A Voice from Vietnam
GERSHMAN, CARL
Perspectives A VOICE FROM VIETNAM BY CARL GERSHMAN Doan Van Toai is a young Vietnamese who came here last month to tell Americans what life is like in his homeland now. This is not his first...
...The regime doesn't only violate human rights, he continues, "it violates human nature...
...He was simply sent off to a prison camp for 28 months...
...It further held the government's gross economic mismanagement responsible for Vietnam's food deficiencies...
...Even in 1945, he says, when the Japanese confiscated rice for their troops and nearly 2 million people starved to death, Vietnamese did not abandon their ancestral homeland and take to the sea in flight...
...He looked at North Vietnam and mistook the forced silence of the people for political unity and general satisfaction...
...On the other hand, he is trying to describe the system to Americans and convince them of its realities...
...Then we could fight for our human rights," says Toai...
...From their prison cells they managed to communicate the text of the manifesto to Toai, who put it to memory to make it public upon reaching France...
...During that time his mother died, having been denied admission to a hospital because she had a son in custody...
...Nevertheless, Toai will shortly return to Berkeley to meet with other former antiwar activists...
...Nine years ago, while vice-president of the Saigon Student Union, he was the guest of antiwar groups at Berkeley, Stanford and other California campuses...
...The Communists can pick up anyone they wish, kill them at any moment they wish, and nobody will know about it...
...Following their return, Le Monde, in an editorial tagged "PeaceCrimes," denounced "Vietnam's Gulag Archipelago," charging that its repressive system differed merely in degree from the genocide in Cambodia and derived from the same totalitarian impulse...
...One of them, who lived for a time in Saigon, and offered his home as sanctuary when Toai was hiding from Thieu's police, was unwilling to discuss the present state of human rights in Vietnam, or even to admit that Hanoi's troops were involved in the recent capture of Phnom Penh...
...The war has passed into history...
...This will be hard for many Americans to grasp, since it has been widely accepted in the U.S...
...The first, written by eight "third force" leaders and entitled, "The Disinherited Vietnamese's Manifesto on Human Rights," was a plea to the world community to protest against the " savage violation of human rights" in South Vietnam...
...All the Paris newspapers carried front-page accounts of the press conference, and many ran editorials on the subject of human rights in Vietnam...
...Arriving in Paris in May, Taoi held a press conference that received unusual attention...
...The Hanoi government then initiated a campaign to discredit Toai, claiming that he was a CIA agent who had collaborated with Thieu's secret police...
...When reminded of Jean-Francois Revel's description of Communism as the first political force in history to be "oppresive in its domination and liberating in its propaganda," Toai observes that the Vietnamese have their own way of saying the same thing: "Don't listen to what they say...
...intervention in Vietnam, a passionate opponent of the Nguyen Van Thieu government, and a sympathizer with the National Liberation Front (NLF), Toai got something of a hero's welcome from his American counterparts...
...Although he once shared those views and still has not softened his opposition to Thieu, first-hand experience has persuaded Taoi otherwise...
...Toai hopes to start a similar debate here, but so far he has met with only limited success...
...Half the prisoners, it said, were officers, soldiers and civil servants of the former government...
...So has the activism it inspired...
...They were Vietnamese," he says, "and I just couldn't believe they would behave this way toward other Vietnamese...
...He refused and was arrested...
...He suggested a solution to his dilemma when he said, " If someone tells you Communism is terrible, there must be something in his background to make this credible...
...The case was not investigated, he was allowed no legal defense, and he received no trial...
...It was originally read on the steps of the Saigon Cathedral on April 18, 1977, after which all the signatories were arrested...
...where the people are like little ants...
...The current oppression, Toai insists, is different from anything he could have imagined, or anything anyone could imagine who has not actually lived through something similar...
...lectuals, workers and peasants who not only had no connection with the Saigon government but, in many cases, had been associated with the opposition...
...But today the system is a closed and isolated box...
...those who show the least sign of dissatisfaction are denied rice rations and employment...
...His mistake was that he had listened to the words, he says, and could not believe that they were lies...
...Today he is prepared for a quite different reception...
...Toai feels his own background gives him credibility and will make it difficult even for former antiwar activists to distrust what he says...
...The statement charged that many prisoners had died from hunger, overcrowding, torture, and suicide, and that the Communist regime threatened to harm prisoners if their families were not completely obedient...
...It also urged its political supporters in Paris to send letters to the press raising doubts about Toai's testimony and defending the policies of the Communist government...
...More significantly, he was opposed to Thieu and the Americans, and the Communists promised justice and national reconciliation...
...Toai's disillusionment with the Vietnamese Communists began soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975...
...And he is determined to reach as broad an American audience as possible with his message that Vietnam's suffering today is unparalleled in the country's long, often tragic history...
...He points out that the current exodus of refugees from Vietnam is unprecedented...
...that any fate for the Vietnamese was preferable to a continuation of the war, and that a Communist government, regardless of whether it was a dictatorship, could be no worse than Thieu...
...This is not his first visit to the United States...
...Watch what they do...
...He was not even charged with any crime...
...He has caught the country at a moment when most people are concerned chiefly with problems of inflation and taxation and would prefer not to think about foreign issues, Vietnam least of all...
...It is typical of the kind of system that Communists have imposed elsewhere...
...So the question naturally arises: Why didn't Toai anticipate that life would be like this under Communism...
...and because everyone is encouraged to inform on others, the fear of imprisonment is always present...
...In November 1977 he was released for reasons he does not understand, and eventually he bribed his way out of the country...
...These were systematically analyzed and refuted in a running battle in the pages of Le Monde...
...He distributed two documents placed in his trust, he said, by political prisoners still in jail in Vietnam...
...Their host's desires notwithstanding, the journalists managed to look into the human rights situation as well...
...It claimed that there were 800,000 political prisoners in Vietnam, twice the highest estimate previously published abroad...
...He had read Solzhenitsyn, he replies, but dismissed the writer's picture of Communism as Right-wing propaganda...
...As a strong critic of U.S...
...On the one hand, he doubts that it is possible for a person who has not lived under it to really understand Communism...
...The two documents, and Toai's own comments about what he had seen and experienced in Vietnam under the Communists, created considerable controversy in France...
...Moreover, he is aware that his new message is not likely to appeal to his old friends -for the burden of it is that he and they were wrong, at least about the mercies of the men in Hanoi...
...the other half were intelCarl Gershman is the executive director of the Social Democrats, U.S.A...
...He has had a few encounters with former friends from the peace movement...
...He was asked to cooperate with the Finance Committee of the NLF in drawing up plans for the confiscation of private property...
...In an obvious effort to divert attention from the human rights issue, Hanoi invited four respected Paris reporters to visit Vietnam to witness the border conflict with Cambodia...
...It is this hope that sustains him as he tries to make Americans think once again about Vietnam...
...While under the former government one could seek out a foreign reporter or be assured of a lawyer and a trial if accused of a crime, no such defenses exist now...
...the few remaining campus activists are concerned about "liberation" in Africa, Iran and other places -but no longer in Vietnam...
...Toai finds himself in something of a dilemma on his American visit...
...The regime controls every aspect of life...
...What Toai describes is easily recognizable as totalitarianism...
...The other document was a scathing attack on Vietnam's prison system, signed by 49 inmates...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 3
