From The Indochina Newsletter (Burlingame, California), Feb.-March 1982, Issue No. 24 A FORM OF TORTURE: FOOD DEPRIVATION by Cao Ngoc Phuong Personally, I am not opposed to having inmates of prisons and re-education camps work in the fields or in the forests. In fact, I think assigning daily work to prisoners keeps them sane. It may make them feel good to be productive. But I do deplore the policy of depriving prisoners of food. So far as I know, this policy has been used in Vietnam since as early as 1956. Recently I received original documents in which the prisoners report themselves on this policy. In this article I shall only use two documents: the poems by a prisoner from North Vietnam and the memoirs of a writer from the South. At this moment at least 160,000 people live in prisons and concentration (re-education) camps throughout the country, most of them located in deep forests. Visitors from outside the country never have access to these camps. We learn of the life conditions in these camps from very rare family visits. Letters and poems can sometimes be smuggled out of the camp in this way. The policy described by these witnesses is very simple: the prisoners are given so little to eat that they can never think of anything but food. Their labor requires great energy, but the portion of food provided them is extremely small. Even just after a meal, prisoners feel like they have not even started to eat yet Listen to this from the South Vietnamese writer who is a personal friend of mine: "In my forced labor camp in the highlands, the event that dominates everything is the experience of hunger. We are hungry permanently. All we can think about, day and night, is eating! During the first days of the harvest season we are allowed almost our fill of corn and manioc roots. But that lasts only a few days. During these days there are shining eyes and smiles. But very soon the camp administration shuts up the eating. The shining eyes and smiles disappear. We feel hungry again, so hungry that we think of nothing else. Many of us catch lizards to eat, knowing they provide proteins. Very soon the lizards of the whole area were exterminated. I know of a prisoner who one night caught a millipede on the ceiling, hid it under the mat, and in the morning roasted it on a fire and ate it. He said it was as good as a roast shrimp. There are those who are very clever to invent devices to catch mice and birds; they will roast and eat them while others watch with envy. Others catch grasshoppers and crickets. Whenever someone catches a snake, that is a feast. In our conversation, we only talk about eating and how to find things to eat. When we do not talk about eating, we silently think about eating. As soon as we finish lunch, we begin to imagine the supper awaiting us when we return from the fields: The food put into the mouth is like one breath of air blown into a vast empty house. What little food is given is chewed very slowly. Still, it makes no difference -- we feel even more hungry after eating. Even in our sleep, our dreams are haunted by food. There are those who chew noisily in their dreams... "Such food as mice, rats, birds, snakes, grasshoppers, must be caught and eaten secretly. It is forbidden, and if the camp guards learn about it, the prisoners will be punished. "I was assigned to carry sand and pebbles from the stream to the camp so that other prisoners can make bricks. I balanced two baskets with a stick across my shoulder. One day, by digging in the sand, I saw a beautiful white egg. I bent down, used my hand as a spade, and unearthed fifteen of these eggs. On my way back to the camp, I shared them with some of the younger prisoners. Everyone believed they were tortoise eggs. After boiling them, we discovered small reptiles already formed inside. They were hard to swallow, but we all tried to eat to get some protein in our body. During the period of my assignment to carry sand and pebbles I had the opportunity to try different kinds of young leaves. There are young leaves of yellow color, I chewed them and had the feeling that they possessed some protein. I also found the tips of some bamboo right on the edge of the spring. Bamboo has a sour taste. Even so, I ate many of these, hoping that they might provide some vitamin C." The memoirs of my writer-friend whose pen name is Ho Khanh) were smuggled out and sent to me by a friend of his, who escaped the country by sea on a small boat. Ho Khanh had been arrested already in 1976. The La Boi Publishing House in Paris has published some extracts in October '81, and will publish the whole document in Vietnamese in a few months. Another friend of mine, named Chau, is now in a concentration camp in Nghe An. He asked me through his wife living in Ho Chi Minh City to send him a bottle of Super Levure Gayelord Hauser tablets so that he can calm down his hunger. This is a kind of dietetic yeast tablet used by French ladies to suppress their appetite when they want to lose weight. Chau hopes that a tablet of Superlevure taken with a lot of water will help him forget his hunger. I have sent several bottles of these pills, and hope they may help! It is cold in the mountainous areas, not only in the winter, but also in spring and autumn. Prisoners wonder how government cadres can bathe in the chilly spring water without showing any feeling of cold, while the prisoners themselves, with clothes on and sitting near a fire, shiver so much. Nguyen Chi Thien wrote in a poem: "We work hard and can never relax, afraid of being beaten all year around, our food is roots, leaves and salt. Government cadres and security officers undress and bathe happily in the spring. We, sitting near a fire, still shiver..." (Nhung ghi chep vung vat) On a day of the peanut harvest, it rained and the peanuts were mixed with mud. Prisoners working in the fields tried to eat some raw nuts. They did not have the time to take the nuts out of the shells; there was not even time to wipe the mud out of the shell: "Last night it rained all night This morning unearthed peanuts are dirty, full of mud. Not afraid of germs, not afraid of sickness, this is a great opportunity! Prisoners quickly put them into their mouths and chew them in great hurry. I hear the chewing all around me: One part peanut and two parts mud." (Troi Mua Tam Ta) That was a lucky day. Another day: "Our team was harvesting peanuts in the field Watched carefully by a government cadre. For one short moment the cadre looked another way and a prisoner swallowed some peanuts together with their shells. But he was caught and beaten with a gun until his swollen face was bleeding and his teeth came out." (Toan toi ro lac) At another season, in order to prevent prisoners from eating peanut seeds: "They mixed the peanut seeds in ash and manure to prevent prisoners from eating. It did not work! They mixed the seeds with DDT-poison (now let the prisoners dare to eat!) Still, dozens of pounds disappeared. But the poisoned peanut seeds could not grow, not one came out! This is the way the Party realized the Winter-Spring Project." (Lac Giong Dem Trong) The book by Nguyen Chi Thien has about 350 poems with over 4,000 verses. Most concern the hunger of prisoners. These poems were written from jail to jail and in several re-education camps during 20 years in North Vietnam. One day it happened to Thien that his bowl of rice mixed with roots tipped over. The food scattered on the muddy ground. Five or six prisoners rushed to the spot, trampling each other in their frenzy, and fighting each other for that bit of food. The aim of the policy, prisoners believe, is to hurt them both physically and morally, making them lose their personality and turn beasts. As Thien writes: "From ape to man, the process took millions of years >From man to ape, will it take so many? People of the world, come and visit concentration camps in the heart of distant jungles! Naked prisoners, bathing together in herds living in stinking darkness with lice and mosquitoes, fighting each other for one piece of manioc root or sweet potato, chained shot, dragged, beaten torn up at the will of their captors, thrown away for the rats to gnaw. These apes are not swift, they are slow in their movements they are not like the apes that descended from ancient times. These apes are hungry and thin as toothpicks, yet they produce the nation's wealth all year long People of the world, please come and visit! (Tu Vuon Len Nguoi) Thien says that under the new regime the manioc root has become as precious as the ginseng root. He admits that when chance comes: "I can devour several pounds of raw manioc root as if they were pieces of chocolate. You are impressed? You say that I am more talented than an ox? No, it is just that I am an inmate of a Vietnamese Communist Prison. In the cold winter when the wind is roaring in fury I jump into the icy stream to fish up bamboo trunks. Do you think my skin is made of leather, my bones of iron? No, it is just that I am living in a Vietnamese Communist Prison." (Toi co the) Human rights, to Thien, are simply human dignity. The food deprivation policy strips people of their dignity: "My ideal, my glory, my dream, my love, all these are remote and abstract things! I confess to you that we, hungry prisoners, only dream of being as well fed as animals. Why? Our dream to be Man, alas, has ceased to be a possibility; that dream has led us to prison. Now, only four things on this earth are meaningful: Rice, manioc roots, potatoes and corn. These four things bind us, harrass us, torture us, They never leave us in peace." (Tu Chuong Tren Doi) Thien complains that prisoners are exploited to the marrow for economic ends: "If you count the number of prisoners If you see the amount of work they do If you see how much food each one gets You will realize how big an economic resource the detention system is." (Nhung ghi chep vung vat 78) It is very difficult to survive under these conditions. When prisoners get sick, with no medical care, many die. In the mountainous areas, all over the country, there are prisoners' graves: "The Ho Chi Minh era is characterized by hunger and misery by soldier graves and by prisoners' graves." (Nhung ghi chep vung vat 51) Nguyen Chi Thien was arrested in 1959 in North Vietnam because he once expressed his discontent with government policy. He spent 20 years going from prison to prison and to several re-education camps. He was condemned to forced labor and tortured by the practice of food deprivation, in order to make him feel like an animal. He is only one of the tens of thousands of people living and dying in the concentration camps far off in the jungles of Vietnam, as a punishment for the fact that they could not unconditionally condone government policy. The poetry of Nguyen Chi Thien has been smuggled out of the country by a diplomat and will be published under the title "Tieng Vong Tu Day Vuc". I hope that many people, also outside Vietnam, will listen to his voice and realized the secret suffering in Vietnamese prisons and concentration camps, so that we may seek a way to end this kind of torture and destruction of human dignity. - Cao Ngoc Phuong Alkmaar, Holland Dec. 14, 1981 (Editor's note: Cao Ngoc Phuong is co-chairman of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation in France, the overseas representative of the Unified Buddhist Church of Viet Nam.)