VIETNAM 1975-1982 THE CRUEL PEACE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201400007-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE APPUAW WASHINGTON QUARTERLY FilE
ON PAG Fall 1985
Vietnam 1975-1982: The
Cruel Peace
Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson
BY JULY 1, 1942 over one million
Jews had been exterminated in East-
ern Europe. Yet, during the first one
and one-half years of the Holocaust,
newspapers were reluctant to give cre-
dence to what the U.S. Department
of State referred to as "wild rumors
inspired by Jewish fears." Even after
The Times and other major British
newspapers had finally headlined, in
July 1942, "One Million Jews Die,"
the British Foreign Office, the U.S.
State Department, and the U.S. pub-
lic remained steadfast in their disbe-
lief. The Holocaust only became a re-
ality for them when U.S. soldiers and
photographers actually marched into
the death camps.
Walter Laqueur's study, The Terrible
Secret: Suppression of the Truth about
Hitler's Final Solution, contains a
wealth of examples of the difficulties
that rational, democratic and, most of
all, pragmatic government officials,
journalists, and scholars had in accept-
ing as fact the psychologically unac-
ceptable truth. Could a government of
supposedly civilized men intentionally
Jacqueline Desbarats, an associate research
social scientist at the Institute of East Asian
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, is
currently writing a book on Vietnamese mi-
gration. Karl D. Jackson is an associate pro-
fessor of political science at the University of
California, Berkeley and author of several
books on Southeast Asia. Desbarats and Jack-
son are preparing a book on human rights in
Vietnam after 1975.
mount a program which would result
in the deaths of many of its most tal-
ented and formerly respected citizens?
Laqueur recounts Supreme Court Jus-
tice Felix Frankfurter's open disbelief
when confronted in late 1942 with the
existence of Hitler's extermination
program by a Polish representative
who had just witnessed trainloads of
Jewish corpses fresh from the gas
chambers in one of the Polish exter-
mination camps. Justice Frankfurter
heard Karski out but stated, "I can't
believe you." After a further exchange
he said, "I did not say this young man
[Karski] is lying. I said I cannot be-
lieve him. There is a difference.'
During the course of the last four
decades the world has witnessed vio-
lent transitions in a number of Asian
countries: land reform campaigns in
China and Vietnam involved consid-
erable brutality; in 1965-1966, repris-
als against the Communist Party of In-
donesia were widespread in Central
and East Java and Bali; violence at-
tended the decolonization of East Ti-
mor; and postrevolutionary Demo-
cratic Kampuchea was beset by
autogenocide. In each of these in-
stances serious controversy has
emerged over exactly how many peo-
ple lost their lives. In China, for in-
stance, the numbers put forward range
from 800,000 to 3 million.' In Indo-
nesia, it is estimated that between
78,000 and 1.2 million died.3 Esti-
mates of the number of people exe-
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cuted in the Tonkin land reform fluc- fail. First, in closed societies, journal-
tuate between 3,000 to 50,000.; ists and scholars are either shut out or
Twenty-five to one hundred thousand given the kind of guided tours that led
persons probably died in the aftermath some Red Cross officials to conclude
of the decolonization in East Timor, that allied prisoners of war were being
out of a total population of 550,000.5 well taken care of in Germany during
The government of Democratic Kam- World War II. Second, Western intel-
puchea, through both its misguided ligence services often are not very
policies and its program of liquidating helpful. They are often uninterested
all real, as well as imaginary, social and in non-military intelligence and are
political enemies, did away with 1.2 usually incapable of forming statistical
to 2.5 million of the 1975 population impressions of whole populations from
of 7.7 million.6 representative samples; the forte of in-
There are obviously serious difficul- telligence services remains the style of
ties involved in attempting to estimate information collection developed be-
the magnitude of these events with fore the rise of modern public opinion
anything approaching scientific preci- research. Intelligence services inter-
sion. By definition, dead men tell no view colorful or important individuals
tales. In addition, such acts are inten- often at the expense of more typical
tionally concealed by their perpetra- and statistically representative per-
tors-with the exception of extraordi- sons. Third, those outside the society
nary displays of candor, such as Mao's in which terrible things are taking
admission that 800,000 people lost place often have too much to lose if
their lives during land reform. Fur- they acknowledge and divulge the
thermore, clever, albeit ruthless, gov- facts; new information can invalidate
ernments dispose of their enemies in old positions (for example among ad-
small groups, in places that are far re- herents of the anti-war movement) or
moved from the prying eyes of the prompt renewed guilt for having aban-
international press. Estimating the doned an ally in a time of need. These
magnitude of violence in the Third powerful motives favoring disbelief
World is usually left to seat-of-the- often lead observers to dismiss as ex-
pants "guesstimates" by well-meaning aggeration the reports of the only per-
but untrained observers. What be- sons who know what is going on and
comes historical fact is in reality a con- are also able to tell the truth-refu-
sensus which is often without any em- gees. A paradox of refugee research is
pirical foundation. Finally, the that the data of the most knowledge-
political ideology of the estimator fre- able informants are often dismissed as
quently plays a large role, making it exaggerations, even in cases where
all the more difficult for serious schol- there is no evidence whatsoever indi-
ars to reach sober conclusions. cating that exaggeration is indeed tak-
It is important to exercise caution ing place.
against accepting as historical fact the The findings presented in this paper
absence of reports, especially from are unprecedented in the post-1975
closed societies. It is imprudent to ap- literature about Vietnam and may be
ply standards of proof befitting open difficult for some to accept. These
societies to those societies where bad findings represent more than three
news are not allowed to travel fast. In years of research among representative
closed or semi-closed societies, the samples of Vietnamese refugees in
normal tools for acquiring information Chicago, San Francisco, Orange
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County (California), Paris, Lyon, Tou-
louse, and Nice. Many serious scholars
today, like equally well-intentioned
men of affairs in the 1940s, may say
that refugees exaggerate, become hys-
terical, and sometimes tell lies. As au-
thors we can only ask our readers to
suspend disbelief until they have
taken a close look at the hard evidence
derived from the testimony of more
than 800 refugees in two countries and
seven cities, who span the social
length and breadth of the adult over-
seas Vietnamese population.
Setting the Record Straight
Establishing the existence and extent
of a bloodbath is no mere academic
exercise. Accurate estimates of politi-
cal repression are useful guides for the
formulation of refugee admission pol-
icies. Additionally, foreign policy de-
cisions should depend on accurate
monitoring of human rights violations.
Finally, setting the historical record
straight at least in part fulfills the
scholar's duty toward the victims.
An individual will be declared a ref-
ugee if he demonstrates a "well-
founded fear of political persecu-
tion."' Determining the likelihood
that any particular refugee will be sub-
jected to persecution is the crucial de-
cision facing immigration authorities
in countries of first asylum and of final
resettlement. The decision can be rel-
atively straightforward when well-
known political figures flee a country
and are subsequently condemned to
death in absentia by a successor gov-
ernment. Well-founded fear of politi-
cal persecution is more difficult to
prove for a mass of refugees. For
these, it is difficult, if not impossible,
to point to direct personal threats.
Therefore it is necessary to rely on
statistical estimations that particular
groups will be liable to political per-
secution.e Victims are not only indi-
viduals defined by their political opin-
ions, but also persons singled out
because of their membership in a spe-
cific group: ethnic, religious, social, or
occupational. Three essential ques-
tions must, therefore, be answered.
First, how large must the probability
be before one can talk of well-founded
fear of persecution? Second, what is
the risk to any particular individual of
becoming a victim? Third, which so-
cial and political categories are the
most exposed? That these decisions
can be trying is shown by the imme-
diate execution of a whole group of
individuals who had been denied asy-
lum and were forcibly returned to Pot
Pot's Cambodia in 1977. In spite of
the life-or-death nature of these deci-
sions, methods have not yet been de-
vised for estimating the statistical
probability of persecution. This paper
represents a first attempt to use refu-
gee data to derive statistical probabil-
ities of various types of persecution in
Vietnam, such as long-term incarcera-
tion or political execution.
Decisions on foreign assistance in-
creasingly depend on the human rights
situation existing in the potential re-
cipient country. Congress requires the
U.S. government, for instance, to
monitor human rights throughout the
world in order to decide whether a
particular regime should receive for-
eign assistance. It is obvious that hu-
man rights problems exist throughout
much of the world, particularly in the
Third World, where justice and pro-
tection against arbitrary actions by the
state have not attracted widespread
support within either political elites or
mass publics. The very generality of
human rights abuses, when combined
with the limited attention span of U.S.
governing institutions, means that
only the most serious instances, ex-
amples involving mass deprivation of
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human and political rights, will receive
adequate attention. For this reason,
whenever the possibility of massive
human rights violations exists, it be-
hooves us to marshal the sharpest in-
formation-gathering tools possible in
order to assess the situation accurately
and to supply policymakers with the
raw materials required for making ra-
tional decisions.
In the early 1970s, numerous claims
were made that the withdrawal of U.S.
military support in Vietnam would
lead to a bloodbath. High level poli-
cvmakers in the Johnson, Nixon, and
Ford administrations, including both
President Richard Nixon and Vice
President Nelson Rockefeller, stated
categorically that a large bloodbath
was inevitable if North Vietnam and
its supporters inside South Vietnam
took power. As Saigon was falling, for-
mer CIA analyst Samuel Adams pre-
dicted that 100,000 people would be
murdered in the event of a communist
victory.' These predictions were
based, in part, upon an earlier study.10
Since 1975, not only the Hanoi gov-
ernment but also U.S. government of-
ficials, journalists, and academics of
various political persuasions have re-
peatedly stated that the oft-predicted
blood bath did not occur. A retrospec-
tive on predictions has been made and
the predictors have been lampooned."
Virtually every person who has written
on postwar Vietnam-even those em-
phasizing the miserable nature of in-
ternal conditions-has begun by say-
ing that there has been no bloodbath.
There has apparently been little
retaliation on any level and vir-
tually none against former mem-
bers of the Thieu government or
army. 12
. . . The bloodbath theory was
one of the great false alarms of all
time."
Indeed, the only bloodbath of
which there is so far any evidence
in Vietnam was the massacre of
civilians by the disintegrating
South Vietnamese army. ...14
At the end of the Vietnam war in
April 1975 there was no bloodbath
as some of the more harsh antag-
onists of North Vietnam had pre-
dicted.15
At any rate, there appears to have
been no bloodbath, to the sur-
prise of some of those who had
feared that they might be among
the victims."
In Vietnam and Laos, members
of the former enemy officer corps,
the upper echelons of the civil
service, bourgeois intellectuals,
and professionals have been in-
carcerated in reeducation camps.
There has been no evidence of
systematic executions of former
enemies in Vietnam or Laos. n
There has been no bloodbath, so
far as is known.'8
While no bloodbath followed the
1975 victory in the South as U.S.
officials predicted. ...19
Four years after the last American
helicopter fled from the roof of
the Embassy in Saigon there has
been no `bloodbath' of reprisals
and killings by the Communist
government in Vietnam.-'0
To be sure, the `bloodbath' that
had been feared by supporters of
the war did not occur. ...21
Although the Government admits
that some war criminals were ex-
ecuted in the wake of the 1975
take-over, execution for purely
political acts is not accepted pol-
icy. Several executions for orga-
nizing refugee escape attempts
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have been announced, and for-
mer reeducation camp inmates
have reported executions for es-
cape attempts and resistance to
camp authonaes.22
Certain disturbing facts contradict
these reassuring statements. Refugees
speaking and writing about conditions
in Vietnam, after having themselves
experienced some of the harsher forms
of political repression, maintain that
political executions are quite common:
"Another witness, Nguyen Cong
Hoan . . . said that he himself knew
about 300 cases of executions in his
own province of Phy Yen ...."73 In
addition, several other refugees have
published detailed accounts of execu-
tions in the context of the reeducation
camp system.24
Further credence is given to the
possibility that there may have been a
bloodbath after 1975 by the work of
demographers knowledgeable about
Vietnam's official vital statistics.
These demographers suspect that the
crude death rate of seven per thousand
reported for the country as a whole in
the vital registration system and in the
1979 census is an underestimate. A
method devised to reconstruct likely
population trends separately for North
and South Vietnam reveals that the
South Vietnamese death rate remains
consistently half a percentage point
above the rate for North Vietnam. The
underestimate of the death rate for the
South is attributed to underreporting
of deaths on both the census and the
registers.25
What is clear from the protestations
of protagonists on both sides is that
there is an important controversy.
Whatever else one might say about the
bloodbath question, it remains clear
that the subject will rouse strong opin-
ions on both sides and that the discus-
sion itself will bring forth the ghosts
of the ideological battles of the 1960s
and 1970s. In many ways it might
seem preferable to some to avoid delv-
ing into such unpleasant matters be-
cause reopening old wounds cannot
bring the victims back to life and rais-
ing the whole topic will further com-
plicate the history of Vietnam and
cloud its future diplomatic relationship
with the United States. The aforesaid
notwithstanding, we believe that
professional social scientists cannot
shrink from controversy and that the
matter must be confronted in a serious
and objective manner.
Anyone working in the human
rights field has a responsibility to those
who may have fallen victim to capri-
cious governments, be they on the
Left or on the Right. The single most
dramatic impact of the human rights
movement worldwide may be that few
governments today, regardless of the
inclinations of their leaders, can ignore
world public opinion in its entirety.
Publicizing the fate of those who have
been unjustly treated may make such
treatment less probable in the future;
conversely, failing to publish such re-
suits probably encourages govern-
ments with arbitrary inclinations to in-
dulge themselves, assuming that the
outside world will neither know nor
long remember. Clearly, responsibility
to the victims requires that their
deaths not go unreported. Even in mo-
ments of darkness, history needs to
know.
Estimating the Size of the
Bloodbath
We will present results pertaining only
to victims of intentional executions in
Vietnam from 1975 to 1982. We have
not included those who died by acci-
dent (such as clearing mine fields),
those who died from malnutriton, dis-
ease, or exhaustion, those who com-
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mitted suicide, or those who simply
disappeared.
The method utilized depends upon
refugee accounts as the basic source of
information. In the spring and summer
of 1982, 615 randomly selected adult
Vietnamese refugees were inter-
viewed in Chicago, and in northern
and southern California. The sample
is representative of the U.S. Vietnam-
ese refugee population on major socio-
demographic characteristics. As part of
a larger series of questions, the re-
spondents were asked questions about
both their personal experience and
their indirect knowledge of political
repression after 1975. The forms of
political repression that are considered
here include incarceration in a political
jail, detention in a reeducation camp,
and executions.
Twenty percent of the respondents
had spent time in a reeducation camp
and six percent had been incarcerated
in a political jail. Sixty percent of the
respondents answered that they had a
relative or friend who had been sent
to a reeducation camp, and 28 percent
personally knew one or several persons
who had been jailed. Fifty-seven per-
cent gave detailed information about
at least one camp internee (his name,
camp location/s, period/s of detention,
reason for detention, effect of reedu-
cation on the person) and 23 percent
gave detailed information about polit-
ical prisoners. On the average, each
knowledgeable respondent provided
details about two or three internees or
prisoners. Altogether, the respondents
gave some detailed information about
905 friends, relatives, and acquaint-
ances who had been placed in a reed-
ucation camp or a jail since 1975.
For many of our respondents who
had been interned in a reeducation
camp, in a prison, or both, the differ-
ence between the two types of insti-
tutions is a difference in degree rather
than in quality. The amount of polit-
ical indoctrination taking place in
camps may vary from a perfunctory
one hour a day to periods of full-time
indoctrination, that is, approximately
ten hours a day of lectures, self-criti-
cism sessions, and confession writing.
Generally, the longer the stay in a
reeducation camp, the less intensive
the political indoctrination classes. In-
stead, much reliance is placed on the
reeducating value of forced labor, con-
stant hunger, general discomfort, as
well as arbitrary, extremely painful,
and life-threatening punishments.
More than half of the twenty per-
cent of our respondents who had ex-
perienced reeducation spent periods
varying between several months and
several years in one or more reeduca-
tion camps. For these long-term in-
mates the emphasis was on forced la-
bor, eight to ten hours a day felling
trees, digging ditches, and other types
of agricultural labor. Inadequate food
rations was the complaint most fre-
quently voiced-a posteriori-about
camp conditons: 300 to 500 grams of
starchy food a day, usually steamed
rice mixed with corn, or noodles,
sweet potatoes, manioc, or an undi-
gestible sorghum cereal called bobo.
Maybe once a month, this was supple-
mented by a few grams of fish or meat.
Perpetual hunger was the predomi-
nant condition. Even with the irregu-
lar supplement of the food parcels that
the prisoners were occasionally al-
lowed to receive from relatives, this
diet was clearly insufficient: "The ma-
jority of us did not have enough food
to eat and too much hard labor to the
point of passing out while working"
(Respondent # 479); "I ate banana
leaves to survive" (Respondent #
247). Others ate frogs, rats, or insects
for protein. Many became sick with
beri-beri.
Respondents also stressed the arbi-
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trary nature of the punishments, dis- that protects its international reputa-
tributed more or less randomly, some- tion by letting people die a slow death
times for trivial or imaginary faults. in camps, jails, and New Economic
The most dreaded of these were being Zones, rather than by killing them
shackled in a connex box, being put outright. Actually, the information on
in a compression cell, or being tied political executions supplied by the
with barbed wire. "If any complained very same respondents in the last part
or said something improper he would of the questionnaire has convinced us
te o s both. political
be punished by handcuff or footcuff. that the regime
It is a very terrible punishment to be Th ult form of
chained 24 hours out of 24" (Respon- repression is death by execution. Our
dent # 34). "If one is punished, he purpose here is to determine whether
will be put in a compression cell. Once a bloodbath took place after April 30,
out from the compression cell, nobody 1975, and to estimate the number of
can walk" (Respondent 201). "A form persons executed. The data we col-
of punishment for those who at- lected revealed facts that are as shock-
tempted to escape is the Japanese ing as they were unanticipated.
sword: Two arms are cross-tied in the Thirty-five percent of the respondents that they knew or had
back and the person beaten up until
e, heard of acknowledge eaal persons who were ex-
Twenty-
moved passes out. After the cuffs are cal
reasons moved the arms are unable to have not nine percent gave detailed information
(Respondent 479). "1 myself name, date of execution, place, rea-
beaten punished. But others have been
beaten and tortured. Some were even sons for c ecuti
ofon, etc.) for Tone eirt or
placed in water-filled trenches" (Re- more spondent # 71). percent of the executions were re-
The treatment reserved for political ported by eyewitnesses. Those who time
in a
ducation prisoners was worse than for camp amoPWe i- had d camppwerestwice as likely toebe aware
mates, because they were not to be fed and cared for by their fami- of executions as those who had not ndents lies. "Myself and eighteen others days Vietnamese iryweereomore likely
chained for five months and 20 Ys
report victims
respondents. ' ~were los St of~he~re-
in a completely dark cell. We Cwere fe to ommunist sold
the leftovers of the Cported execution victims were males.
diers. The food was always spoilt and p executi foul smelling. But we had
53to eat
~,a thtre curred in 1975 51976!lH if of thons e ~c-
survive" (Respondent # 53).
spect to the jails, the recurrent theme tims were allegedly guilty of anti-gov-sistance.
the was the extremely cramped conditions common rvictims ofIn
a ec utions were
in cells built for 30 or 40 but acco
modating at times up to 100 prisoners, high-ranking officers of the former re-
where it was often impossible to lie gimes. After 1975, they were anti-gov-
down. In some jails, the prisoners ernment resistants. Two-thirds took
were regularly shackled at night. place in the Saigon and the Mekong
the
The phrase that comes back bomost ea areas. In 1975, Saigon th Gowns of the delta were the majordsites
consistently with reference to
camps and jails is "slow death." Iron- of these executions although the
ame
ically, many of our respondents in- coastal areas north of Saigon bet xecutions
sisted on the deviousness of a regime more important
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of resistants were widely spread geo-
graphically, but the delta area had a
concentration of high-ranking officers.
Most of the executions motivated by
escape attempts happened in areas
north of Saigon.
Just because approximately 35 per-
cent of the refugees questioned gave
information about executions does not
necessarily mean that large numbers
of persons were killed. Taking a hy-
pothetical example, all of the respon-
dents conceivably might have been re-
porting on exactly the same, relatively
small number of victims whose exec-
utions happen to be well known. This
is why obtaining the names of the vic-
tims was crucial, even though the act
of asking for names tended to frighten
some people into silence.
A substantial number of our fully
identified victims were named by
more than one respondent, and were
therefore duplicates. That diverse re-
spondents independently reported the
execution of the same individual gave
us confidence in the reliability of our
data. To take an extreme example,
when the same individual's execution
was independently reported by twelve
different respondents interviewed in
three different cities in two different
countries, this established beyond any
doubt that the particular person was
indeed executed.
The existence of duplicates-exec-
utions reported by more than a single
respondent-however, creates statis-
tical problems when one tries to esti-
mate the total number of individuals
who might have been killed for polit-
ical reasons in Vietnam. We assumed
that, as the samples became a larger
and larger proportion of the total world
refugee population, the duplication
rate would increase so much that we
would probably reach a point where
we would not be told about any ex-
ecution that had not been previously
reported by other respondents. For
this reason, we have not directly ex-
trapolated from knowledge of execu-
tions found in our samples to the
knowledge levels that would have
emerged had we been able to inter-
view all refugees. Instead, we devised
a means of deflating the estimated
death count by utilizing the comments
of Vietnamese officials to determine
the true duplication rate that would
have been found if all refugees had
actually been interviewed.
A second major problem exists in
utilizing refugee interviews. Refugee
samples do not directly reflect the rate
of persecution that one might encoun-
ter among the general population that
remained behind in Vietnam. Follow-
ing the advice of critics of refugee re-
search, we explicitly rejected the as-
sumption that the rate of persecution
found among refugees would be the
same as among the population that
stayed behind in Vietnam. We have
not assumed, for instance, that the
same percentage of the home and ref-
ugee populations would have been
sent to reeducation camps and prisons.
The logic of the method makes the
following assumptions:
? that Prime Minister Pham Van
Dong was telling the truth in 1978
when he stated, "In over three
years, we returned to civilian life
and to their families more than a
million persons who in one way or
another had collaborated with the
enemy";'s
? that people truthfully reported
whether they themselves had been
sent to reeducation camp or jail for
political reasons;
? that people who reported in con-
vincing detail about persons who
were incarcerated or executed were
probably telling the truth; and
? that our U.S. sample of 615 respon-
1'
i
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dents was representative of the
Vietnamese refugee population
throughout the world.29
Combining the data from our study
with the above assumptions, we are
confident that 150,000 out of the
worldwide population of adult refu-
gees experienced either reeducation
camp or imprisonment for political rea-
sons. Extrapolating from Pham Van
Dong's admission, it is clear that an-
other 850,000 persons still residing in
Vietnam must have shared the expe-
rience of incarceration. This means
that the rate of victimization among
the adult population of Vietnam was
approximately one-quarter of the rate
found among refugees.30 We also
found through our investigation of the
prisons and reeducation camps that
when we ask different people inde-
pendently to name inmates, there is a
substantial duplication race. Although
our own sample manifested a dupli-
cation rate of five percent for the
names of inmates, we instead assume
a duplication rate of 500 percent,
which brings our estimate in line with
Pham Van Dong's admission."
In estimating the number of exec-
utions we assumed that the high inci-
dence of reports on executions among
the refugees would need to be divided
by five to account for duplication, and
additionally, it needed to be reduced
by a factor of four to reach a final figure
for the home population. After adding
these correction factors, we estimate
the total number of persons executed
in Vietnam during 1975-1982 to be at
least 65,000.32
It should be emphasized that this
estimate may well be quite low, be-
cause we erred on the side of conser-
vatism in evaluating what refugees
told us. For instance, when making
our estimates, we discarded two-thirds
of the names of execution victims,
preferring to use only names that were
provided by eyewitnesses.
The number of named victims used
in this estimate already reflects a prior
conservative decision to use only re-
ports which were detailed enough to
convince us that they were not simple
exaggerations. For instance, one of our
respondents told us about 200 execu-
tions in one evening at a single reed-
ucation camp. Yet, because he did not
provide names-only giving us the
date, place, and reason for the exec-
utions-we considered this to be firm
evidence of only one execution. Our
rationale was that the respondent
could conceivably have supplied
names for all those executed. The
amount of detail supplied by this sin-
gle respondent was not sufficient to
convince us that he was not exagger-
ating. Therefore, we conservatively
counted this as evidence of a single
execution only. Interestingly, we ob-
tained independent confirmation of
this particular incident, albeit with
lower numbers, but this evidence
came from a refugee who was not in
our sample, and therefore, we did not
alter our original coding decision. Fi-
nally, since it was the respondent's un-
cle, rather than the respondent him-
self, who had seen the executions, the
entire report of 200 deaths was re-
moved from the projection process al-
together because it did not emanate
from an eyewitness.
Statistics do not begin to convey the
quality of this experience. Our respon-
dents were eyewitnesses to 30 percent
of the executions that they reported,
and their words give a pattern of ex-
ecution that was often as arbitrary as
it was vicious.
Respondent # 91, a former high
school student, interviewed in
San Francisco: The chief of a
village who disliked the Com-
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munists treated them badly
whenever he caught a Vietcong
(VC). So when the VC took over
the south of Vietnam and caught
him, they took him through the
village and let anyone beat him.
Finally, the VC disemboweled
him."
Respondent # 92, a former non-
commissioned officer in the Viet-
namese Air Force, interviewed in
San Francisco: "Three of my
friends were soldiers of the for-
mer government. They partici-
pated in anti-government resis-
tance. One day, they were caught
by the Communists as they were
distributing leaflets. They were
executed in front of the public
court. Also the brother of one of
my friends in Go Cong got drunk
and shouted words against the
Communist government. The
Communist soldiers heard him,
followed him to his house, and
shot him right in front of his
house."
Respondent #96, a former house-
wife interviewed in San Fran-
cisco: "I witnessed the execution
of a district chief in Rach Gia in
1975. He opposed the Commu-
nists fiercely. But when the Com-
munists took over South Viet-
nam, he did not manage to run
away and was caught. Before ex-
ecuting him, the VC lacerated his
skin and cut off his nose and his
ears.
Respondent # 202, a former sol-
dier interviewed in Chicago: "I
knew four persons who were put
to death between 1975 and 1978.
One was shot to death and an-
other tortured to death because of
escape attempts. Another was
shot because he had sent his fam-
ily a letter expressing his discon-
tent. The fourth one was exe-
cuted because he had violated
camp regulations."
Respondent # 273, a former civil
servant interviewed in Orange
County: "A lieutenant colonel
tried to escape from the Lang Son
reeducation camp by bribing one
of the guards. His plan was re-
vealed, he was shot in one leg and
caught. On the next day he was
buried alive. He died after four
days."
Respondent # 269, a former fish-
erman interviewed in San Fran-
cisco: "Two people in the same
reeducation camp as me were al-
lowed to be released from the
camp. But when they just got out
at the gate of the camp, they were
shot to death."
Respondent # 328, a former air-
port security guard, interviewed
in San Francisco: "I witnessed
the execution of a congressman,
a leader of the Hoa Hoa religion
in the fourth zone, who was im-
prisoned in the same barrack as
me. His head was cut off in public
and he was stabbed in the belly."
Respondent #429. a former fish-
erman interviewed in San Fran-
cisco: "In 1980 in Con Xom
Bong, in Nha Trang province, 20
people were caught as they were
trying to escape from Vietnam by
boat. They were shot to death
when they were on the boat. One
of these twenty people was
brought upon the shore and shot
to death there."
Respondent # 460, a former su-
pervisor in a French factory, in-
terviewed in San Francisco: "By
1975, the Communists executed
everywhere. They established
the People's Court, accused sum-
marily, and executed."
Conclusion
When this research project began, we
expected high estimates on the pop-
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I I
ulation of jails and reeducation camps
and virtually no positive responses on
political executions. When the first
100 interviews from Chicago contra-
dicted the prevailing wisdom that
there had been no widespread execu-
tions, we hypothesized that virtually
the entire phenomenon resulted from
sampling error; we thought we simply
might have touched a pocket of ex-
treme right-wing respondents on the
north side of Chicago. To test this rea-
soning, we next drew fairly large, sta-
tistically representative samples of the
Vietnamese population of the entire
city of San Francisco as well as Orange
County, California. The results on the
execution question remained remark-
ably consistent with the earlier snow-
ball sample from Chicago, in spite of
the insertion of new interviewing
teams at each locale: 37 percent of the
respondents in Chicago gave details
about victims of execution, 31 percent
in San Francisco, and 35 percent in
Orange County.
Over a year of interviewing in three
different metropolitan areas in the
United States convinced us that the
phenomenon was real. Nonetheless,
we decided to delay release of the
U.S. results until we had tested yet
another reason for skepticism-
namely that there was something pe-
culiar about the refugee population
that had reached the United States.
The middle and left wing of the South
Vietnamese political spectrum might
have well have fled elsewhere (per-
haps to France), leaving the United
States with a disproportionate share of
army officers, police operatives, and
government officials, who would logi-
cally have had a higher probability of
being exposed to the harshest forms
of political recrimination. Nine addi-
tional months of research in France
have invalidated this hypothesis; al-
though we have only scratched the
surface of the data yielded by the
French sample, it is clear that the
number of persons knowing about
reeducation camps, jails, and execu-
tions is slightly higher than among the
U.S. samples. Two additional years of
research in two countries and six cities
have been sufficient to exhaust our
skepticism about whether or not wide-
spread killing took place in Vietnam
after 1975.
This project recounts the conse-
quences of a revolution that replaced
a corrupt, right-wing, autocratic re-
gime with a corrupt, left-wing, mobi-
lization regime. The method used to
part the veil of secrecy is not designed
exclusively for carnage accompanying
Communist revolutions. The same
method can and should be used on
transgressions wherever they occur;
with refugees from El Salvador as well
as from Nicaragua; with refugees from
Iran as well as from Kampuchea.
The point here is not to pillar either
the Left or the Right but to provide a
more accurate record on which to base
refugee policies, human rights deci-
sions, and perceptions of history.
The fact that a bloodbath occurred
in Vietnam after April 30, 1975 may
be startling to some and unacceptable
to others. Just as reasonable men
doubted the reports of the escapees
from Auschwitz, reasonable individu-
als will respond to these findings about
Vietnam with a combination of shock
and disbelief. Some will dismiss the
research as an attempt to rehabilitate
the political reputations of the mighty
who have fallen (Johnson, Nixon,
Dean Rusk, Rockefeller, etc.) Others
may prefer to ignore the findings be-
cause it is psychologically more com-
forrable to forget the consequences of
what was popularly viewed as a far-off
Asian war in which the United States
should never have been involved. Still
others may say that estimates are only
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12.
approximations, that refugee eyewit-
nesses exaggerate, and that nothing
short of photographic or documentary
evidence will do-thereby dismissing
the testimony of hundreds of statisti-
cally representative Vietnamese. Fi-
nally, many will say that the Vietnam-
ese are a methodical and rational
people and that they would never have
become involved in large-scale repris-
als because "any attempt at a blood-
bath would have outraged relatives
and friends of the victims and would
have isolated the People's Revolution-
ary Government from the population
whose support it needs to consolidate
control and run the country."" Such
commentators would do well to re-
member that in excess of one million
Vietnamese have fled from Vietnam
precisely because they could not ac-
cept the legitimacy of the new political
order whose performance since 1975
has featured war rather than peace and
tight coercive control rather than any-
thing approximating "socialism with a
human face."
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