Asian Newsmen Slayings Decried

A media advocacy group has called on the federal government and the media to investigate the unsolved slayings of five Vietnamese journalists in the United States, including the 1987 killing of a Little Saigon magazine publisher.

“What really startled us was the fact that all the Vietnamese cases were unsolved, whereas all the other cases, except one, have been solved or at least suspects have been found,” Greg Victor, director of publications for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said Monday.

One of the journalists killed was Tap Van Pham, who ran a one-man Vietnamese-language entertainment publication, Mai, out of Garden Grove. Pham died when his office was set on fire. Though Pham didn’t run political news, he received death threats and demands that he stop running advertisements from a Canadian company that offered favorable exchange rates for Vietnamese currency. Also, some people took offense to ads about travel packages to Vietnam.

Both were seen as supportive of the Vietnamese Communist government.

The day Pham was killed a group calling itself the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation sent a communique to police claiming responsibility.

The FBI looked into the homicide but has closed the case, said spokesman John Hoos from Los Angeles. Garden Grove police are still looking into the case, Investigator Al Butler said.

“The case is not closed by any means,” Butler said. “It’s in the active file. However, we have no full-time investigator assigned to it right now. I firmly feel within a reasonable length of time, we will solve the murder. . . . We know that there are people out there who know about it. . . . It’s just a matter of hitting the right nerve at the right time.”

In the past 15 years, 13 journalists in the United States have been killed apparently because of their reporting or commentary, according to the committee. Nine were foreign-born.

The killings intimidated and bred a sense of self-censorship in Vietnamese-American communities, the committee said.

Victor blames fear and cultural barriers as reasons why the cases remain unsolved.

“People are afraid to talk,” Victor said. “The police have a hard time finding witnesses who are willing to testify. . . . The other thing is there aren’t many Vietnamese-speaking law enforcement officials, or detectives, or people who can make inroads into the Vietnamese community.”

A third reason, Victor said, is the lack of attention by the media.

“The mainstream press doesn’t pay that much attention when journalists are attacked or killed when the journalists are not members of the mainstream press.”

Attacks on Vietnamese journalists have been declining, said Yen Do, editor of the Nguoi Viet Daily News in Westminster. Anti-communist fervor has subsided with the breakup of the Soviet Union, he said.