They demanded the release of the prisoners and when Hanoi finally agreed, Hanoi stated that they have done nothing wrong.“It is Vietnam’s right to punish these criminals as the European countries did with the elements who had cooperated with Hitler. Hidden Horrors of Vietnam’s Re-Education Camps “So whatever happened to the losing side in the Vietnam War?” Re-Educations were were the winners of the party would perform atrocious acts of revenge on its citizens. The others who had been ordered to report for "reform study" were not allowed the same arrangement of attending during the day and going home at night, but were instead to be confined to their sites of "reform study" until the course ended. In the past the Charity relied on local laborers to excavate specific grave sites of individual families. Click here to show PDF About this Item. There are known burial practices of ordained Christian clergy buried with the head at the eastern end of the grave, supposedly in readiness to minister to their congregation after the Resurrection.Many South Vietnamese embraced Catholicism during the time of French colonization, and many Catholic clergy were sent to re-education camps after 1975. As of 1980, official regulations stated that prisoners in the camps could be visited by their immediate family once every three months. Manuscript/Mixed Material NVN: K-3 RE-EDUCATION CAMP/"Daily Life in Vietnam's Reeducation Camps" from The Wall Street Journal. The charity is a non-political, humanitarian organization.December 2006 welcomed a new chapter in the life of the Foundation as The Returning Casualty (TRC) initiative began to take shape.
That way, escapes from prison could be prevented, and prisoners' relatives could be prevented from visiting them.
Brief history of the re-education camps in Vietnam On April 30, 1975 the South Vietnamese Government fell to the Communist regime under Ho Chi Minh and those individuals involved in the political and military running of the former government were ordered to register with the new government and await further orders. Scholars believe that at one time there were as many as 300 camps throughout Vietnam, most of them near Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon.--Sent people to the camps for indefinite terms without bringing formal charges against them or conducting judicial proceedings of any kind.--Subjected prisoners to intense political harangues and forced them to write … This resulted in the establishment of reeducation camps in the North, set up to deal “with the task of concentrating for educational reform counterrevolutionary elements who continue to be culpable of acts which threaten public security.” (The Indochina Newsletter October-November 1982) This resolution was quickly applied to South Vietnam after the DRV’s takeover. Then, in June, the new regime issued orders instructing those who had registered in May to report to various places for reeducation. Through this project, we hope to bring closure and peace of mind to the many Vietnamese who lost their relatives in the post-war reeducation camps, while honoring those who perished in the jungle camps. Officially, the Vietnamese government does not consider the reeducation camps prisons, but rather places where individuals could be rehabilitated into society through education and socially constructive labor.
After the fall of Saigon, the cemetery was ransacked and later abandoned. Violations of rules led to various forms of punishment, including being tied up in contorted positions, shackled in Longtime anti-Vietnam war and human rights activist During the last three years friends and I have interviewed several hundred former prisoners, read newspaper articles on the camps as well as various reports of Amnesty International, and have studied official statements from the Vietnamese Government and its press on the re-education camps. In addition, the remaining skeleton elements were placed in individual ceramic ossuries and taken to a temporary burial site until the results of the DNA analysis and familial matches were complete and the remains returned to their families.An archaeological approach to the retrieval of human remains had never been achieved by the Charity. In such "reeducation camps", the government imprisoned several hundred thousand former military officers and government workers from the former regime of South Vietnam. Today, 7 1/2 years after the communist takeovers in South Vietnam and Laos, tens of thousands of people are still in reeducation camps, according to refugees and Western diplomats. Many teachers reported for reeducation, assuming that they would have to undergo it sooner or later anyway. But this promise was broken. The duration of the visits was not long, reported by former prisoners to last from 15 to 30 minutes. The re-education camp system, as it developed in the South, was both larger and more complex than its counterpart in the North.
If the progress of the former prisoners was judged unsatisfactory during this period, they could be fired from their jobs, put under surveillance for another six months to a year, or sent back to the reeducation camps. This often pushed inmates to exhaustion and nervousness with each person and group striving to surpass or at least fulfill the norms set by camp authorities, or they would be classified as 'lazy' and ordered to do 'compensation work' on Sundays. Other kinds of work included cutting trees, planting corn and root crops, clearing the jungle, digging wells, latrines and garbage pits, and constructing barracks within the camp and fences around it.