Word: phong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...newcomers do have one advantage: many are joining family members who are already established in thriving Vietnamese communities. Yen Thi Duong, 40, recently arrived in Atlanta with her daughter and two children of her brother, Duong Xuan Phong, who had settled earlier in Atlanta with his wife Nga. Yen had sailed from Viet Nam last February on a rickety boat with 60 other people. Although the Malaysians opened fire on the refugees when they first tried to land, and many were later raped or robbed, the foursome wound up safely at a camp and were allowed to immigrate to America...
...regime's figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian Journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, "No one ever returns...
Those who wind up in Phong Saly are accused of specific crimes, although the charges may be as vague as being a "spy" or a "reactionary." Since Pathet Lao soldiers have been given blanket permission to charge just about anyone and no trials are necessary, many Laotians have been banished to Phong Saly for little reason...
...only prisoners known to have walked away from Phong Saly are five of a group of 15 Thai nationals released from Laotian jails last month as a gesture of reconciliation. They tell a grim tale of forced labor, undernourishment and disease. Said one: "We were so thin, so hungry that we even tried to roast toads. We pleaded for medicine, but the doctor wouldn't give us any. We thought we would die." Others told of three prisoners thrown into tiger cages for having killed and eaten a guard's dog; one Thai claimed that disease had killed...
...Pathet Lao's plans for Phong Saly appear to be patterned on what the Vietnamese Communists euphemistically call a "new economic zone," a remote area where primitive agriculture can absorb a large population of political exiles who are there to stay. Inmates in other parts of the Lao gulag may also be sinking some unwanted permanent roots. Many who were shipped off to re-education centers two years ago are still there, and some prisoners' wives have been warned to pack up and join their husbands if they ever want to see them again. The Pathet...