Vietnamese Editor Latest to Be Threatened by Rightists

The editor of one of the largest Vietnamese-language newspapers in the United States has received a death threat from a right-wing group.

The typewritten communique accuses editor Yen Ngoc Do and several other prominent Vietnamese-Americans of unspecified pro-Communist activities. It threatens to execute them on April 30, the 15th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, unless they stop their activities.

The letter is the latest in a barrage of threats, beatings, arsons and shootings by right-wing groups. Since 1980 their targets have included Vietnamese-Americans who either advocate normalization of relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam or are otherwise perceived to be less-than-zealous anti-Communists. One of Do’s trucks was set ablaze last April.

Copies of the death threat were mailed to at least 20 newspapers and community groups in Orange County and San Jose. The letter was released to The Times by a community activist who hoped that public attention would prompt authorities to crack down on violent extremists.

San Jose attorney Liem Huu Nguyen, who was also named in the death threat, said Friday that the violence has succeeded in silencing political discussion.

“It’s a kind of unofficial censorship stronger than any kind of government censorship that I know,” Nguyen said.

Vietnamese refugees have intently followed the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, upheaval in the Soviet Union and Vietnam’s recent policy of doi moi , or liberalization, which some hope will pave the way for better relations with the United States.

Vietnamese-American conservatives oppose establishing diplomatic relations, ending economic sanctions or lifting travel restrictions unless democratic reforms are enacted. They have publicly denounced doi moi as a “fake.”

“It’s almost impossible to say anything reasonable or moderate under these circumstances,” said Nguyen, who advocates closer ties. “The idea of anti-Communism to these people is to kill all the Communists.”

In 1988, after a Garden Grove newspaper publisher died in an arson fire, the FBI announced an investigation into political violence in Vietnamese exile communities in the United States. No arrests have been made. Los Angeles FBI spokesman Jim Nielson declined any comment Friday.

As editor of the Westminster-based Nguoi Viet Daily News, which appears six days a week and reports a circulation of 10,000, Do said he has been threatened and warned to “keep quiet.” His car was vandalized three times last year and once this year, he said.

Last April 24, arsonists set fire to a Nguoi Viet pick-up truck and scrawled a threat in Vietnamese on the newspaper’s wall: “Nguoi Viet, if you are VC (Viet Cong) we kill.”

Do said Friday he does not know what prompted the latest threat.

The letter, dated March 13 with a Santa Ana postmark, was signed by a group that has not been heard from before. It warns that priests, intellectuals, journalists and businessmen “have tried to work with the Communists because they think the Communists are now changing,” an apparent reference to doi moi.

Nguyen, the San Jose attorney, advocated reconciliation between the United States and Vietnam at a conference in August.