‘I Killed to Help the Living’ : Cannibal or Savior: Viet Refugee Says He Was Both

In a cluttered storage room behind a Roman Catholic church, Phung Quang Minh lives quietly, marking time until it is safe for him to join the others in the teeming U.N. refugee camp here.

Minh, 33, keeps to himself. He rarely smiles, and he has no friends.

By his own admission, Minh was the man who assumed control of a foundering Vietnamese refugee vessel last year and killed at least one of the people on board in order to feed himself and the others.

“Because of the other people on the boat, I did this thing and I hoped God blessed me,” Minh said this week in an interview. “I am a Christian. I killed this man on the boat to help the living. Personally, I think it’s wrong, but so many people needed to eat.”

Minh was among 10 men arrested and imprisoned when the refugees were rescued by Philippine fishermen last June 28 after 37 days at sea. Philippine officials investigated the stories of killing and cannibalism but determined that they had no authority to prosecute--the incident did not take place in Philippine waters, and the vessel involved was not registered in the Philippines.

The 10 have been released, but Minh has yet to join the others. He has been free for about a month, and camp authorities are watching to see whether there will be any attempt on his life.

“We feared a bit that he might be mauled,” said Jan Top Christensen, field officer for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Last summer, when the refugees arrived at the camp, there was great animosity toward those who were thought to be the leaders, Christensen said. The committee of refugees who help run the camp sent a note to Christensen asking that the 10 who had been investigated be barred from living among them, he said.

Now, almost eight months later, the anger apparently has subsided. So far, Christensen said, there has been no trouble as Minh moves between his cot in the storage room and the camp hospital, where he works as a janitor.

Minh said that much of what has been said about him and reported in the press is not true. He said the killing and the cannibalism were not just his idea, that it was agreed to by all of the remaining refugees among those who had set out ill-prepared for what they thought was to be a voyage of only a few days. The others turned on him later, he said, because they did not want to accept the blame for what they all had done.

“They did not want to take the responsibility,” he said.

Accounts of the voyage have come out in interviews with the survivors and through documents and testimony at the court-martial of Capt. Alexander G. Balian, who was commanding officer of the U.S. amphibious transport Dubuque when it encountered the refugee vessel last June 9.

Balian was charged with dereliction of duty and disobeying orders for failing to rescue the refugees, although he provided them with supplies and directions to the nearest land.

Today, Balian was convicted of dereliction of duty and given a letter of reprimand. But the six Navy captains hearing the case acquitted him of the more serious charge of disobeying orders. The six captains had heard almost two weeks of testimony at the court-martial at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines.

There is general agreement that more than 110 refugees were on board the vessel when it set out from Ben Tre in southern Vietnam last May 22 and headed for Malaysia. But the vessel’s engine gave out after three days, and by the time the refugees sighted the Dubuque in the South China Sea, between 10 and 20 had died of starvation or drowned when they tried to swim to passing ships.

Took Charge of Boat

Before the encounter with the Dubuque, according to most accounts, Minh had already taken control of the leaderless group and was rationing rainwater they collected.

After the Dubuque moved away, Minh took charge of the food and water that Capt. Balian had given the refugees. But the supplies were soon exhausted, and on the 28th day at sea, according to Minh, the refugees decided “to use the dying to help the living.”

Some survivors have said that they disapproved, that they agreed only because they were too weak to resist. As the refugees weakened, some said, Minh and his men became more cruel, using sticks and a knife to force starving passengers to bail water.

Vo Thi Bach Yen, whose 4-year-old daughter died on the refugee vessel, said in an interview last November that Minh beat her with his shoe when she attempted to distribute water from the Dubuque to emaciated children.

Another refugee, Dinh Thuong Hai, said he protested when Minh and his men suggested killing Hai’s best friend, Dao Cu Cuong. The protest was ignored and the man was killed.

Minh tells a different story.

“Before the 28th day, all of the dead were thrown into the sea,” he said. “After the 28th day we decided to use the dying to help the living. . . . The people in the boat came to me. All of the people in the boat agreed with this idea. It was June 18, and we decided to use this date to remember the dying in the boat.”

Cuong, 30, was near death and had no hope of surviving, Minh said. He was selected.

“All of them agreed, including the close friends of the dying man,” Minh said.

Some refugees sang songs, he said, and about 10 who were Christians offered a prayer for the dying.

“I did not want to do the wrong thing,” he said. “There were so many people. All of these people believed in me and asked me to keep discipline in the boat, and when they decided to use the dying, they asked me to do it.”

According to most accounts, two people were killed for use as food and three others who died were eaten.

Minh admitted killing the first victim, Cuong, but would not say who killed the other, a 13-year-old boy named Pham Quy.

“I am afraid the people of the world misunderstand,” Minh said. “I was only a member in a group of persons, so I didn’t have the ability to force all of them to follow me. I was only a man who was thinking more clearly than the others.

“Please explain to all the people of the world that I had to do that to keep all the people living. We were at sea in huge waves. I had no other choice.”

Minh said he is particularly upset that his mother, who lives in San Jose, Calif., has rejected him. She sent him a newspaper article and demanded to know if the allegations about him were true. He tried to explain in a letter, but she did not believe him and will no longer communicate with him, he said.

Minh said he fled Vietnam because he had been in the air force of South Vietnam and that after the Communists took over in 1975, he became an outcast. Last summer’s voyage was his 10th attempt to escape, he said. He had been caught twice and spent four years in prison, he said.

He denied reports that he had been a paratrooper in a South Vietnamese infantry unit known as the Red Berets. He said he was never in combat, and was a student at a school for officers when the war ended.

Christensen said that Minh’s account of his past appears to be true. He said that as the truth is separated from the rumors about Minh, the other refugees have become more willing to accept him. In recent days, he said, several people have offered to take Minh into their homes in the camp.

The other refugees “are kind sometimes,” Minh said, and added: “They invite me to their homes for dinner or to do things. I always feel lonely because I have no friends, no brother, no sister, no family in this camp.”

Minh said that he hopes someday to “join in the life of the camp and help the people of the camp.” But more than anything, he wants to resettle in another country, preferably the United States.

The other refugees among the 52 who survived do not talk about what happened. According to Yen, the woman whose daughter died, they wish to put the voyage behind them. She said Minh came to see her after his release and seemed to be seeking forgiveness for the way he treated her.

“He asked me how I was getting along,” she said. “I was kind to him.”

Minh has recovered from a deep depression that followed his mother’s rejection and “seems very stable and well now,” Christensen said. “He’s doing a good job as a volunteer at the hospital.”

Sooner or later, he said, some country will accept him.