Re-education camps (Vietnam)
재교육 수용소
Re-education camps (Vietnamese: Trại cải tạo, trại học tập cải tạo) were the detention and "re-education" facilities run by the new government of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, holding former South Vietnamese military personnel, officials, police and supporters of the old government. The government defined them not as prisons but as sites of reformation and constructive labour for reintegration into society. Korean usage also renders the institution as 재교육 훈련소.
In depth
Origins
In May 1975 the new government ordered designated groups to register, and in June it ordered those registered to report for re-education. Enlisted men and non-commissioned officers of the South Vietnamese army were given a three-day programme; lieutenants to captains, junior police officers and intelligence agents were told to bring ten days of food and supplies; senior officers and officials, thirty days. The announced terms were three days for enlisted men, ten days for junior officers and officials, and one month for senior ones, but in practice senior officers were held for more than ten years, some for seventeen or eighteen.
Camps were scattered across South Vietnam. Detention lasted from weeks to eighteen years, and releases and closures continued through the 1980s and 1990s.
Conditions
Detainees were required to undergo collective political indoctrination (criticism of US imperialism, the glory of labour, victory under Communist Party leadership) and to write forced handwritten confessions, and were put to forced labour clearing mines, logging, farming and building camp grounds. With food and medical care scarce, deaths from starvation and disease (malaria, beriberi, dysentery) were common, and beatings, solitary confinement and shackling were reported.
Estimates of the number held diverge. A scholarly review puts the figure at 200,000 to 300,000, and treats the claim of one million as an exaggeration stemming from a mistranslation of a remark by Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng. Diaspora and US-government accounts, by contrast, estimate 500,000 to one million.
Release and end
In June 1976 the Provisional Revolutionary Government announced that detainees would be tried or released after three years, which was not honoured, and release criteria were unclear, so bribes and connections played a role. In 1989 the Reagan administration concluded an agreement with Vietnam to press for the release of former South Vietnamese officials still held. No single year for the institution's formal end can be fixed.
In a 1985 speech, US Secretary of State Shultz asserted that North Vietnamese forces had arrested South Vietnamese officials, supporters and other opponents and sent hundreds of thousands to these camps, where they suffered labour, indoctrination and violent abuse. This is a political characterisation from the anti-communist camp and should be cited as attributed testimony.
Related but distinct institutions
Laos had a similar but distinct system. The Lao People's Democratic Republic ran "re-education centres" (seminar camps), mainly detaining former Royal Lao government officials considered politically dangerous; thousands of former officials were sent there. Many had been held since 1975, and in 1989 senior officials and officers were released from a re-education centre in Houaphan Province.