course has a wife, children, parents and relatives—ten on average. We may thus say that the penitentiary regime is hated by at least 10 million human beings" (Prisons in South Vietnam, published by the Movement of Catholics for Peace).

Black Lists of political activists prepared

The form of identification suggests what the North Vietnamese have called "the white book" of opponents marked for assassination. The Washington Post report notes: "In some provinces, every family has been photographed as a unit ... That photograph is held by the Government, and the presence of extra people in the house, or the absence of people in the photograph who cannot be accounted for, is taken as proof of unlawful activity. In other areas a colour-coding system is used, with each family designated by a colour showing the degreee of loyalty to the Government—a determination that local officials have wide latitude in making".

When Wilfred Burchett was in New Zealand at the beginning of April, he reported that a number of Vietnamese exiles had arrived in Paris with documents showing that the Thieu regime had drawn up black lists of political activists marked down for execution, just as the Nazis towards the end of World War II, shot all those they thought would become political activists after the war was over.

Burchett pointed out that Thieu is not only violating the Peace Agreement by failing to comply with the provision for the release of political prisoners by the end of April, but that he is also trying to sabotage the Agreement by eliminating the neutralist forces, one of the three political forces recognised in the Agreement.

Since the beginning of the Vietnam war world attention has been focused on the military conflict. The fate of Thieu's political opposition in the south has largely been ignored. But now the political future of South Vietnam depends to an important extent on the fate of the political prisoners.

We must demand that the Thieu regime releases the prisoners and stops violating the Peace Agreement, and that the New Zealand Government puts pressure on Thieu to do this. Mr Kirk, Mr Walding, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still claim there are only 21,000 political prisoners in the south. The New Zealand people will have to wake them up to the seriousness of the situation.

The material on political prisoners in this supplement is based on 'Resource Dossier Number I' of the South East Asia Committee, based in Sydney. The primary objective of the committee is to provide 'a factual basis o for an evaluation of the issues involved in South East Asian politics, especially concerning political prisoners, and to provide, as far as possible, an explanation of the circumstances of South East Asia by way of theoretical analysis'.

"The regime is inhuman. Although Article 7, paragraph 5 (of the South Vietnamese Constitution) stipulates: 'Nobody can be tortured, menaced, or forced to confess', on April 29 1970. an ordinance of the Supreme Court ordered the prosecution of students on the strength of evidence drawn from torture, menace and coercion. I have seen with my own eyes prisoners tied to benches and questioners pouring water, soapy water, sewage and urine into their mouths and noses under their bellies are swollen.

I have seen ropes and iron hooks hanging from ceilings for subjecting prisoners to a kind of strappado called 'airplane flying'. I have seen bloodstained prisoners supporting still bloodier ones by the armpits and helping them limp over from an interrogation room to a cell-block or court-room.

In these interrogation rooms, such trivial things as pins, wooden paper-weights, a length of electrical wire, or a water tank at night suddenly become torture instruments. Pins are driven into the detainee's fingertips, wooden blocks smashed on his head, electrodes applied to his ears, breasts and genitals . . .

They have invented this game: the detainee is put in a tank under a tap from which water falls in drops on his head for hours on end. He will feel as if his head was going to burst and may be driven insane. An official on a careless inspection will find everything quite normal: the water and soap for the detainee to wash, the electric wire for a stove, etc. But I have heard with my own ears the sinister sounds of water dripping, stifled screams, the thuds of blows or of human bodies collapsing on the cement floor . . ."

'(Extract from an article by Saigon Judge Tran Thuc Linh in Prisons in South Vietnam, published by the Movement of Catholics for Peace)

Refugees—Virtual Prisoners

Besides the prisoners and the rural and urban populations at large, the refugees in the cities are a major target for Thieu's repression. According to American sources they numbered 641,000 before the ceasefire, but at least 200,000 have been added since. "President Thieu is said to consider strict control of the people to be the most important task tor his regime in the uncertain ceasefire period. To allow a gradual slipping-away of refugees anxious to return to their native villages, he evidently believes, would loosen his control over the rest of the population", Washington Post January 24th, 1973)

The recent decree threatening arrest and/or shooting on the spot anyone who "urges the population to make trouble or leave zones under government control ..." follows an earlier report that freedom of movement will be curbed severely

in South Vietnam when the fighting stops Such a decree is a clear violation of Article 10 of the Agreement, which binds the two South Vietnamese parties to "ensure the democratic liberties of the people"

"Refugees and officials agree that the government has been unusually efficient in curbing whatever organised activity there has been in the camps for a return to communist-held areas. U. S. intelligence sources said that systematic sweeps of the enclosures have been made by troops and special police to arrest Communist agents and sympathisers identified by informers". (Intercontinental Press, February 5th)

The refugees, most of whom have no means of making a living, and who exist under the continuous watch of police and government troops are virtual prisoners. On this basis the estimated number of political prisoners in South Vietnam must be revised upwards. In addition to the 350,000 who are held in prisons, there are at least 641,000 held tinder armed guard against their will in places known by the more attractive name of "relocation centres".

Address: South East Asia Committee, A.L.C.D., G.P.O. Box 161, Sydney 2001, Aust.