Re-education Camp Justification in Print?
From mjanette@ksu.edu Wed Oct 6 11:20:26 2004
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 13:18:43 -0500
From: mjanette@ksu.edu
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: re-education camp justification in print?
Hi all,
I have just been reading _The Vietnamese Gulag_ with my graduate students, and they were wondering if anyone has published a defense of the re-education camps described in Toai's book.
We would be especially interested in defenses that come from Vietnamese scholars, critics, or politicians, although non-Vietnamese perspectives would of course be worthwhile as well. And here's the big catch: they would need to be written in or have been translated into English or French.
If anyone knows of such resources, I would appreciate your advice!
thanks in advance,
Michele
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Wed Oct 6 11:40:42 2004
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 14:39:12 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: re-education camp justification in print?
Funny, I just five minutes ago noticed that the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies makes Huynh Sanh Thong's collection of translations from the re-education camp literature available as a PDF file:
http://www.yale.edu/seas/Vietpubs.htm
the title is "To be Made Over: Tales of Socialist Re-Education in Viet Nam".
These accounts carry justification for the camps in two ways. Of course neither is a primary document from a legal authority, but a bit of literature.
For one thing, a persistent theme of the stories is the cant of the guards, always speaking in the language used to justify the camps. So you get that language.
For another, in Nguyen Ngoc Ngan's memoir, you get to see a humane prisoner trying to see how a guard could actually say those things. So you get a second party's attempt at rationalizing the language.
Best I can do -
Dan Duffy
From judithh@u.washington.edu Wed Oct 6 12:06:43 2004
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 12:03:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Judith Henchy <judithh@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: re-education camp justification in print?
I would recommend Kim Ninh's book on the Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-65 for an understanding of the origins and trajectories of the politics of repression. It may not directly address the period you are talking about, but it is a fine study of cultural policy and its identification of enemy influences and practices.
Kim B. King. A World Transformed.Politics of Culture in
Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-65. U Mich Press, 2002.
Judith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judith Henchy
Head, Southeast Asia Section, Box 352900
University of Washington Libraries
Seattle, WA 98195
Telephone: (206) 543 3986
Fax: (206) 685 8049
Web address: http://www.lib.washington.edu/southeastasia/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From sdenney@uclink4.berkeley.edu Wed Oct 6 12:51:13 2004
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:45:15 -0700
From: Stephen Denney <sdenney@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: re-education camp justification in print?
When the issue of human rights and re-education camps were first raised in the late 70s, some publications came out of Vietnam defending its policies in this respect. I recall, for example, a tiny book titled "Which Human Rights?" which I believe was published in Hanoi around 1980. It was a collection of essays by Ngo Ba Thanh and others, not only on which human rights should be considered more important (i.e. economic and social vs. civil rights) but also whose human rights, that is, the right of free expression did not expand to those counter-revolutionaries who were seeking to subvert the system. I believe Nguyen Khac Vien may have also written on this subject.
In 1980 or 1981, Amnesty International published a monograph which was a collection of correspondence between it and the government of Vietnam over the re-education camps. The basic argument presented in defense of the camps was that under the Law on Counter-Revolutionary Crimes (ratified in North Vietnam in 1967), those who sided with the RVN were guilty of national treason and could be sentenced to life imprisonment or death under's Vietnam's laws; therefore it was argued that the camps were a humane alternative to legal punishment, allowing the prisoners to remain the camps until they were reformed and ready to return to society.
Of course, those are not my views. :/)
- Steve Denney