Oregon daily emerald., April 30, 1973, Page 8 and 9, Image 8

Excerpts of statements on torture in South Vietnam prisons
Following are excerpts from statements by
two Frenchmen. Jean-Pierre Debris and Andre
Menras, who were prisoners in South Vietnam for
two years. The two men. who were freed Dec. 29,
1972, spoke at a meeting in Paris on Jan. 20. A
story about their tour of the U.S. appears on page
1.
Comments of Jean-Pierre Debris:
First of all I want to tell you about our arrest.
During the first week we spent in jail, we were
surrounded by ordinary prisoners, who are used
by the Saigon administration to guard and beat up
the political prisoners.
Still, even in that first week, while we were
lying in our cell, I was thrown a little bottle of oil
which the Vietnamese use for relieving pain after
you’ve been beaten up. Around this little bottle
was a note written in very good French. It said,
“Thank you, on behalf of the Vietnamese people,”
and was signed, “your comrades in arms.”
We learned a long while afterward that this
came from a cell where the so-called “rebels”
were kept, those who refused to salute the Saigon
regime’s flag. They were beaten and tortured for
it.
We met them eight months later, during the
first Tet celebration we spent in prison, in
February 1971. After months of complete isolation,
we were able to go down into the yard where the
latrines were. It wasn’t a favor on the part of the
prison guards; it was just carelessness: They
were too busy celebrating Tet.
So we went into the yard and there we met the
brothers who had sent us the lotion They lived in
awful conditions and now, for Tet, their families
had been able to visit them and had brought them
all kinds of good things to eat. They insisted on
giving us everything, and we celebrated together.
We sang the song of unity and solidarity.
Then the brothers from the isolation ward also
came down. These were political prisoners who
had been brought back from the tiger cages in
Poulo Condor. Normally, they were never allowed
to go out into the sunlight; but were kept in
solitary confinement, in cells without windows or
light. But that day, the first day of Tet, they could
come down into the prison yard. So we saw, the
whole jail saw, for the first time, these hundred
prisoners from the tiger cages.
Prisoners couldn 't
walk anymore
And in what condition! They had to crawl
down, because they couldn’t walk anymore; their
knees had been broken. They dragged themselves
along the ground with little wooden benches they
had made. In the sun they had to close their eyes
completely because they’d been blinded from so
many years of darkness. Their faces were
haggard and lined, their bodies gaunt and
emaciated. They were wearing tattered prison
uniforms, the standard black pajamas.
No (me made a sound when they arrived. Even
the trustees who guarded them were astonished. A
regular prisoner threw them a box of candy. The
trustees didn’t move. They let him do it. Other
regulars threw delicacies they had been brought:
oranges, fruit, even a few ducks.
We watched all the prisoners throw
everything they had to these people, who had come
back from the death camps. We even saw an
American, an American GI, who was in the
isolation ward. He had nothing to give, no money,
he received no visits. All he had was his clothes.
He started to undress and, piece by piece, he threw
all his clothes to these prisoners from Poulo
Condor.
This policy of “re-education,” as the Saigon
government calls it, is aimed solely at breaking
patriotic Vietnamese, sapping their strength,
breaking them not only physically, but especially
morally. There are many ways to kill a man.
At Eu Quoc, an island prison for seven years
until 1971, prisoners were shot at with machine
guns. When the prisoners demanded better food,
jeeps with machine guns mounted on them were
driven into the prison and they would fire on the
prisoners, forcing the prisoners further and fur
ther down. And each time there were dozens of
dead and wounded.
At our prison, Chi Hoa, and elsewhere, there
are other ways of killing people: By giving them
nothing to eat, by rationing their water, by beating
them, by torturing them, by leaving them in tiger
cages.
Tiger cages 'father
returns to camp
In our last months at Chi Hoa, we saw
something which was still more tragic. On Nov. 15,
1972, Colonel Nguyen Van Ve came back. He had
been exposed in 1969 and 1970 as the “father of the
tiger cages” at Poulo Condor.
These tiger cages were denounced in 1969 by
all the international press, by American papers
and by French papers. I even remember seeing a
picture of this colonel in a Paris magazine that
labeled him the father of the tiger cages. (Actually
it was the French colonialists who were the first to
biui- them.)
In 1967, this colonel was director of the con
centration camps at Poulo Condor. After the
scandal of the tiger cages, he disappeared, only to
re-appear in the “Phoenix” campaign, which was
aimed at destroying the ranks of the National
Liberation Front by assassination.
Despite the exposure of the tiger cages,
they’re still there, and what’s more, they’ve been
rebuilt. We saw prisoners ... at Chi Hoa who had
come back from the tiger cages to be “nursed.”
There is an infirmary at the Chi Hoa prison. When
they arrived at this infirmary, they were told that
there was no medicine. The American supplies
weren’t being sent any more. There were no
dollars for medicine for political prisoners, but
there was $400,000 to build new tiger cages in
camps numbers seven and eight, at Poulo Condor
There is an American company in Saigon which is
building tiger cages at the present time—new,
improved models.
The cages are too low for the prisoners to
stand up. Also they put three to five prisoners in
each one, so there’s not enough room for them to
sleep. They have to take turns lying down while
the others crouch. The cages are kept in com
pletely dark rooms without ventilation; most of
those who manage to live through the experience
are completely blind afterward.
Friends of ours who’ve lived in the cages have
told us how they were forced in desperation to
wash themselves with their own urine, even to
drink their own urine.
The food rations decrease each year. In
August 1972 it was still a pound and a quarter of
cooked rice a day; now it’s less than a pound, and
the rice is soaked in sea water and mixed with
sand to make it go further. The only thing they get
with the rice is a pinch of salt—not enough—no
vegetables, no meat, of course, no fish. They used
to get a bit of pickling brine, but now they don’t
even get that.
If anyone so much as asks for an extra bowl of
rice, there is ferocious repression. Beside each
tiger cage is a container of quick lime which the
guards throw onto the prisoners, and which burns
their skin. They also use grenades of nauseous gas
and tear gas. Then, when they’ve used all this,
they beat and handcuff them, with their wrists
behind their backs. We know people who’ve been
kept handcuffed like this for years because they
refused to salute the Saigon flag.
So on Nov. 15, at Chi Hoa, the colonel came
back. He brought into the prison a hundred
members of the tac squad of the Saigon police,
armed with bamboo shields, helmets, bullet-proof
vests, pistols, club6, even grenade launchers.
They entered every cell containing political
prisoners.
Each cell had from 60 to 100 people piled on top
of one another. They divided each cell into tiny
groups, separating people who had known each
other for years. During this separation and change
of cells, a lot of prisoners disappeared completely.
They even mixed the Catholic students with
members of the National Liberation Front, so they
could be classified as communists; and all the
political prisoners were mixed with ordinary ones.
Then they took away the files of these
prisoners, so that no one will be able to prove that
they were political prisoners and not ordinary
criminals. This was done for a very good reason. If
there is a cease-fire (since declared), the criminal
prisoners won’t be released. If the political
prisoners are indistinguishable from the ordinary
ones, they won’t be released either ...
In the last few months of our imprisonment,
we realized that the colonel was p reparing for a
cease-fire. By mixing the prisoner's, putting them
out of sight, he was going to do away with the
political prisoners, who should be released upon a
cease-fire.
Frenchmen tell of Vietnam torture
Continued from Page 1
Debris and Menras went to South
Vietnam as volunteer school teachers
in a French government program.
After two years working in Da Nang
and Saigon, they became outraged by
what they saw as the corruption and
tyranny of the Saigon government.
With more courage than prudence,
they climbed a memorial outside
Saigon’s National Assembly, waved a
National Liberation Front Flag, and
scattered leaflets calling for immediate
peace. They were immediately
arrested and taken to Saigon’s Ci Hoa
prison, where they remained until their
release and deportation last December.
Their message is simple, and they
present it with quiet earnestness and
impressive attention to detail. There
are perhaps 200,000 political prisoners
in South Vietnam, they say, and
thousands of them are being
reclassified as criminals so that they
won’t be freed under the terms of the
cease-fire agreement.
Their detailed description of life in
President Thieu’s prisons, where even
children are held as political prisoners,
is both absorbing and chilling. Excerpts
from a taped statement they made are
on this page.
Debris spoke briefly about the
Catholic church’s response to the
prisons. He had no good words for the
Catholic chaplain who visited his
prison. He brought bread for the 200
children there, “but always with, how
you say, in one hand rosaries” for the
children to take with the bread.
Debris said he knew of no attempts by
the chaplain to alleviate the prison
conditions, but that the chaplain saw
his job as making converts both to
Catholicism and to the Saigon govern
ment.
On the other hand, he said, five
Catholic priests were deported last
Dec. 26 as political prisoners to the
infamous Con Son island prison, where
tiger cages were first discovered by
American congressmen and the press
years ago.
Debris took a reporter’s notebook and
quickly wrote the names of four of the
priests: Truong Ba Can, Phan Khac Tu,
Nguyen Ngoc Lan, Huynh Cong Minh.
He couldn’t remember the name of the
fifth.
The two young Frenchmen had one
more message: On the need for public
pressure. They said they were probably
saved by the letters of thousands of
French people on their behalf.
“From the moment thousands of
French people decided to pressure the
Saigon fascists, from that moment on,
we saw a difference in the attitude of
our jailers,” said Menras. ‘‘They
stopped beating us and they took
precautions with us.
“We also saw how the torturing of the
students had been denounced, and how
the New York Times and the Daily
Mirror (London) printed articles which
spoke of this torture. At that monfent
the torturers stopped their work. They
permitted families to see their children,
who up to that point had been kept in
unknown prisons. And then we saw how
silence closed in after that... silence;
and then the tortures started again.”
Don Luce, who was first to reveal the
“tiger cages,” said Americans can
most effectively register their protest
by urging their represntatives and
senators to investigate prison con
ditions in South Vietnam.
‘27 prisoners were
tortured to death *
There are a lot of examples of this. We knew a
student Nguyen Ngoc Phuong, who was at Camp
No. 7 at Poulo Condor. He was tortured to death by
officials at Poulo Condor called “specialists.” We
know of at least 26 other prisoners who were being
tortured to death when we left.
On Dec. 10, 16 Catholic students began a
hunger strike to protest: They weren’t allowed to
go into the yard to get sunlight or to have visits
from their families. On Dec. 26, less than three
weeks after they began their hunger strike, they
were taken away on stretchers to the tiger cages
at Poulo Condor.
We also saw 53 political prisoners, who had
already been brought back from tiger cages at
Poulo Condor, returned there. They were among
those who had been brought to Chi Hoa to be
treated, but as I said, there was no medicine.
There is a nurse at Chi Hoa, but she had no
medicine and did nothing. So when these students
went there, the 53 prisoners accompanied them.
They went back to the tiger cages in the same
condition they had left them: Their legs broken,
their joints paralyzed, asthmatic and leprous, and
most of them infected with tuberculosis.
We knew that, for these prisoners we had lived
with for nearly a year, this was a death sentence.
We know we will never see them again. The
president of the Association of Vietnamese
Students told us upon our departure, “We have to
bring back all those who’ve been deported.
Otherwise we’ll never see them again. We know
that we’re going to be taken away too...”
On Dec. 28, three days after the convoy left
with the Catholic students and the 53 prisoners, the
French consul came to see us, to tell us that we
were released and would be deported to France.
It was really unbelievable, unthinkable, that
after what we’d seen of the conditions of im
prisonment of our brothers, we should be released
now. And then when we were to go, we refused to
leave, we didn’t want to leave our comrades in
arms*who had helped us so much. They ran the
risk of being taken to the security room to be
tortured; this was a room which, when American
delegations came, they transformed into a movie
theater.
Then some political prisoners came to see us
and told us that we had to go, to bear witness of
what we had seen, to tell of the tortures, the
beatings, the assassinations, the policy of slow
death All this has been going on for dozens of
years and no one speaks of it in the papers. And
that’s why we’re here today.
I should also tell you that, in the last nine
months of our imprisonment, we saw a new type of
political prisoner arriving at Chi Hoa. Up till then
we had seen mostly members of the National
Liberation Front, patriotic Vietnamese, usually
peasants. But from about March 1972 we began to
see lawyers, intellectuals, professors, students
even Catholic students, Buddhist monks; in fact,
an entire category of prisoners that, until then, we
had not been accustomed to seeing. At first, we
were extremely surprised, then we understood:
“These people belonged to the neutral 1 Third
Force’ that, just now, Thieu is so afraid of.”
A form of torture
*The plane trip '
. . . There exists a form of torture which
leaves fewer traces than the others, but is much
more painful and lasting. The victim, after having
been bound hand and foot, is plunged into a big
metal barrel filled with water up to the neck. Then
the police, armed with heavy wood hammers, beat
against the sides of the barrel with all their might.
The water acts as a conductor of these blows,
which penetrate to the internal organs of the body,
especially, the liver, the heart and the kidneys.
People who have been tortured this way several
times never really recover.
Then, there is what the police call the “plane
trip.” After the victim’s wrists have been tied
together behind his bade, a long very strong rope
is inserted through the cords around his wrists,
while the other end is attached to a pulley on the
ceiling. By pulling on the rope the police can make
the victim swing in the air by his wrists, which
have been tied together behind his back. The ef
fects of this action are heightened by an occasional
black-jacking, or cigarette burn on the more
sensitive parts of the body, particularly on the
genital parts.
A girl student who was subjected to this tor
ture twice in succession, could not bend her arms
or wrist joints, and her shoulder blades were
fractured. The same was true of a young male
student, who after having been subjected to
practically every form of torture, tried to commit
suicide. He was afraid that he would down and
sign the paper they tried to force upon him.
He first tried to open his veins with a piece of
glass, inside his cell. He failed, however, and
fainted. When the trustees saw the blood trickling
under the door, they saved him in spite of himself.
He tried to kill himself by biting his tongue as hard
as he could, and beating his head against the walls
of the cell. Here agin, he failed, a fact he seemed
almost apologetic about. However, he signed
nothing.
There is yet another torm 01 torture wnicn is
practiced on war prisoners. The prisoner is
stripped naked and make to sit on a chair with a
hole in the seat. A lighted oil lamp-making it
possible to raise and lower the flame—is placed
underneath the chair. If the prisoner refuses to
talk, the flame is raised higher and higher, until it
burns the anus.
Some 75 per cent of the prisoners tortured in
this manner do not survive since the only
possibility of saving them would be an operation
on the abdomen that would permit the intestine to
function normally.
While rape has always been the fate off the
little peasant girts considered as “communists”
by the Saigon authorities, at present the same
thing is true of girt students.
A young woman student, whose fiance is now
in the Chi Hoa prison, told us that she had been
raped by a veritable monster who forced a living
eel into her vagina. He was known to have done
this type of thing with other young women, using,
among other instruments, filled Coca-Cola bottles,
which he had shaken well before opening.
This same young woman also told us that she
had had lizards let loose to run over her body,
cigarette burns on her breasts, etc. She too tried to
commit suicide. At first she tried to hide from her
family and from her finance what had happened to
her. But she couldn’t keep it from them, and three
months later she tried again to take her life. At
present she has been moved to another prison.
One student told of having been subjected to
torture with needles. Seated at a table, his hands
were attached to the table, with his fingers spread
so far apart that ht could no longer move them.
Slowly, by means of light taps on a piece of
cardboard, needles were inserted under the
fingernails. Once inplace, a sheet of tissue paper
was attached to each needle, after which a ven
tilator just opposite was turned on. The breeze
from the ventilator set the tissue papa- in motion
and this, in turn, made the needles move, under
the nails.
The student told us that he stood it for 10
minutes before fainting, but added that even the
most hardened could not stand it for longer than 15
minutes . . .
This then is the long road that the Vietnamese
patriots must travel until they reach ex
termination. How do they do it? This is what
impressed us most. It also is for us the greatest
lesson in courage wehave ever learned. It’s their
smile, the smiling will power of these patriots.
Systematically, scientifically, their bodies are
destoryed.
But their spirit is not destroyed; they continue
to resist. After 10,15, 17 years—we met one man
who had spent 17 years in these jails, but who still
smiled, nevertheless.
The symbol, perhaps, of this struggle, of this
suffering, of these Vietnamese patriots in the
concentration camps of the South is the children
whom we met at Chi Hoa, because there are
children there also.
The youngest among them, whose name is
Dong, is six years old. His mother was lulled by
American bombing in the Delta region. His father,
suspected by the Saigon regime of being a com
munist sympathizer, was incarcerated in Chi Hoa
and brought the child with him. The child had no
relatives to take care of him.
The last news we have of Dong dates from
Dec. 20, 1972, when
we heard him cry out in the disciplinary se
where he was imprisoned with his father, with his
friends. He was shouting slogans with the adults,
to protest the living conditions that were forced
upon the political prisoners, to protest the lack of
food, the imprisoning of people in unknown places,
and to demand that the prisoners be allowed to
take walks outside, to take baths in water, in real
water, not in urine. They were demanding water,
unadulterated water, larger rations of rice, of
properly cooked rice.
We also met another little prisoner who
considered us his brothers. As 12 years of age, he
had already been in three prisons. His crime was
attempting to steal a rifle from a G.I.
He had been taken by the police, who tried to
make him say that he was part of a group that was
stealing arms. The police also tried to get him to
say where arms were bring stored, who were his
parents’ friends, and, then, they wanted him to
reveal names. First they gave the kid candy, then
they gave him money, and then they hit him,
because he still wouldn’t talk.
The boy told us how the policeman who beat
him justified his hitting him. He told him: “Your
hands are little, but they are big enough to hold a
rifle. That’s why I’m hitting you.”
*40 kids organize,
shout slogans ’
We saw a section of 40 kids in Chi Hoa who
organized themselves and who, when they were
mistreated, got together, like adults, and made up
slogans. At night when the prison camp was
sleeping, they shouted these slogans so that the
adults in all the different sections could hear them.
They also put together little information
bulletins which said, for example, “To day when
we went to take a bath, trusty so-and-so- hit so
and-so. He was hurt. Today the food ration was
lowered.”
We saw how these kids, at an age when little
French children are playing marbles, are already
adults. We saw how the prison authorities
repressed them. No difference between them and
the adults. They were put into the same category:
hard-headed rebels.
There’s a camp at Dalat, a concentration
camp for children, where at this moment 800
young boys and girls are being held. In this center
the prison authorities try as well to force the
children to rally to the regime: They must salute
the flag and work. There is a special torture for
the kids.
Dalat is situated on the high plateau, a place
where it rains a lot and the nights are cold. The
children who are obstinate, who refuse to salute
the flag and to sing the “re-education” song, are
put into a cell. They are bound so that they cannot
move, and th*ai twice during the night, they are
drenched with water and left like that to dry off.
Psychological tactics are often used on them
as well, especially on the younger ones. They are
isolated without food or water for a day or two and
then the kids are told: “Your mother is sick; she is
very sick. Do you want to see her? Do you want to
see your mother? Well, it’s easy. You just have to
salute tne flag and go cut wood with the others or
the hill, and then you will see your mother.”
At the last transport of prisoners to Dalat we
received word that there were four children who
persisted in refusing to salute the flag; the others
couldn’t hold out. It’s impassible to hold out for
long. If you do you are dead...
Reprinted with the permission of the National
Catholic Reporter, P.O. Box 281, Kansas City, Mo.
64141, $12 per year.