Vietnam Says It Is Freeing Ex-Saigon Officials

Vietnam is releasing 6,685 prisoners, including generals and senior officials of the South Vietnamese regime it toppled in 1975, the official Vietnam News Agency said Sunday.

The agency said that the Council of Ministers ordered the amnesty and reduced the terms for 5,320 other prisoners to mark National Day, which was Sept. 2, and the 42nd anniversary of Vietnam’s “August Revolution,” when a Communist government was first proclaimed in Hanoi.

Among those granted amnesty were 480 military and civilian personnel of the former South Vietnamese government, including two ministers, 18 administrative officials, nine officers of general rank, 248 field officers and 117 junior officers, it said.

Lenient Policy Applied

“They were all convicted of crimes against the people,” added the agency, monitored in Bangkok. “However, the government applied a lenient policy toward them by sending them to re-education camps. In the process, they have shown their resolve to mend their ways.”

The news agency also said the government gave the 365 prisoners freed in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) “encouragement” and some physical necessities to quicken their re-integration into society. Prisoners released elsewhere were given assistance to return to their hometowns, the agency added.

After the Communist victory over South Vietnam in 1975 following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, tens of thousands of South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps. Some were released after a few days, others after years. Hanoi officials said recently that about 7,000 people remained in re-education camps.

Western sources believe that up to 200,000 South Vietnamese spent at least a year in the camps, which range from “model” institutions visited by foreigners to remote jungle shacks where inmates die of malnutrition and disease.

Former inmates and other sources interviewed in recent years said the systematic brutality found in early Soviet labor camps was not the policy in Vietnam but that there were occasional beatings, torture and executions. They said hard manual work was interspersed with political lessons.

Hanoi has in the past reported releases of re-education inmates but did not provide the details carried in Sunday’s report.

A diplomat based in Hanoi said: “Vietnamese top leaders realize they have to do something about the political prisoners question before they can improve relations with the West.”