Death by Government by R. J. Rummel

Author:R. J. Rummel [Rummel, R. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2013-12-15T23:00:00+00:00

But inhuman conditions and constant “thought reform” are not all the prisoners had to worry about. There was tortuous physical punishment for minor violations or insufficient obedience, or for inadequate dedication to changing one’s beliefs. Moreover,

every camp has a loudspeaker system that is used without warning to summon prisoners who did not show enthusiasm for their work or who, according to informants, made unfavorable remarks about the revolution. They are ordered to report to the camp headquarters at midnight. Such prisoners never come back. Usually, a few hours after they have been summoned, the other prisoners hear rifle fire in the nearby jungle. Perhaps these are mock executions, and the “executed” prisoners are secretly moved to other camps; perhaps they are not. I have inquired of exprisoners and they cannot tell me. I do know, however, that these midnight arrests have an effect on the prison population that is absolutely terrifying. Even in his dreams, a prisoner is haunted by the thought that he may be summoned and taken away like his friends.147

The poet Nguyen Chi Thien, who by 1980 had spent over sixteen years in prison camps, must also have been expressing the feelings of “re-education” camp inmates in a poem he called “From Ape to Man” that was smuggled out of the camps to the West:148

From ape to man, millions of years gone by.

From man to ape, how many years?

Mankind, please come to visit

The concentration camps in the heart of the thickest Jungles!

Naked prisoners, taking baths together in herds,

Living in ill-smelling darkness with lice and mosquitoes,

Fighting each other for a piece of manioc or sweet potato,

Chained, shot, dragged, slit up at will by their captors,

Beaten up and thrown away for the rats to gnaw at their breath!

This kind of ape is not fast but very slow in action, indeed

Quite different from that of remote prehistory.

They are hungry, they are thin as toothpicks,

And yet they produce resources for the nation all year long.

Mankind, please come and visit!

In sum, “re-education” was a label for revenge, punishment, and social prophylaxis. But unlike the Khmer Rouge who were too public about their mass killing, the Vietnamese regime cleverly and at first successfully hid it from the outside world. In dealing with “war criminals” and high members of the South Vietnamese government, they claimed that “re-education” was a humane alternative to a blood bath. Explained Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, “It’s not good to kill as Pol Pot did…. When you kill you lose the sense of family.”149 But in private they boasted about their blood letting to those they trusted. This was pointed out by Nguyen Cong Hoan, a member of the Buddhist antiwar opposition in South Vietnam during the war and of the postwar Vietnam National Assembly until his defection. “The party leaders themselves have told me,” he says, “that they are very proud of their talent for deceiving world opinion. ‘We’ve been worse than Pol Pot,’ they joke. ‘But the outside world knows nothing.’”150

TABLE 11.2

Vietnam War and Postwar Dead, 1954–87a

Period

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