U.S.-Hanoi Talks Stir Hope for Those in Vietnam Prisons : Loved Ones in the U.S. Lobby for Release Pact

Tears welled in Vu Thuy Hanh’s eyes as she spoke of her husband, imprisoned in Vietnam since 1975.

“Ten years, you know, is a long time,” she said softly, as she sat on a sofa in her Buena Park apartment. “I don’t know what’s happened to my husband, whether he’ll ever get out of camp or how long he has to suffer . . . My husband--to me and to the Vietnamese, to the Free World--he is a hero. He fought until the last minute. But to the Communists, the more heroic he is to us, the more criminal he is to them.”

Hanh’s hope of being reunited with her husband, Tran Dang Khoa, were given a boost late last year, when Hanoi and Washington began talks on releasing political prisoners. News of the talks touched off a wave of optimism in Vietnamese refugee communities across the country, and prompted formation of numerous committees to lobby for an agreement, and to help resettle any prisoners who may be released.

“Sooner or later, the Communists are going to release them,” said Tran Son Ha, secretary general of the Ad Hoc Committee for Vietnamese Political Prisoners. “But we must be patient, both in the Vietnamese community and the Reagan Administration.”

Ha’s committee, formed in October, involves 14 Vietnamese community organizations and seven prominent individuals, including the former premier of South Vietnam, Nguyen Cao Ky.

At about the same time, Vietnamese army veterans, relatives of political prisoners and writers and artists formed three additional committees. The four Orange County-based groups and other Vietnamese community organizations, have coordinated efforts by setting up an umbrella group, the Inter-committee for Vietnamese Political Prisoners.

Concern for the imprisoned is profound among the 500,000 Vietnamese in the United States. Strong support for a prisoner-release agreement has arisen despite many refugees’ fears that success in such negotiations would be an unwelcome step toward friendlier ties between Washington and Hanoi. Most refugees are bitterly anti-Communist, and many dream of someday overthrowing the present government of Vietnam.

“Of course we don’t want to see the U.S. government and the Vietnam government have a better relationship at all,” said Kieu Chinh, a well-known Vietnamese actress living in Los Angeles, who has been active in organizations seeking the release of people from Vietnam’s “reeducation camps,” the term used for the prisons where former government officials, army officers and other supporters of the defeated South Vietnamese government serve indeterminate terms at hard labor.

“But the priority now is the prisoners. They have to get out of the camps now, after 10 years . . . I think, as Vietnamese people, we are the same everywhere in the United States--waiting for something to happen for the prisoners very fast. We are waiting for our relatives and friends to join us here, before it is too late.”

Hanh recalled that on April 29, 1975, amid the confusion and panic of the final day before Communist troops entered Saigon--and while her husband was still in the field fighting--Americans helped her and her children, parents and other relatives onto an evacuation ship. They soon arrived in the United States, where a year passed before she learned that her husband was alive but imprisoned, she said.

“Every man in his family went to concentration camp, including his father,” she said.

She soon learned that her brother, who also was imprisoned, had been released, but died a short time later. “They did something to him in the camp, and he was dying. They sent him home to die.”

Hanh said she has received only “very short notes, very simple letters” from her husband. He is not allowed to receive mail from her, but news of herself and their daughter, 15, and son, 14, is told to him when relative are allowed to visit the camp once a year, she said.

Du Tu Leall, editor of the Garden Grove-based, Vietnamese-language newspaper Tay Phai, estimated that 20% of all refugees have relatives in the labor camps, and many more refugees have friends in the camps.

The issue of a prisoner release has been extensively reported in Orange County’s Vietnamese-language press ever since U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz declared, in September, that the Reagan Administration would seek the release of 10,000 political prisoners for resettlement in the United States. Le said his newspaper has devoted several issues to the subject.

Names Collected

The local committees have met with elected and appointed officials in California and Washington, and are collecting the names of those in the reeducation camp from information provided by friends and relatives.

The writers and artists committee, for example, has identified 300 writers, poets and journalists believed to be imprisoned in Vietnam, and sent the list to U.S. officials with a petition signed by about 100 Vietnamese writers and journalists living in Southern California, Le said.

Kathleen J. Cullinane, executive director of St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center, in Garden Grove, agreed that many Vietnamese are “very excited” about the idea that prisoners may be released, but she views the Washington-Hanoi talks as nothing more than “political posturing.”

“The Vietnamese want to look like good guys, so they say, ‘Sure, we’ll release everybody,”’ she said. “The U.S. wants to look like good guys, so they say, ‘Sure, we’ll take everybody.’ But when they get down to specifics, there’s very little they agree on.”

Total May Be 10,000

Reliable figures on the number of people still confined in reeducation camps are unavailable, but Western diplomatic sources have on several occasions estimated the total at about 10,000. Many Vietnamese refugees say they believe there are more.

Chinh pointed out that the United States continues to press for an accounting of U.S. soldiers missing in action in Indochina, even though most are presumed dead, while the reeducation camp inmates “are still alive . . . (and) have fought together, side by side, for the same goal.”

“The war has been over for 10 years,” she said. “Why keep them in prison? Why? And the U.S. government should accept them, the American people should accept them, because they fought for freedom. If the American people are trying to bring their men back, they should bring their comrades back too, before those prisoners die in those prisons.

Dornan Visit

“I believe the U.S. government will do its best . . . Now is the time that both sides want to look good, for the humanitarian purposes . . . I can imagine the happiest moment of our people, when we receive the first group of political prisoners in the United States.”

U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) is planning to visit Hanoi with a congressional delegation in May, to seek information on Americans missing in action and to press for release of Vietnamese political prisoners. He said he is aware of “pleading and requests” from Vietnamese communities in California, Texas and the Washington, D.C. area, for action to win release of the prisoners.

“These people have been pressing so hard,” he said.

Phan Van Thinh, once South Vietnam’s deputy ambassador to the United States and now chairman of the Action Committee for Political Prisoners in Vietnam, said in a telephone interview from his Rockville, Md., home that he believes negotiations will be difficult, but it is quite possible that Hanoi will release the prisoners on terms acceptable to Washington.

“By now, they realize that there are a lot of people who will never be recovered and brainwashed by them,” he said. “I think those people are--excuse the expression--a ‘pain in the ass’ for them. Nowadays, they cannot afford to do things like the Pol Pot regime did in Cambodia--kill them, just like that . . . So they are quite willing to release some of them. Perhaps not all of them.

Fears Expressed

Thinh said he fears Hanoi also will send to the U.S. some government agents, posing as political prisoners, and criminals.

On the U.S. side, there may have to be “some easing of the regulations,” Thinh said. “Short of evidence that such-and-such names are obviously spies or criminal elements, the doubtful cases would have to be accepted.”

U.S. officials have said the United States will insist on screening the immigrants, to prevent a recurrence of the 1980 Mariel “boatlift” from Cuba, when many criminals and mentally ill people were included among 125,000 refugees who came into Florida.

Tran Ngoc Nhuan, chairman of the Hayward-based Vietnamese Veterans Assn., which has 37 chapters in 16 countries, said his organization has informed the State Department that it could help resettle 1,000 released prisoners or family members in Northern California, and that its Southern California, Oregon and Texas chapters also could assist in resettlement efforts.

Lobbying Government

Groups in Houston also want to help with resettlement, and are lobbying the U.S. government for a prisoner release agreement, according to Nguyen Ngoc Linh, executive director of the Council of Vietnamese-American Organizations in that city.

Hanh, who said most of her Vietnamese friends have relatives in the camps, expressed her suffering and hope in a poem she wrote in Vietnamese and read at a December fund-raising dinner of the Ad Hoc Committee for Vietnamese Political Prisoners. She later translated the poem into English:

I am lying here very still, the winter grass

buried under a grave of white snow

my red blood still running.

It is like sleeping with the rhythm of nature

nurturing in my cold heart

a bud for the spring.

Hanh said she shared the poem because “it is not just a symbol of how I am living here now, with hope, but it symbolizes the hope of the whole Vietnamese people, waiting for a brighter day.”