Tales From the 'Vietnamese Gulag'

"The idea of getting out is like a dream--they crowd 50 to 100 prisoners in a 12 by 30-foot room with one small window. I desperately wanted to be transfered to a re-education camp with heavy labor so I could see the sun," Nguyen Huu-Hieu says of his year in a Vietnamese political prison.

Without explanation, Hanoi released Hieu and fellow prisoner Doan Van Toai from prison in late 1977. Since then, the two have traveled through Europe, Canada, and most recently, the United States, describing the horrors of Vietnamese prison life and urging Western nations to condemn the Vietnamese government for human rights violations.

The 33 year-old Toai spent 28 months in prison for refusing to serve on the Finance Committee of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the South Vietnamese revolutionary group that helped overthrow former President Nguyen Van Thieu. Hieu, a former Buddhist monk, was forced to renounce Buddhism by the Vietnamese Communist leaders in 1975. He joined the political opposition to the government, and was arrested in 1976 as part of a mass roundup of former religious leaders.

To help publicize what Toai calls the "Vietnamese Gulag," Toai and Hieu recently visited Cambridge as guest of the East Asian Law Colloqium at the Law School. They focused their discussion on the Vietnamese prison conditions, but they also explicitly condemned the Hanoi government, rejecting their own revolutionary past.

Toai's reference to "gulags" is deliberate; he has written a book about his experience entitled "Tales from a Vietnamese Gulag," and he likens his political education to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "At first when I read Solzhenitsyn I thought he was just anti-Communist, but now I know it is true. You have to see Communism to believe it," Toai says. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has gone from revolutionary supporter to virulent anti-Communist propagandist.

While he and Hieu are undeniably zealous crusaders, their tales of prison life rival those of Solzghenitsyn. Toai and Hieu insist that all the captives in Vietnamese jails are political prisoners, whose only crime is lackluster support or outright opposition to the government. While prisoners in the re-education camps work at hard labor, the captives in the jails are kept inside a small room and are taken outside only for interrogation. "It was so crowded that you had to sleep standing up, and when I got out for a while I could not sleep lying down," Toai says. Hieu adds, "They leave very bright lights on the celling all night long to prevent you from falling asleep, and there isn't enough air to breathe--under these conditions the prisoners wish to have any opportunity to do heavy work outside."

In addition to the severe crowding, Hieu and Toai say prisoners were often tied up in contorted positions for days on end. "My first day in jail my right hand was chained to my left leg, and I was left that way for days," Hieu says. Other escaped prisoners have told similar tales of being confined in cells without room to sit or stand, or sitting with their toes or fingers tied to each other.

But Hieu says the psychological torture far surpassed the physical discomforts. From 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. prisoners listened to government broadcasts over loudspeakers mounted on the prison roof. At the direction of prison officials, the captives wrote down reasons to support the government. "The most terrible torture was the torture of the spirit and the will," Hieu says.

Prison officials used sophisticated methods of psychological control to compel obedience and prevent escapes, the men say. These officials reduced the number of guards needed by telling the prisoners their families would suffer arrest and torture if the prisoners misbehaved. "The most inhuman torture in not to torture the prisoner himself but to torture his relatives in front of him," Toai notes. With this psychological pressure in force, Hieu says, prison doors stayed unlocked, and only one or two guards patrolled the area, which used neither barbed wire nor other security precautions.

Prison officials also manipulated the prisoners' fear and suspicion of each other to control behavior. "The first thing you learn is the prisoners must control each other," Hieu says. "If anyone violates the discipline of a prison, the whole room would be punished. We were forced to supress each other for our own good."

Hieu and Toai charge that the Communists psychological manipulation extends to the general Vietnamese public. Although both Hieu and Toai fought against Thieu, they now say the Hanoi government is harsher and more totalitarian than was the Thieu regime--a government hardly noted for its tolerance of political opposition, much less for its respect for the average citizen. "The only thing better now than under Thieu are the jails, "Toai says.

But the Hanoi government is much better at cloaking its repression under the banner of the public good, or blaming mysterious "counter-revolutionaries" for unpopular curtailments of freedom, the men assert.

"The Communists are so much smarter than Thieu. If they want to take your car, they arrest you and take your home and car, then free you and give you back your home, so you are grateful. Under Thieu, they just took your car," Toai says.

The two men also say the Hanoi government makes especially good use of scapegoats to soften the impact of harsh policies. Hieu describes what he termed the government's strategy for preparing the public for the nationalization of key industries. "If they want to monopolize the fish industry in Saigon, they order the fishermen not to send their fish to Saigon. The prices shoot skyhigh, and the government launches a propaganda campaign blaming the capitalist monopoly fish industry and then they take it over," Hieu says. Hieu also charged that the Hanoi government periodically publicly executes scapegoats to combat public uproar over the prohibitive prices on the black market.

Hieu and Toai's accusations reflect their complete disillusionment with Communism, a sharp turnaround from their earlier revolutionary actions. Toai in particular is bitter about the failure of the NLF ideals, and blames the Hanoi regime for co-opting the NLF and radicalizing its more moderate platform. He says he refused to serve on the NLF Finance Committee because he was chosen to draw up a plan to confiscate all private property in Vietnam, not an original NLF proposal. The idealistic people in the NLF sought to rely upon the power of Hanoi to overthrow the Saigon government, but once the objective was realized the Communists in Hanoi had no need for the NLF which they looked on as a tool," Toai says.

The NLF, with its cellular organization modeled on the techniques of Mao's Red Army, played a key role in gaining support for the Communists among the Vietnamese population. Like their Red Army counterparts, the NLF worked in small groups, emphasizing the Thieu government's exploitation and downplaying their revolutionary aims. They tried to win the support of the Vietnamese peasants by treating them courteously--for the most part. Gradually, many Vietnamese villages became NLF strongholds, prompting some of the more horrible U.S. attrocities to "flush out" NLF members.

But Toai blames the NLF's naivete for allowing the North Vietnamese to take control. "The first thing the Hanoi Communists did was to unify all military forces under the command of North Vietnamese leaders, but the NLF was unprepared--they never believed that Hanoi would do this to them," he adds.

The idealists and intellectuals who resisted the Hanoi takeover were imprisoned or killed, Toai says. Nevertheless, he adds he still believes in the NLF's ideals before the North Vietnamese takeover. "The former leaders of the NLF were the true idealists and revolutionaries and they were betrayed by the North Vietnamese Communists, who were afraid of their popular support," Toai says. "The American people think the Hanoi Communists started a true revolution, but we have a duty to let them know this is only a pretended revolution."

When Toai reached Paris in late 1977, he brought with him a document with what he asserted to be the signatures of 48 other political prisoners, many of them former NLF members, detailing the oppression in Vietnamese prisons and urging international condemnation of the Hanoi government. A number of groups in France and Canada, where Toai travelled before reaching the U.S., have contested the authenticity of the document, which Toai says he circulated secretly through Vietnamese prisons.

Whether or not Toai and Hieu speak for other political prisoners, they are passionately eager to spread their stories of political repression. And they pointedly direct their reproaches to Americans, who they believe must share the blame for Vietnam's sufferings. "I want the American government to condemn the human rights violations in Vietnam, but the American people want to forger Vietnam because they are ashamed," Toai says, adding "They are ashamed because they were wrong.