Word: hieu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...help publicize what Toai calls the "Vietnamese Gulag," Toai and Hieu recently visited Cambridge as guest of the East Asian Law Colloqium at the Law School. They focused their discussion on the Vietnamese prison conditions, but they also explicitly condemned the Hanoi government, rejecting their own revolutionary past...
While he and Hieu are undeniably zealous crusaders, their tales of prison life rival those of Solzghenitsyn. Toai and Hieu insist that all the captives in Vietnamese jails are political prisoners, whose only crime is lackluster support or outright opposition to the government. While prisoners in the re-education camps work at hard labor, the captives in the jails are kept inside a small room and are taken outside only for interrogation. "It was so crowded that you had to sleep standing up, and when I got out for a while I could not sleep lying down," Toai says. Hieu...
...addition to the severe crowding, Hieu and Toai say prisoners were often tied up in contorted positions for days on end. "My first day in jail my right hand was chained to my left leg, and I was left that way for days," Hieu says. Other escaped prisoners have told similar tales of being confined in cells without room to sit or stand, or sitting with their toes or fingers tied to each other...
...Hieu says the psychological torture far surpassed the physical discomforts. From 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. prisoners listened to government broadcasts over loudspeakers mounted on the prison roof. At the direction of prison officials, the captives wrote down reasons to support the government. "The most terrible torture was the torture of the spirit and the will," Hieu says...
...reduced the number of guards needed by telling the prisoners their families would suffer arrest and torture if the prisoners misbehaved. "The most inhuman torture in not to torture the prisoner himself but to torture his relatives in front of him," Toai notes. With this psychological pressure in force, Hieu says, prison doors stayed unlocked, and only one or two guards patrolled the area, which used neither barbed wire nor other security precautions...