Word: toai
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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...
...Toai's reference to "gulags" is deliberate; he has written a book about his experience entitled "Tales from a Vietnamese Gulag," and he likens his political education to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "At first when I read Solzhenitsyn I thought he was just anti-Communist, but now I know it is true. You have to see Communism to believe it," Toai says. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has gone from revolutionary supporter to virulent anti-Communist propagandist...