Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...idea of getting out is like a dream--they crowd 50 to 100 prisoners in a 12 by 30-foot room with one small window. I desperately wanted to be transfered to a re-education camp with heavy labor so I could see the sun," Nguyen Huu-Hieu says of his year in a Vietnamese political prison...
Without explanation, Hanoi released Hieu and fellow prisoner Doan Van Toai from prison in late 1977. Since then, the two have traveled through Europe, Canada, and most recently, the United States, describing the horrors of Vietnamese prison life and urging Western nations to condemn the Vietnamese government for human rights violations...
...year-old Toai spent 28 months in prison for refusing to serve on the Finance Committee of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the South Vietnamese revolutionary group that helped overthrow former President Nguyen Van Thieu. Hieu, a former Buddhist monk, was forced to renounce Buddhism by the Vietnamese Communist leaders in 1975. He joined the political opposition to the government, and was arrested in 1976 as part of a mass roundup of former religious leaders...
...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...