Thieu's Prisons: Some POWs Can't Go Home

In a few months it will be a year since the Vietnam "cease fire," but in fact the war is continuing. It progresses at a level lower than in previous years, but no less fatal for those who are killed, no less uprooting for those who are made homeless. At the same time that the war continues, apparently, the political techniques which helped turn many Americans against the Saigon government of Nguyen Van Thieu continue as well.

Estimates of the number of political prisoners in Thieu's jails vary widely. The Saigon government announced in July that it held 4321 political prisoners, a figure Newsweek magazine called "unconvincing." A few days later, a group of South Vietnamese students and clerics issued a statement claiming that the government held about 202,000 political prisoners.

Amnesty International, a widely respected humanitarian group based in London, estimates that Thieu holds about 100,000 civilians, a figure that presumably includes some criminals as well as political prisoners.

Article Four of the South Vietnamese constitution prohibits "every activity designed to publicize or carry out communism."

Article Four is more than enforced. Under a number of decree-laws, issued by the executive branch of the Saigon government and approved, sometimes under heavy pressure, by the legislature, "persons, parties, leagues, and associations" that aim directly or indirectly at "practicing communism or pro-communist neutralism" are outlawed. "Pro-communist neutralism" is defined as "propaganda for and incitement of neutralism."

People "considered dangerous to the national defense and public security" can be imprisoned for a renewable term of two years. without trial. This is the most frequently invoked of all the decree-laws, according to the Indochina Mobile Education Project, because prisoners who are tried are sometimes acquitted.

As might be expected under such laws, political imprisonment is not reserved for supporters of the National Liberation Front. The best known political prisoners are not communists, but neutralists, pacifists, or other opponents of Thieu. According to some observers, in fact, it's precisely non-communist and even non-political people that the Saigon government is most interested in imprisoning. They're the ones that might help to bridge the gap between the Provisional Revolutionary Government and its opponents, or present an alternative to Thieu besides the NLF to upper-class Vietnamese, other Vietnamese anti-communists, and especially the United States, the NLF's most powerful opponent.

Conditions in Thieu's prisons are controversial. Thieu's government claims the prisons are humane "re-education centers," but it generally refuses to let journalists visit them freely. Former prisoners and letters smuggled out of prisons tell of a lack of food, frequent beatings, and torture of all varieties, with the the most popular apparently applying electric shocks to men's and women's genitals, subjecting prisoners to blazing lamps, sticking pins through their fingers, forcing bottles and other objects up women's vaginas, and forcing people to swallow large quantities of clear or soapy water and then jumping up and down on their stomachs.

Many of the most graphic accounts of torture go back to pre-ceasefire days. But there are more than enough reports of torture since the ceasefire--stories like that of a 14-year old girl, arrested for having the sheet music for four antiwar songs, who says police stripped her, put sandbags across her body, beat her until she vomited blood, and held her prisoner for six months without ever filing charges--to indicate that prison conditions haven't changed very much. It is not entirely clear how much torture, or how much of Thieu's police and prisons in general, is paid for by American money. It's arguable that the government responsible for them exists only by virtue of American support, and that if such support were withdrawn it would be replaced either by the PRG--whose treatment of American prisoners of war, though apparently not so humane as that of North Vietnam, bears no comparison to the stories ex-inmates of Thieu's jails tell--or by a neutralist coalition of some sort.

The United States now pays 70 or 80 per cent of the Saigon government's budget in direct aid. All South Vietnamese military equipment, weapons and ammunition are provided by the United States on a one-for-one replacement basis. As a result of American aid, the Saigon government has one of the world's best-equipped air forces and 1.1 million men under arms, the fourth largest military force in the world.

American aid is heavily weighted toward the military. Medical services for civilians, many of whom were injured in the war, get 0.5 per cent of the American aid budget, and education gets a little over 0.1 per cent, according to The New York Times.

Of approximately $2.5 billion requested by the Nixon Administration for South Vietnam this fiscal year The Times reported, about $1.9 billion, or 76 per cent, would be direct aid to the military.

But this doesn't tell the whole story of military aid. Another 6 per cent of American aid goes for an apparently pacific program, purportedly designed to feed the hungry urban poor of South Vietnam. Most of these people were neither hungry nor urban until the war drove them from their rice fields; and many of them would presumably return to the fields if fighting stopped. In the meantime, this is how The Times described the program:

Every bag of rice given by the United States, for example, is paid for by Washington in dollars, then bought by Vietnamese importers in piasters. Eighty per cent of the piasters are then deposited in accounts to be used solely by the South Vietnamese Army, Navy and Air Force. This is known as the Food for Peace program.

But even apart from American maintenance of Thieu's government in general, and American aid to the Saigon budget Thieu uses for prisons at his own discretion, the United States is underwriting at least some of Thieu's prison system in particular, as it has for years. Senator James Abourezk (D-S.D.) recently undertook an extensive investigation into American aid to Saigon's police and he reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the end of June.

Like Senator Edward Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) who conducted a similar investigation, Abourezk found at least $20 million in direct aid to police and prisons, with other "public safety support funds" probably hidden elsewhere in the budget. Over 250 Vietnamese policemen were to be trained this year in the United States--a small fraction of the 120,000 Vietnamese in the National Police, the largest South Vietnamese police agency, but a large increase over the 43 policemen trained in the United States the year before. In the meantime, Vietnamese continue to die in skirmishes between Saigon and NLF troops, and Vietnamese prisoners from the Saigon government's jails continue to tell stories of their treatment: "The two hands of the woman are tied together and drawn up to the ceiling," four Vietnamese from Thu Duc prison wrote in 1970. "The police then twirl her around, beating her until she is unconscious..."

"You worry about me because you have seen me laugh and talk," the ex-prisoner who alerted American Congressmen to the tiger cages reportedly told them the same year. "I am a person to you. But I have seen 10,000 other people who have been and are still being tortured. Each one of these 10,000 is a person to me. As a man I cannot rest until these men are able to live free as I do now."