Victims of the Hanoi gulag. (Vietnam).

Normalizing U.S. relations with communist Vietnam was supposedly going to improve human rights there. Actor Don Duong and Fr. Nguyen Van Ly know otherwise.

For many years, Don Duong has lived a relatively privileged life in Vietnam. The 45-year-old actor has been a popular film star in his home country, playing in numerous government-approved Vietnamese films. In 1999, he broke onto the international stage with the critically acclaimed Three Seasons, scoring a triple win at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2001, he scored again, starring with Patrick Swayze in Green Dragon. His biggest break has been a major role opposite Mel Gibson in this year's Vietnam War epic We Were Soldiers.

In the past few months, however, Don Duong has gone from film star to public pariah. Communist officials have branded him a traitor. His big Hollywood break in the Gibson film may end up breaking his career. Mr. Duong has disappeared from public view but officials in Hanoi say that he has not been arrested. They have not said precisely how they will punish him, though some statements have indicated that he may be fined and prohibited from acting or traveling for several years.

Perhaps Don Duong's international recognition and contacts in Hollywood and the media will manage to protect him from the harsh treatment recently meted out to other individuals similarly designated as "criminals" by the Hanoi regime. That new criminal class includes Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest, sentenced in October 2001 to 15 years in prison for peacefully expressing his religious and political beliefs. It also includes Le Chi Quang, a 32-year-old lawyer, sentenced in November to four years in prison on charges of writing and posting on the Internet an essay criticizing the government for conceding too much land to China in a 1999 border agreement.

Don Duong, Fr. Ly, and Le Chi Quang represent only the tip of the iceberg, say human rights monitors who believe that thousands of unfortunate souls may have disappeared into Vietnam's gulag archipelago over the past year-and-a-half. How can this be happening? Weren't we told that the Hanoi Reds were mellowing? When President Clinton decided to normalize relations with Vietnam in 1995, the familiar refrain went out: A new generation of leaders in the Communist regime wants to open up to the West. This would benefit not only American business, we were told, but would also facilitate cooperation on finding U.S. POW/MIAs, and would provide a positive force for freedom and human rights in Vietnam.

The appearance of Internet cafes in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) frequently has been cited as proof that freedom is taking hold in Vietnam. However, the government's secret police closely monitor all Internet traffic that passes through these portals and have had little trouble identifying and arresting those expressing opinions deviating from Communist Party doctrine. As in the nightmarish total state depicted in George Orwell's novel 1984, the Vietnamese regime severely punishes subjects judged to have committed "thought crimes." Having reaped the benefits of U.S. trade subsidies, the Hanoi regime has decided to reassert its police-state authority. In 2001, Vietnam launched a new wave of persecution for religious and political expression. Don Duong is the crackdown's most famous victim, thus far.

"Propagandist" and "Traitor"

The treatment of Don Duong appears to be calibrated to signal to other artists, intellectuals, and dissidents that they shouldn't get any ideas that the recent "liberalization" means the Communist authorities will brook genuine dissent. The regime will tolerate only superficial "reforms" aimed at gulling foreign tourists, politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Vietnamese officials and the state-run media have led a shrill campaign against We Were Soldiers and Don Duong since the movie's release earlier this year. The film depicts the first major engagement between the North Vietnamese army and U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, a fierce three-day battle in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. The film is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once ... And Young, a gripping account of the battle by Lt. General Harold G. Moore, who commanded the vastly outnumbered U.S. troops in their heroic and victorious stand. *

In We Were Soldiers, Mr. Duong plays the North Vietnamese commander leading the Communist forces against Moore's 7th Cavalry. In the film Green Dragon, Duong played a refugee fleeing Communist-controlled Vietnam after the war. "Both movies distort the legitimate war history of our people and the humanity of the Vietnamese," the army newspaper Quan Doi Nhan Dan (People's Army) accused in a front-page article on September 18th. "By becoming a propagandist and henchman for 'hostile forces' and tarnishing the Vietnamese soldiers and people, Don Duong has sold his conscience cheaply and become a national traitor," it declared. The newspaper called Duong's actions "unforgivable," and said the "conscience-seller and traitor must be strictly disciplined."

The Cinema Association of Ho Chi Minh City joined the attack on Duong. One association official, film director Duong Minh Dau, accused Duong of insulting Vietnam by "turning his back on his country and his people."

"The movie We Were Soldiers did not reflect correctly the truth of history of the just war by the Vietnamese people, not forming the image of the soldier of the Vietnamese People's Army," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh is quoted as saying in an October 17th story by Reuters news service. "It is very regrettable that an actor who used to enjoy the popularity in Vietnam, who took part in big movies, now has taken part in movies that damage his own image," Thanh said. "That's the most severe punishment to an actor.... It will be heavy losses for an actor when he loses popularity."

If the government believed its own propaganda, it would simply allow Mr. Duong to suffer the "severe punishment" of the marketplace. But even several months of public vilification couldn't be counted on to sufficiently damage his popularity. On October 3rd, Duong was grilled for eight hours by officials of PA-25, Vietnam's "cultural police." According to family members, at the end of this session, they ordered Duong to sign a confession of treason, but he refused to do so. His relatives are hoping that media coverage generated by Duong's Hollywood associates will cause authorities to back off. Actors Mel Gibson, Harvey Keitel, Patrick Swayze, and Forest Whitaker, and filmmaker Randall Wallace, have launched a letter-writing campaign to U.S. and Vietnamese officials protesting Duong's treatment.

Cyber "Enemies of the State"

Law school graduate and computer instructor Le Chi Quang was arrested on February 21st at the Internet cafe in Hanoi where he had posted essays critical of government policies. The 32-year-old Quang, suffering from a kidney ailment and in poor health, was held for months in a prison outside Hanoi. On November 8th, he was subjected to a secret trial and convicted of "acts of propaganda against the state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," according to Nguyen Son, chief of the Hanoi Criminal Court. Quang was sentenced to four years in prison, followed by three years of house arrest. His "crimes" included writing and posting an essay criticizing the Vietnamese government for not standing up to China in a border dispute, and writing essays supporting fellow "Internet dissidents" Pham Hong Son and Nguyen Vu Bihn. Dr. Pham Hong Son is a 34-year-old physician arrested in March for translating and e-mailing to friends an article from a U.S. State Department website entitled "What Is Democracy?" Mr. Bihn, a former Communist Party journalist, was reportedly arrested for criticizing, like Le Chi Quang, the government's border negotiations with Red China.

Vietnamese authorities tightly restrict all means of communication. Access to telephones, fax machines, Internet providers, and radio and telephone broadcasts is limited and monitored. All Vietnam-based web sites must be licensed by the government, and Vietnamese caught listening to or viewing foreign TV, radio, or Internet broadcasts are subject to prosecution. The government's indictment of Quang is worthy of the dictatorships of Stalin or Chairman Mao. It declares:

Since 2000, Le Chi Quang frequently listened to broadcasts of RFI, BBC which denigrated, distorted, and opposed the Government of Vietnam. Concurrently, Quang also met with certain individuals inside the country holding opposing, dissenting viewpoints and was able to receive from these individuals documents opposing the Government. Quang was then urged, pulled in [by these individuals] to write articles. (Code 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 76, 77)

From April 2001 to September 2001, Quang wrote and distributed 7 articles, all of which attacked, criticized the regime, opposed the Government of Vietnam, and claimed that the Government of Vietnam oppressed the democracy movement, violated human rights.

No God (Except the State) Allowed

It is religious "criminals," however, who have suffered the greatest persecution in Vietnam and whom the West has shamefully ignored. The Hanoi Communists insist that their regime allows religious and political freedom, so they do not normally bring charges related to worship against religious offenders. The government finds it more useful to accuse believers of "slandering the government," "disrupting the unity of the people," "causing public disorder," and similar offenses.

In May 2001, Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest from the diocese of Hue, was arrested as he prepared to celebrate Mass. The secretive sham trial, held on October 19, 2001, took only a few hours. His public appeals for freedom of worship were characterized as violations of national security. He is now serving a 15-year prison sentence and has spent much of his life in prison. He was held without trial in the 1970s and in 1983 was sentenced to serving 10 years in prison for his peaceful dissent of the Communists' persecution of believers. Other Christians and Buddhists are likewise suffering persecution. There has been little protest from U.S. officials and corporate leaders, who continue "business as usual" with the Hanoi persecutors.

U.S. "normalization" with Vietnam continues apace, despite admissions by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the official U.S. monitoring agency, that Hanoi has an atrocious record. The commission's current report states:

Since 2001, the religious freedom conditions in Vietnam have deteriorated. Key religious dissidents remain imprisoned or under house arrest, and the government has continued its campaign of forcing religious minorities in the northwestern provinces and the Central Highlands to renounce their faith. The heightened crackdown on religious freedom was reportedly sanctioned at the highest levels of the Vietnamese government, according to documents obtained by human rights non-governmental organizations.

Because Vietnam has not cooperated with the commission and human rights groups seeking knowledge about reported arrests of various religious believers, getting an accurate picture of the persecution has been difficult. The commission report states:

[A]pproximately 14 Hoa Hao Buddhists are reportedly either in prison or under house arrest; an estimated 10 Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) monks and lay leaders are either under de facto house arrest or in reeducation camps or prisons; 20 Hmong Protestants apparently remain in detention; dozens of Montagnard Christians in the Central Highlands have been detained in relation to the government crackdown in 2001; and approximately 10 Catholic priests and lay adherents are still imprisoned.

The most prominent prisoners or detainees noted by the commission, in addition to Fr. Ly, include the Venerable Thich Quang Do of the UBCV, Mr. Le Quang Liem of the unofficial Hoa Hao Buddhist organization, and the Most Venerable Thich Huyen Quang, the UBCV Supreme Patriarch, who has been placed under de facto house arrest without charge for 20 years.

These cases, however, barely scratch the surface. The report notes that, based on information from various human rights groups, "there may be thousands of religious prisoners in Vietnam who are unaccounted for." If Americans do not express their outrage over this persecution of religious believers, U.S. officials and business leaders will not penalize Hanoi's brutality. U.S. trade, loans, and subsidies will continue, and Vietnam will take our silence as a signal to intensify the persecution.

* See THE NEW AMERICAN, March 25, 2002, "Vindicating Our Veterans," for a review of the movie and the book, and an interview with General Moore. The same issue of the magazine also includes a special report, "Seven Myths About the Vietnam War," that refutes many of the distortions, misconceptions, and lies about the war, and exposes the political elites whose treacherous policies shackled our troops to ensure U.S. defeat. These and other important stories about Vietnam can he accessed at www.jbs.org/vietnam.