Re-education camp (Vietnam)

Re-education camps (Vietnamese: Trại cải tạo) were prison camps operated by the communist Việt Cộng and Socialist Republic of Vietnam following the end of the Vietnam War. In these camps, the government imprisoned at least 200,000-300,000 former military officers, government workers and supporters of the former government of South Vietnam.[1][2] Other estimates put the number of inmates who passed through "re-education" as high as 500,000 to 1 million.[3][4][5] The high end estimate of 1 million is often attributed to a mistranslated statement by Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, and is considered excessive by many scholars.[1] "Re-education" as it was implemented in Vietnam was seen as both a means of revenge and as a sophisticated technique of repression and indoctrination. Torture was common in the re-education camps.[6] Prisoners were incarcerated for periods ranging from weeks to 18 years.[7]

  1. ^ a b Porter, Gareth; Roberts, James (Summer 1988). "Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation: A Review of A Methodology for Estimating Political Executions in Vietnam, 1975–1983, Jacqueline Desbarats; Karl D. Jackson". Pacific Affairs. 61 (2): 303–310. doi:10.2307/2759306. JSTOR 2759306. At this point, Desbarats and Jackson make a major factual error which makes it even more difficult to make sense of their methodology. They assert that there were one million Vietnamese who experienced incarceration in reeducation camps, based primarily on an alleged admission by then Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, quoted in their unpublished preliminary draft as 'in over three years, I released over a million prisoners from the camps.' But what Dong actually said was rather different, as Desbarats and Jackson confirm in a different version of the article: 'In over three years, we returned to civilian life and to their families more than a million persons who in one way or another had collaborated with the enemy.' The difference between the two translations is important, because Dong was clearly referring to those who were released after only a few days of reeducation in their own home towns—not released from longterm reeducation in distant camps. The actual number of reeducation camp internees, according to both official communist sources and former officials of the regime who later fled to the West, was between 200,000 and 300,000.
  2. ^ Sagan, Ginetta; Denney, Stephen (October–November 1982). "Re-education in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering and Death". The Indochina Newsletter. Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  3. ^ Werth, Nicolas; Panné, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis (October 1999), Courtois, Stéphane (ed.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, p. 572, ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2
  4. ^ Wiest, Andrew (2008). Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN. New York University Press. p. xv. ISBN 978-0-8147-9410-4.
  5. ^ Anderson, David L. (2002). The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War. Columbia University Press. p. 160. ISBN 0-231-11493-1.
  6. ^ Hoang, Tuan (August 1, 2016). "From Reeducation Camps to Little Saigons: Historicizing Vietnamese Diasporic Anticommunism". Journal of Vietnamese Studies. 11 (2): 43–95. doi:10.1525/jvs.2016.11.2.43. Retrieved August 18, 2022.
  7. ^ Kaiser, Robert (May 15, 1994). "SURVIVING COMMUNIST 'REEDUCATION CAMP'". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 26, 2021.