Thieu's Political Prisoners of War

JUST after the 11 p.m. curfew, a convoy of green and white police vans slid into a small alley off Phat Diem Street in Saigon's Second District. Policemen toting M-16 rifles and wooden clubs jumped out and sealed off the alley at either end. Pushing brusquely into each apartment, they demanded identity cards. Suspected Viet Cong sympathizers, draft dodgers or army deserters were hustled off to a van.

Every night in Saigon, some 200 to 300 people are arrested in similar police sweeps, and others are grabbed without warning on the street during the day. Since last spring's North Vietnamese offensive and especially after the beginning of peace talks, there has been an alarming upswing in arrests. Offenses are as diverse as suspected Communist leanings, or having a relative in the North, or being neutral--which violates an admonition of President Nguyen Van Thieu: "No neutralism in the Communist way."

The fate of Saigon's political prisoners is one of the most troublesome issues bedeviling the prospects of peace. Hanoi claims that the nine-point agreement worked out by Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho provides that "all captured and detained personnel will be returned simultaneously with the U.S. troop withdrawal." But to release the prisoners would present a delicate problem to President Thieu. Most of them are resentful enough to support any leftist opposition and work to bring his government down.

Thieu's purge of suspected enemies has been so massive that even the government may not know how many prisoners it has--or how many of them can be rightly classified as political. Besides 58,000 prisoners of war (including 11,200 North Vietnamese), 80,000 South Vietnamese political prisoners are in jail, according to South Vietnamese sources. U.S. observers estimate that there are perhaps 90,000 people in prison all together, including not only political prisoners but also P.O.W.s and common criminals.

They have no recourse to justice.

Under martial law, clamped on the country in May, anyone who is considered a threat to national security--a vague charge, to be sure --can be held in "preventive detention" indefinitely without trial. Even prisoners who have finished their sentences can still be held if they are considered dangerous to security. Opposition Leader Truong Dinh Dzu, who ran against Thieu in 1967 as a peace candidate and was subsequently jailed for advocating a coalition government, was due to be released in May. He is still behind bars, although his quarters are comfortable and his family is allowed to visit him.

According to Ho Ngoc Nhuan, an opposition member of South Viet Nam's lower house, many of the prisoners "have never committed a political act in their lives. Political activities have been excuses used against the poor who haven't the money to protect themselves from police corruption." There is even a kind of fixed scale of bribes. A suspect against whom nothing definite has been found may be able to buy his release for $3 or $4. More prosperous businessmen are held up for more; if gold or large amounts of currency are found in their possession when they are arrested, for instance, the rate can soar to several hundred dollars. Prisoners seriously suspected of Communist or antigovernment activity sometimes are able to buy their way out and sometimes not. Many of them are tortured for confessions, which in South Viet Nam are admissible in court no matter how obtained.

Horror stories of torture by security agents abound, and most Saigonese accept them as true. One woman recently released from central police headquarters reported that her interrogators shoved a rubber stick up her vagina. She also claimed that police had tortured other women with electric shocks. Another woman, who never discovered why she was being held, was crammed for ten months with six others into a pit cage at the most notorious prison on Con Son island. "It smelled so foul at times that we wanted to die," she said. "When we asked for water, they dropped lime on us. It burned our skin and eventually blinded me." Prisoners who cannot buy their food from guards subsist on the prison diet of rice, salt and occasional dried fish.

"The distinction between revolutionaries and others disappears in prison," says a 26-year-old social worker who was jailed for two months on the excuse that his identification card was mutilated. The prisoners' common enmity toward Thieu is bound to complicate negotiations over their release. It is unlikely that the political prisoners will be granted their freedom until Thieu is forced to act by international agreement. But by throwing more people into jail, meanwhile, the government is enlarging the ranks of the anti-Thieu activists.

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