Vietnamese Prisoners to Be Reunited With Relatives

Nearly 15 years after the fall of Saigon, American relatives of 300 former Vietnamese political prisoners waited anxiously Thursday for two planes to depart Ho Chi Minh City for Bangkok--the first leg of a journey that will bring more than half of the emigres to California.

The former prisoners aboard the flights include high-ranking former South Vietnamese miliary officers, bureaucrats and soldiers who spent years in “re-education” camps. Many complained of political persecution even after their release.

Details were sketchy Thursday, but Southern California refugee resettlement officials confirmed that at least 70 people were headed for Los Angeles County and at least 63 are planning to join relatives who have settled in Orange County.

A State Department spokesman in Bangkok said the first emigres could begin to arrive in the United States Jan. 12.

They are the first political detainees to leave with their families under an accord reached between Washington and Hanoi last July, after seven years of negotiations, Robert Funseth, senior deputy assistant secretary of state, said in an interview from Washington.

“The day is finally here when I will see my brother again after more than 14 years,” said Kim-Nhung Tran, 47, whose brother spent eight years in prison camps in northern Vietnam. When she heard the news, she said, “I couldn’t sleep that night. I was full of plans for my brother and his new life.”

Quang-Hoi Tran, 43, a former army colonel, his wife and his two children were expected to be aboard the first Air Vietnam flight, scheduled to arrive in Bangkok Thursday night Pacific Standard Time, his sister said.

She said her husband, son and a second brother drowned in an attempted escape from Vietnam in 1980. Undaunted, she fled by boat five months later, landed in a Thai refugee camp, and now runs a dressmaking shop in Westminster. But a third brother, who also spent seven years in prison camp, is still in Ho Chi Minh City hoping to be one of the next to depart, she said.

Linda Lien Dao, 65, who works for the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services, said her youngest brother, Hung Anh Dao, 48, once an army major, his wife and three children are expected to arrive at Los Angeles airport within 10 days.

He was captured one week after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and imprisoned near Ho Chi Minh City until 1980, she said.

“During the first two years in prison, they beat him all the time,” said Dao, who communicated with her brother by mail over the years.

“He had almost no clothes to wear and very little food,” she said. “Each day, they gave him two or three spoonfuls of rice sprinkled with salt. But no meat, no fish, nothing else at all.”

“After three years in prison, his wife was allowed to visit him,” she said.

After his release in 1980, Dao said, “He could not have a job and he dared not go outside because people watched him. His wife supported the family with a black market business selling everything, like medication and clothes,” she said.

Dao, who has been trying to get her brother out of Vietnam for 10 years, said her mother “dreamed of coming to the United States with her son. Unfortunately, she died in 1986.”

“He finished four years of college in French and is very good in mathematics,” she said. “Maybe he can learn a job in computers.”

More than 100,000 former prisoners and their families have applied to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok for permission to emigrate, Funseth said Thursday. He said the United States expects 700 people to depart Vietnam this month, and up to 7,000 to be resettled here by September.

Resettlement officials have said new arrivals tend to be highly educated and skilled, and will be better able to make their way in America than the average refugee.

But they have expressed concern that federal money for refugee services, already in short supply because of the influx of “boat people,” will not be sufficient to deal with emotional and medical scars of the former prisoners.

Others in the Vietnamese emigre community worried that if the former prisoners are too outspoken about their experiences in Vietnam’s prisons, they may jeopardize the release of those still hoping to get out.

“Some of them probably will come forward and tell the world their personal stories,” said Nguyen T. Nguyen, consultant to the California Legislature’s Joint Committee on Refugee Resettlement, International Migration and Cooperative Development. “However, they need to be concerned about the fate of those left behind. Bad publicity certainly will have an adverse effect on their comrades.”

Vietnam has made sporadic attempts at liberalization. In December, however, police arrested about 10,000 people in what the government said was an anti-crime campaign, but what dissidents branded a political crackdown, said Nguyen Manh Hung, director of the Indochina Institute at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Thu D. Duong, a former colonel and political detainee who joined his family in San Clemente a month ago, said that 522 former military officers who had been released from re-education camps were among those re-arrested in the crackdown. But U.S. officials could not confirm that report Thursday.

The crackdown comes amid growing tension in Vietnam over the democratization in Eastern Europe, Hung said. The Vietnamese government supported the now-ousted regimes in Poland and East Germany against the democratic protesters, and in the last two weeks has shut down outspoken newspapers at home.

Duong expressed fears that any further political instability--internal or external--could jeopardize future releases in spite of the July accord.

“We have waited for so long, and our situation is becoming more dangerous,” said Duong, 59, who spent five years in the camps and was rearrested three times for trying to flee. “Because of the positions we held in the former regime, we are the first ones to be persecuted if there are any changes in the present political system.”

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.