New Research on Post-1975 Execution and Imprisonment

On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 12:03 PM tran_n_a@yahoo.com <tran_n_a@yahoo.com> wrote:

Dear list,

I am slowly updating my lectures, and I have a question about the numbers of South Vietnamese that the SRV executed and sent to reeducation camp in the aftermath of the war.

I lecture from Mark Lawrence's Vietnam War for this portion of the course, and he puts the number at up to 65,000 executions and cites Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," in The Vietnam Debate (1990) for a sense of the debate on this question. Lawrence writes that at least 200,000 were sent to reeducation camps and cites Robinson, Terms of Refuge, 27 (1998). This is from Lawrence 168 n9 and n10.

I was wondering if there's been strong, more up to date scholarship since the 1990s that gives different estimates. I understand it's debated, and the debate is highly politicized, so I'm hoping for either a consensus estimate or a middle-of-the-road estimate or an estimate of the range. Any info on new estimates based on new scholarship would be much appreciated!

Cheers,

Nu-Anh Tran

UConn

From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>

Sent: Saturday, July 23, 2022 1:54 PM

To: tran_n_a@yahoo.com

Cc: vsg vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] new research on post-1975 execution and imprisonment

I can't fit the original debate on VSG years ago, but I would never use Desbarats and Jackson as a reliable source on executions. It is based on a clumsy extrapolation from a tiny number of witnesses in the US.

Huy Đức, Bên Thắng Cuộc, pens a sympathetic portrait of those imprisoned -- in fact, he calls re-education a "cuộc bể dâu," suggesting it is a great and bitter misfortune of the twentieth century. He has a few statistics on the camps, but no overall estimate of deaths. But he does carefully tell stories about what happened. I think a distinction has to be made between the initial re-education in 1975/6 and the re-education against Chinese in 1978 in particular, which had very different logics.

Shawn McHale

George Washington University

From: tran_n_a@yahoo.com <tran_n_a@yahoo.com>

Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2022 12:06 PM

To: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>

Cc: vsg vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] new research on post-1975 execution and imprisonment

Thanks! I'll check out Huy Đức's book. Nu-Anh

From: Paul Schmehl <paul.schmehl@gmail.com>

Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2022 1:15 PM

To: tran_n_a@yahoo.com

Cc: vsg vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] new research on post-1975 execution and imprisonment

I believe Desbarats and Jackson updated their research with interviews of Canadian and French expatriates as well as the original sampling from the United States.

Paul Schmehl

paul.schmehl@gmail.com

From: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>

Sent: Monday, July 25, 2022 9:23 AM

To: vsg@uw.edu

Subject: [Vsg] FW: Archive of post war land reform discussion

Dear VSG List,

Thank you to Shawn for pointing out that our last discussion of post-war executions appear not to have been archived. I’m attaching those discussions from my gmail archive. I’ll ask my assistant to add them to the VSG archive.

Judith Henchy, Ph.D., MLIS

Head, Southeast Asia Section

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

-----Original Message-----

From: Tobias Rettig <tobias_rettig@yahoo.com.sg>

Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 12:04 AM

To: phuxuan700@gmail.com; Hoang t. Dieu-Hien <dieuhien@uw.edu>

Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Post-War-Executions [and earlier land reform]

Dear List,

The land reform was mentioned in this discussion link and a few weeks earlier too.

A recent article, which I believe was not mentioned before, is:

Olivier Tessier (2012), « Le "grand bouleversement" (long trời lở đất) : regards croisés sur la réforme agraire en République Démocratique du Vietnam », BEFEO 95- 96 (2008-2009), Paris, pp. 73-134

Best regards,

Tobias

Tobias Rettig

Independent Scholar,

Singapore

--------------------------------------------

From: Hoang t. Dieu-Hien <dieuhien@uw.edu>

Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2014 10:23 AM

To: phuxuan700@gmail.com

Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Post-War-Executions

Correction to my anecdote:

I did hear of one execution from a person whose brother was executed. The person with whom I talked survived re-education camp for heading an important civilian institution of the RVN. One of his brother died in re-education camp. One was executed (mentioned above).

In the earlier post, I was too focused on stories of my former schoolmates, I completely forgot about this story, which I heard in the U.S. from a coworker whom I trusted. Stories from my schoolmates come from a non-random and non-representative sample of the South Vietnamese population. It is a sample of those with much higher likelihood of being executed or persecuted than the general population living in RVN.

From my personal experience, we did not experience a bloodbath. We experienced slow tragic deaths and prolonged miseries.

I agree with Steve Denney's point that the pre-đổi mới government policies were repressive and resulted in unnecessary loss of lives (in large numbers), loss of human potentials, and delayed progress for post-war Việt Nam.

On Sat, 10/5/14, Hoang t. Dieu-Hien <dieuhien@uw.edu> wrote:

Subject: Re: [Vsg] Post-War-Executions

To: "phuxuan700@gmail.com" <phuxuan700@gmail.com>

Cc: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Date: Saturday, 10 May, 2014, 2:10 AM

Dear list,

This is an anecdote.

I lived in Saigon and witnessed the events of 30th of April,

1975 and the four years that followed. I was 14 and watched everything intently knowing that I was watching history in the making. I went to one of the most elite public schools in Saigon, and in South Vietnam. (There were only five of its kind in the entire Republic of Vietnam: one in each Đà Nẵng, Nha Trang, Đà Lạt, and two in Saigon.)

Among my schoolmates were children of ministers, high ranking officers of Bộ Tổng Tham Mưu (I think this is the RVN equivalent of the Pentagon, but am willing to learn from scholars more familiar with military history), senators, and the like. Some of my schoolmates took off before 30th of April. Many more remained along with their high ranking military commander fathers of the ARVN. All of the father officers that I know and have heard about went to reeducation camps. I know of one who died there. All remainders were released and are now living overseas with their families. I heard of no execution.

To put this in context:

The kinds of schoolmates I had:

One classmate lived in a villa with guard towers and armed guards, barbed wires on the top of the walls surrounding the villa, walked to school with a maid carrying her school bag walking slightly behind her, and two bodyguards behind the maid. One schoolmate's father was a buddy of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, flew bombing missions to the North, survived, stopped in Huế, bought souvenirs for his kids, stories of which my schoolmate still reminisced about. One whose entire clan made it out in 1975, had to leave everything they owned behind, and had to start over with the measly US$ 20K in a U.S. bank as their rainy days fund. Countless others were taken to school in Jeeps driven by their fathers' chauffeurs in crisp uniform. Etc., etc.

The contexts in which I heard their stories:

I have reconnected with roughly 100 schoolmates of my cohort. I've met them at reunions in the U.S. and in VN. There were also reunions in Europe and Australia, which I did not attend, but have heard stories told there. When we meet, everyone asked about everyone else they knew and remembered. Stories were told of how they left VN, if they did, whose fathers' went to reeducation camps, whose father died in reeducation camp, who had left, who died at sea, who died fighting in Cambodia, etc. No story of execution.

In the past year, I reconnected with schoolmates from all different cohorts, in person once

and online. There again, people were asking after news of people from whom they lost contacts. Stories were told: again, whose fathers went to reeducation camps, where they are now (mostly the U.S.), who died at seas, who escaped by land and their stories. Around April 30th this year,

stories were told and retold again, especially of events days before and after the surrender of General Minh. No story of execution.

An oral historian would have a field day browsing our web page.

I have relatives who were tried and executed in the land reform of the 50s in the North. I heard of vague stories of executions in SG post-75, but do not know anyone with personal knowledge of one, including not among my schoolmates whose fathers were in high power positions in RVN and remained after 1975.

I will leave the extrapolation to the statisticians.

Hoang t. Dieu-Hien, RN, MN, MPH

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 9:30 AM, phuxuan700@gmail.com <phuxuan700@gmail.com> wrote:

Since Mr. Paul Schmehl brought up the North Vietnam land reform, I'd like to share one of my earlier = posts, shown below, dated on February 8, 2011.

Chinese advisers set a fixed 5% quota of landlords for VCP's land reform teams.

In Vo Chi Cong's memoirs, (page 144), he said he fought against that high quota but lost to Chinese advisers!

Calvin Thai

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As shown previously by Steve Denney, per May 4, 1953 Politburo directive:

"The punishment of reactionary and evil landlords a. In this campaign, [we] must execute [xu tu] a number of reactionary or evil landlords. In our current situation, the number of executions is fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population in the free areas. This ratio will be controlled by the leadership and applied to the rent and interest reduction campaign this year and next year; this does not mean that the ratio will apply only to this year, nor does it mean that every village will execute landlords according to this ratio. (Thus, there may be communes that execute three or four people and others that execute only one or none at all)."

(See "Van kien Dang Toan tap", v. 14 (1953), nxb Chinh tri Quoc gia, 2001, pp. 201-206).

There were 5 different phases of land reform from late 1952 to mid 1956. Per Politburo report at the 10th Central Committee meeting, from August to October 1956, most mistakes were made in phase 4 and 5, after May 4, 1953 Politburo directive.

Out of more than 10 million heads from 3,314 communes, 5.86% was classified as landlords (or more than 500,000 heads). These huge figures come from VCP official documents. (See "Van kien Dang Toan tap", v. 17 (1956), pp. 425-428, and also Vo Chi Cong's memoirs, pp. 143-145; Vo was a land reform team leader in 1954, and later Politburo member/SRV President).

Page 85 in Dang's book shows a statistic of 26,453 "evil" landlords ("dia chu ac on"), 82,777 landlords, 586 resistance landlords, 62,192 rich peasants for a total of 172,000 landlords. Based on 1953 Politburo directive, this means 26,453 executions.

Since the total in Dang's statistic covers less than 2% as part of the 5.86% mentioned in "Van kien Dang", one question remains on whether the number represents a specific area or a specific period in the land reform campaign?

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 8:23 AM, Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com> wrote:

I do think their work was methodologically flawed. I would not call it a disaster, however. A flawed attempt at analysis would better describe the study, in my view. (It should be noted here that I have sent the study to several statisticians for analysis and comment, along with Porter's critique. I am not a statistician and don't pretend to have the skills to analyze in depth either the study or Porter's critique of it. The results of their analysis could well change my view.)

However, they state clearly in their work that the study is flawed. They struggled with the small sample size and the "commingling" of accounts. That's why the study was expanded to include several refugee groups in France as well as Canada.

It should also be noted that Jackson (with whom I have corresponded) and Desbarats set out to study migration patterns of Vietnamese refugees, but the evidence of a bloodbath kept getting in their way.

Jackson writes, in her grant proposal to the National Science Foundation, "Among other things, we have found that in answering our questions on political repression in post-1975

Vietnam, over one-third of the respondents provided specific details on one or more political executions (victim's name, place and date of the execution, purported reason for the execution). Many more apparently knew of political bloodshed, but were reluctant to talk. It is obvious, then, that the theory positing that American withdrawal from Vietnam avoided a political bloodbath must be reconsidered."

I do think Porter's analysis is flawed as well. For example, he writes "If it were methodologically sound, the Desbarats-Jackson study would compel scholars to reassess what had previously been assumed to be a nonexistent "bloodbath" in postwar Vietnam."

The news that, by 1988, there was no bloodbath in postwar Vietnam will come as a surprise to anyone who has studied what took place post-1975. Porter, however, cannot find bloodbath's anywhere in communist countries, unless he's forced to admit the truth, as he was with Cambodia.

The size of the bloodbath, as you point out, is the real issue, and I doubt that will ever be known with any certainty. After all, communist societies don't exactly publish their executions and document who was killed and where.

It was only fairly recently that a communist document was uncovered that revealed (discussed on this list) a 1% quota for the first phase of the North Vietnam land reform, resulting in a 10-15,000 deaths estimate just for that first phase. (I wonder if Moise will adjust his estimate yet again.)

By the time Porter wrote his article, the Jackson-Desbarats study had been expanded to include both Canadian and French expatriates. Porter deliberately chose to ignore those to "strengthen" his argument, something he does with regularity.

Worst of all, he claims to apply his own algorithm to the data yet reveals nothing about its construction, forcing the reader to either accept or reject his conclusions without evidence.

Having said all this, the arena of executions post-1975 is one that is in crying need of a robust academic study. The problem seems to be a lack of interest.

--

Paul Schmehl (pschmehl@tx.rr.com)

Independent Researcher

--On May 9, 2014 at 10:45:38 AM -0400 Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>

wrote:

Paul,

You are correct about the my confusion over the titles of the essays.

The Porter argument over the bloodbath in northern Vietnam and the Porter and Roberts article on statistical manipulation are very different in tone and method. To say that Porter's analysis "is at least equally flawed" implies that you believe that their criticism of Jackson-Desbarats is flawed. If that is your belief, explain why. Their critique is not couched in political terms, but in methodological ones. I stand by my view that methodologically, the Jackson-Desbarat argument is a disaster.

Shawn McHale

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:21 AM, Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com> wrote:

One correction. Porter dealt with the Jackson-Desbarats study in Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation: A Methodology for Estimating Poliical Executions in Vietnam: 1975-1983 by Jacqueline Desbarats; Karl D. Jackson, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer, 1988) pp. 303-310

The Myth of the Bloodbath was his attempt to address the North Vietnam land reform, and it is riddled with falsehoods, "translation" errors and sophistry, as is his work on the Hue Massacre.

Although there are methodological problems with the Jackson-Desbarats work, I would say that Porter's analysis is at least equally as flawed.

--On May 9, 2014 at 8:45:28 AM -0400 Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu> wrote:

Dear list,

It is clear that, historically, the communist party in Vietnam has executed "traitors," "reactionaries," and the like. So the issue is not whether or not executions occurred. They did. The issue is the scale.

Desbarats and Jackson's initial collaboration, and Desbarat's later article, are methodological disasters. The initial extrapolation was based on interviews with 615 refugees in Chicago and California; she seems to have added more interviews later, in France, then upped the extrapolation. From the initial interviews in Chicago and California, Desbarats and Jackson culled 31 witnessed executions.

To make a long story short, they used this number to extrapolate to an estimate of 65,000 executions.

Porter and Roberts, "The Myth of the Bloodbath," do an excellent job of evaluating the statistical problems involved in this particular extrapolation. Some issues should be intuitively obvious: was the sample random? (No, it appears to have been heavily biased in favor of people from Saigon and environs). Did they deal well with the problem that as one extrapolates to the entire population of witnesses, there would be duplicate observations? (No). One could go on.

Shawn McHale

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Sascha wölck <sascha.woelck@yahoo.com> wrote:

Dear list,

I just read Jacqueline Desbarats: »Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Executions and Population Relocation« (1990).

She claims that in the two years after the war at least 65.000 political enemies of the communists were executed. She derives her numbers from 800 interviews with refugees from Vietnam in the US and France.

To me this seems to be an astonishing number, which I haven’t found anywhere else yet. So I wonder how reliable or outdated her numbers are.

Or, in other words does Duikers statement »no open bloodbath of supporters of the Saigon regime had taken place« reflect the contemporary mainstream position?

Sascha Wölck

PhD candidate, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt

(Oder)

From: phuxuan700@gmail.com <phuxuan700@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, February 1, 2011 7:06 PM

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: Re: RE: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

I had a chance to look up "Van kien Dang Toan tap", v. 14 (1953), nxb Chinh tri Quoc gia, 2001, today. This volume contains the quoted section (pp. 201-206).

Five different phases of land reform covered the period from late 1952 to mid 1956.

The May 1953 Politburo directive did state that the ratio of 1 to 1000 landlords executed should not be a fixed one and should be applicable in the following years.

As mentioned in a previous post, the 5% landlord ratio was confirmed by Vo Chi Cong, a VCP Politburo member, and other sources.

Dang Phong even put the landlord ratio set at 5.68% for which he said unrealistically high (See also "Van kien Dang Toan tap", v. 17 (1956), p. 426).

In his work, Dang cited 26,453 landlords as "dia chu cuong hao gian ac" - fitting May 1953 Politburo directive for reactionary or evil landlord category.

This figure comes from a pool of 172,008 landlords (listed in the table on page 85) or less than 2% landlord ratio (out of a population of 10 million heads from 3,400 communes).

Dang granted several interviews after the book came out in 2005. Unfortunately, until his death last year, no one asked him what happening to the other 3% landlords.

Based on what I have heard about Dang Phong and his passion, I think his figures are more reliable than estimates from other sources.

Is it possible that Dang might have expected us to complete the maths ?

Calvin Thai

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu> wrote:

To add to this confusion:

The text in question, cited by Steve Denney from the JVS, mentioned that this ratio of 1 to 1000 killed was to be put in effect in "free" areas -- presumably meaning the "resistance" zones. In his Economic History, Dang Phong gives the figure of 1.65 million in French controlled zones in the north of the country (Tonkin) in 1953. This would have to be subtracted from the overall population figure, whatever that is. To add to the above, I am assuming that the autonomous zones also should not be included when coming to a determination of the actual killed.

We also have to remember that land reform was rolled out at different times in different places.

Here is an interesting source on Vietnam's population:

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/36/92/51/PDF/BanensVietnamReport.pdf

The author suggests 11.9 million in 1954 for "Tonkin," 13.6 in 1955 for all of North Vietnam.

But most important here is that we do not know the relationship between a target (1 in 1000) and actuality. Some members of this list seem to believe that the target was reality. Well . . . why?

Shawn

Shawn McHale

Director

Sigur Center for Asian Studies

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

George Washington University

Washington, DC 20052 USA

202/ 994-2760

Website: http://www.gwu.edu/~sigur

Facebook: Sigur Center for Asian Studies

Twitter: gwusigurcenter

Student Blog: asiaonestreet.blogspot.com

Blog of the Rising Powers Initiative: http://risingpowers.wordpress.com

----- Original Message -----

From: "Tai, Hue-Tam Ho" <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>

Date: Tuesday, February 1, 2011 4:48 pm

Subject: RE: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

According to the Annuaire statistique de l'Union francaise d'outre-mer of 1931, the total population of Vietnam was 17,7M; in 1943, it had risen to 22,612M, an increase of 5 million in 12 years. In 1945, the population of the northern half (north the 17th parallel, not just Tonkin) was about 12 million. Over one million died in the famine of 1945, all of them in the north. Would the total population of Vietnam have increased by 10 million in 13 years (taking into account the one million who died of famine)?

It is correct that the population of the north was larger than that of the south in the 1950s. This continues to be true despite the influx of northerners into the south.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History

________________________________________

From: vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu

[vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Mac McIntosh [alohamac@xtra.co.nz]

Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 4:17 PM

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Subject: Re: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

Steven , I note that in Spencer Tucker's book 'Vietnam' he says that in 1956, even after the loss of about one million population in the North going South to flee Communism , that the population in North Vietnam was 16 million while the population in South Vietnam was 14 million . I have seen other historical population figures for Vietnam over all that states the total population in 56 was about 31 million . I also recall various analysts commenting on the possibility of unification elections in 1956 saying that since North Vietnam a considerably larger population than South Vietnam and a far greater ability to control the population's voting that free and fair conditions as required by the Geneva accords were lacking .

Walter James McIntosh

The Lighthouse-Bluff , NZ

Steven said :

Five percent of 14 million would be 700,000. Edwin Moise's general range of 3,000 to 15,000 would seem based on the best information available at the time, but the actual number might have been a bit higher. I posted earlier an excerpt from a 1953 directive from the Vietnamese Communist Party which set a general quota of one execution per thousand people during the first phase of the Land Reform campaign, the Rent Reduction campaign, along with an excerpt from an article by Alec Holcombe, who commented that the next phase of the campaign likely involved more executions than the first phase. The translated directive and Holcombe's article appeared in the summer 2010 issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and the directive was originally published in the 54 volume Van Kien Dang Toan Tap, authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1997. He mentions that the total population in north Vietnam at the time was around 10 million.

Steve Denney

library assistant

UC Berkeley

On 2/1/2011 5:31 AM, Tai, Hue-Tam Ho wrote:

If the execution target was 5% of the population of about 14 million, the number of executions would have been 7,000. As Melanie says, within the range estimated by Moise, and in fact half of his high estimate of 15,000.

As for executions in the South, I do not believe there has been a study of the exact numbers. There were plenty of people incarcerated under 10/59, however. 10/59 was unpopular even among non-Communists because of wrongful accusations, such as one that landed one of my distant relatives in jail for three years without trial. He shared a cell with bona fide Viet Minh and learned to weave baskets as part of his rehabilitation (he was a small landowner).

When I visited Ben Tre museum in the mid 1990s, part of the exhibition described the achievements of the 1960s uprisings (made famous by Nguyen thi Dinh, though the museum had little information about her. A wall label boasted that 3,000 officials had been assassinated.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History

________________________________________

From: vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu

[vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Melanie Beresford [melanie.beresford@mq.edu.au]

Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 7:54 AM

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Subject: Re: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

Balasz, If this was for me. No you didn't ask that question. I had some data on the land reform - but didn't then have the technology to get it to you other than by manual transcription which turned out to be too time consuming (my apologies). If I can find it, I could scan it, but I suspect it is already included in Dang Phong's work which is cited somewhere in this thread. I have no idea about the numbers of southern political executions in the late '50s, other than reading from numerous sources that it was a major reason for launching the NLF in 1960.Le Duan returned north in 1959 with information to press his case for armed insurrection in the south.

cheers,

Melanie

On 1 February 2011 16:18, Balazs Szalontai<aoverl@yahoo.co.uk<>> wrote:

Yes, that number would have been too high even for the entire population of Indochina, with Laos and Cambodia included, if the 1:10,000 proportion was to be used. BTW, I wonder if any reliable figures have been found about the number of political executions in South Vietnam during the "Denounce the Communists" campaign, in 1955-58. If I am not mistaken, I asked this question from you, or on the list, about ten years ago, and I would be interested if any information on that has surfaced in the meantime.

--- On Tue, 1/2/11, Melanie Beresford<melanie.beresford@mq.edu.au<>> wrote:

Still within Moise's estimation range. But my only purpose in contributing to what has generally been an very unenlightening thread was to point out that one in a thousand did not add up to 80-100,000 deaths as per Nghia Vo.

cheers,

On 1 February 2011 14:38, Mac McIntosh<alohamac@xtra.co.nz<>> wrote:

Melanie ,

The population of North Vietnam was about 14 Million in 1956 , As you know they had about 1 million of their population flee from Communism in 1954 which brought the population in South Vietnam up to about 10 or possibly 11 million . There have been a number of studies about the number of executions that took place in conjunction with the rent reduction and and land reform programme and Ed Moise's estimates , and that what they are - estimates -- are on the very low end of those estimates. Of course there were many hidden deaths that came with the social classification system that went with the programme. If one was claffified as any thing other than a poor peasant the chances of getting decent medical care were greatly reduced , those whose fathers were classified as the son's of rich peasants when drafted into the military were given some of the most dangerous assignments . In addition to rent reduction and land reform programmes there was also the programme to eliminate the petty bourgeoise which also took many lives. Speaking of that programme Buttinger noted " With a touch of megalomania which was in no way diminished by their victory over the French, the Viet Minh leaders embarked upon their self-imposed task, a truly monstrous one, since even its partial realization required inhumane methods."

Mac McIntosh

The Lighthouse- Bluff , NZ

decree law

I think the arithmetic needs a slight correction here. (Apologies for being a pedant!) What was the population of the DRV in 1956? Maybe 10 million? possibly less. So 1 in a thousand is 10,000. Looks like Moise was about spot on.

cheers,

Melanie

Melanie Beresford

Associate Dean Research

Associate Professor in Economics

Faculty of Business& Economics

Macquarie University, NSW 2109 Australia

tel: +612 9850 8491

fax: +612 9850 8586

e: melanie.beresford@mq.edu.au

On 31 January 2011 22:57, Nghia Vo<nghia2520@yahoo.com wrote:

must execute [xu tu] a number of reactionary or evil landlords. In our current situation, the number of executions is fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population in the free areas. (J Viet Studies)

It is interesting that the VCP called landlords EVIL while the VCP's decision to execute (xu tu) people arbitrarily and blindly (landlords) is EVIL.

70,000-80,000 were thus executed--seems to be correct to me.

Nghia

-----Original Message-----

From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>

Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 2:59 PM

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: [Vsg] Land reform deaths

Nghia,

To be blunt -- so what? We could go on forever on this list with competing statistics for dead from land reform. Surely you agree that finding a convenient number in and of itself is not the issue -- it is finding * reliable* and accurate numbers. On this, why would Christine White's [Kristin Pelzer's] numbers be better? I'm betting that her numbers are derived from secondary sources. Too much of the time, we are simply kicking around estimates of deaths without knowing how these estimates were derived.

It is certainly useful to find, in Hungarian archives, alternative statistics for these death tolls. But again, without disaggregating the data, it is not clear how reliable the alternative statistics are. Ideally, estimates for land reform deaths would be broken down by province, then district, and not simply aggregated. We also need to avoid double counting. While I am no statistician, too much of the time I find scholars want the bigger numbers -- but have not a shred of evidence to support their choices. This applies not simply to land reform, of course, but also to such statistics as the number of deaths from the Vietnam War as a whole.

Shawn

Shawn McHale

Director

Sigur Center for Asian Studies

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 USA 202/ 994-2760

Website: http://www.gwu.edu/~sigur

Facebook: Sigur Center for Asian Studies

Twitter: gwusigurcenter

Student Blog: asiaonestreet.blogspot.com Blog of the Rising Powers Initiative: http://risingpowers.wordpress.com

----- Original Message -----

From: Nghia Vo <nghia2520@yahoo.com>

Date: Monday, January 31, 2011 5:12 pm

Subject: RE: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

In AID Paper by Christine White, p 38 the number killed during land reform was at least 50,000 not including those killed during the rectification period. total: close to 80-100,000

Nghia

3. The dispossessing of landlords: here the Special Land Reform Trtl.bunal enters into play. Thel'e are no exact figures on ho" many Inndlords were affected. According to Bernard Fall, the best-educated guesses Oil the subject are that probably close to 50,000 "ere executed in connection with the land reform lind at least twice the number arrested

4. Redistribution

--- On Mon, 1/31/11, Tai, Hue-Tam Ho <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>

Subject: RE: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Date: Monday, January 31, 2011, 3:34 PM

Just an anecdote, not hard data: Some time ago, I talked about the estimated number of executions associated with the land reform campaign with a friend of mine. His grandfather had been labeled as a landlord for owning 8 mau of land. His own father at the time was at Dien Bien Phu. The grandfather was not executed but he was sentenced to be ostracized by the villagers, including his own family. He was made to live in a hovel in the middle of ricefields. His children crept out at night to provide him with food. It was an untenable situation and the grandfather committed suicide. When I visited northern villages over several years, it seemed memories of the excesses of the land reform campaign were very vivid and in many cases bitter. In fact, it was hard to keep conversations focused on the famine as people were so eager to talk about the land reform campaign. Certainly, my friend was very bitter about what had happened to his grandfather. Yet, he did not think that the figure of 50k was justified. Extrapolating from the few provinces he knew about, he thought the total number of deaths was probably 5,000-10,000.It's extremely difficult to estimate exact number of deaths (see discussions of war deaths or deaths associated with the famine of 1945) or crowds.

The figure of 50k came from Hoang van Chi, who was disillusioned by his own experiences. But I doubt he had hard evidence for that number. His figure was seized upon to make the case that, if North and South were reunified, there would be a bloodbath in the South.The same caution that applies to official figures should also apply to Hoang van Chi's figure. Regarding the label "evil landlord," not all villagers considered the local landlords evil. Many were grateful to those who had provided relief during the famine (of course, before the Viet Minh spearheaded attacks on grain storehouses, landlords would be the only people in a position to provide relief in the form of rice gruel). But some were regarded as such by their own kin. A friend of mine took me to her home village and showed me large areas that had once belonged to her extended family but had been distributed to the tenants during the land reform campaign. She said dispassionately that her aunt had been executed as an evil landlord. From discussions, it seemed clear that the aunt had been quite oppressive to her tenants, some of whom were her relatives.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History

________________________________________

From: vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu

[vsg-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Mac McIntosh [alohamac@xtra.co.nz]

Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 3:03 PM

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Subject: Re: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

As I am sure , most on this list know that there are wide range of estimates in regard to the number of executions and other atrocities committed by the communist regime in North Vietnam in the 1950's . Ed Moise's account and estimates are on the very low end . The estimates I used earlier came from research by Vietnam Human Rights Watch who's estimates are in the mid range of such published estimates. I am quite sure that Ed Moise's accurately reflect what is officially recorded in the Communist files on the subject but I have good reason to believe that those figures are not accurate . Just as if a scholar had access to VN archives and records regarding the number of US planes shot down during the war they would be able to report a number about 3 to 5 times higher than what actually happened . Just as these numbers got inflated right from the beginning , I am quite sure that the number of deaths involved in land reform and rent reduction were down played officially right from the beginning .

Mac McIntosh

The Lighthouse- Bluff, NZ

decree law

Thanks a lot for drawing my attention to this shocking document! On my part, I actually expressed my agreement with Moise's estimates in my article, but the figure of "another 50 to 100 thousand ... imprisoned or deported during the agrarian reforms," which was cited by our esteemed colleague, seems unrealistically high to me.

--- On Mon, 1/31/11, Balazs Szalontai<aoverl@yahoo.co.uk< wrote:

From: Balazs

Szalontai<aoverl@yahoo.co.uk<>>

Subject: Re: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

To: "Vietnam Studies

Group"<vsg@u.washington.edu<>>

Date: Monday, January 31, 2011, 2:55 AM

Thanks a lot for drawing my attention to this shocking document! On my part, I actually expressed my agreement with Moise's estimates in my article, but the figure of "another 50 to 100 thousand ... imprisoned or deported during the agrarian reforms," which was cited by our esteemed colleague, seems unrealistically high to me.

--- On Mon, 31/1/11, sdenney@library.berkeley.edu wrote:

Thank you for posting the article, Balazs, it is very informative. But Buttinger's estimate that at least 15,000 people were executed during the land reform campaign does not seem that far off from other estimates made in recent years. Edwin Moise in his book on this topic gave a range of 3,000 to 15,000.

The Summer 2010 issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies published a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953, which said in part:

"1. The punishment of reactionary and evil landlords

"a. In this campaign, [we] must execute [xu tu] a number of reactionary or evil landlords. In our current situation, the number of executions is fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population in the free areas. This ratio will be controlled by the leadership and applied to the rent and interest reduction campaign this year and next year; this does not mean that the ratio will apply only to this year, nor does it mean that every village will execute landlords according to this ratio. (Thus, there may be communes that execute three or four people and others that execute only one or none at all).

"Human lives are an important matter. It is not that we do not want to execute those who deserve execution. But the number of executions should not be too many; if so, it would make it difficult [for the people] to agree with us..."

Those to be executed included not only landlords, but according to this directive, "very special criminals": "leaders or members of the upper elite in ethnic communities, Catholic priests, religious leaders, democratic personalities, famous individuals, and foreign nationals: their executions must be approved [in advance] by a Central Committee [Trung Uong]."

This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party, that was the subject for discussion in the Summer 2010 issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. In this issue, Alec Holcomb commented on this directive:

"..That directive stated that the VWP Politburo wanted to see the execution of one person for every thousand people during the more moderate rent reduction phase of the mass mobilization.9 In other words, the party leadership had already decided roughly how many people should be executed during rent reduction before cadres had even entered their assigned villages, and before they had had an opportunity to determine whether so-called landlords were law abiding and “repentant” or not.

Extrapolated for the roughly eight million people who went through rent reduction in the DRV, the May 4, 1953, directive’s execution ratio indicates that the VWP Politburo wanted its mass mobilization apparatus to shoot about eight thousand people during this initial phase of the campaign.10 "Because the VWP Politburo had operated on the basis of an execution ratio for the rent reduction, the logic of which was defended in that May 4, 1953, directive, there is no reason to think that it would not have set a ratio for the land reform phase of the campaign as well. And we may reasonably conclude that any execution ratio for that more radical second phase of the campaign, when the landlord class was to be “completely overthrown” [triet de danh do], would have been considerably higher than one to one thousand. What this execution ratio was for the ten million people who underwent land reform, whether it changed over time and place, and how the VWP Politburo came up with the number, remains one of the most well kept secrets in modern Vietnamese history..."

Steve Denney

library assistant

UC Berkeley

These estimates on executions and imprisonments are quite outdated. Buttinger published his books about forty or fifty years ago. I have found some more precise data in the Hungarian archives. See the attached file.

--- On Mon, 31/1/11, Walter james Mcintosh<alohamac@xtra.co.nz<>>wrote:

Balazs, While is true that Communist Vietnam in 1956 had good reason to be concerned about public unrest but this concern had nothing to do with not haing reunification elections. Pham Van Dong gave an interview to a French journarlist in 1954 right at the end of the Geneva talks wherein he expressed great doubt and gave slim to none chances that any such election would ever take place. It was only on 1 November 1956 that NVN announced that they were releasing 12,000 people from prisons and labour camps. But at the same time it was widely believed that at least 15,000 people were killed and another 50 to 100 thousand were either imprisoned or deported during the agrarian reforms. In spite of the fact that about 1.5 million people were granted about one acre of land . This was not enough to quell the major unrest brought about by the injustices and atrocties of the previous 3 years.Joesph Buttinger said : " The brutality of the cadres embittered not only the victims but also those who were lucky enough to have escaped persecution."

Mac McIntosh

The Lighthouse

Bluff, NZ

Balazs said ///, January, 2011, 2:15 PM

Well, this is what I found and wrote about it in my article, "Political and Economic Crisis in North Vietnam, 1955-1956" ("Cold War History" 5:4, p. 416):

On 15 June the regime passed Law No. 267/SL, which threatened those who ‘spread hostile rumours’ with a jail term of five to twenty years. The nature of this law indicates the leadership’s awareness of the potential dangers of growing public discontent, while its timing suggests that Hanoi’s failure to achieve the holding of all-Vietnam elections in July played an important role in the further curtailment of criticism. Since the re-examination of the land reform campaign also started in the summer, the VWP leadership had another good reason to worry about ‘hostile rumours’.

--- On Mon, 31/1/11,

sdenney@library.berkeley.edu<><sdenney@library.berkeley.edu<>>wrote:

From: sdenney@library.berkeley.edu<>

Subject: [Vsg] DRV 1956 decree law

To: vsg@u.washington.edu<>

Date: Monday, 31 January, 2011, 1:50

Would anyone be familiar with a DRV decree promulgated in 1956, which apparently applied to circulation of forbidden cultural materials? In a 1981 trial, Bui Dinh Ha was arrested for operating an underground bookstore, and sentenced to life imprisonment, found guilty "of the crimes spelled out in articles 4,7 and 8 of the decree-law 267/SL promulgated on 15 June 1956 by the Council of Ministers," according to Saigon Giai Phong (6/26/81; JPRS 78913, 9/4/81).

I would be interested in locating the text of this decree or finding more information about it.

Steve Denney

library assistant

UC Berkeley