Témoignage d’un ancien dirigeant étudiant de l’opposition au régime sud-vietnamien militant pour la paix et un Sud-Vietnam neutre et indépendant de Hanoï, deux fois emprisonné sous le régime de Nguyen Van Thieu :

“Après la chute de Saïgon en avril 1975, très vite, comme ses amis de la gauche, il se rend compte qu’il a été trompé. Ce sont les communistes du Nord qui s’emparent de tous les leviers de commande et qui imposent leurs méthodes. Par centaines de milliers, les militaires et fonctionnaires de l’ancien régime sont internés dans des camps de “rééducation” dont ils ne reviennent pas. Les prisons sont bondées de prisonniers politiques. Un soir de juin 1975, c’est le tour de Doan Van Toai. Il ne sera libéré qu’en novembre 1977, grâce au fait que sa femme est de nationalité française” (quatrième de couverture).

 

En annexe figure notamment un Appel à l’opinion mondiale approuvé par 40 de ses co-détenus parmi lesquels d’anciens membres importants du Parti Communiste vietnamien et d’anciens chefs militaires du Front National de Libération du Sud-Vietnam. L’auteur, né en 1945, Vice-Président de l’Union des Étudiants de Saigon en 1969 et 1970, devient, après la chute du régime Thieu, cadre au ministère des Finances. Son opposition à un supérieur, sur un plan purement professionnel, provoque son emprisonnement. Après sa libération, il quitte le Vietnam en mai 1978, pour Paris. En août 1989, alors qu’il promeut un projet de rapprochement entre exilés et gouvernement vietnamien et milite pour l’établissement de relations diplomatiques entre les États-Unis et le Vietnam, il est victime d’un attentat à Fresno (Californie) : il est sérieusement blessé par arme à feu par deux Asiatiques.

Réf. : Doan Van Toai, Le goulag vietnamien, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1979, 341 p. (récit recueilli par Michel Voirol)

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The Vietnamese Gulag

Doan Van Toai spent time in jails in South Vietnam for antigovernment activities as a student leader, including a trip to the U.S. to deliver antiwar speeches at California universities. When the Communists took over in 1975, he went to work for the Revolutionary Finance Committee and observed at close hand the workings of the new regime. Then, without warning, he was thrown into prison, where for 28 months he suffered torture, starvation, disease and despair. Just as abruptly, he was released and allowed to leave the countrystill not knowing why he had been arrested. In this effective, absorbing memoir, the authors describe in detail the “insidious inhumanity” of the Communist government (“far worse than that of the foreign oppressors”) as it took control in Saigon. Toai, who now lives in California, accurately refers to himself as the first articulate messenger of the new order, and his message is directed at “the Vietnamese community abroad who had supported the revolution, and the foreign antiwar movements that had done so much to bring it about.” (From Publishers Weekly).

Every Communist party in power has established prison systems that mix torture, brutality, starvation, and the use of informants to crush real and imagined enemies. Toai, a Saigon student leader in the 1960s and early 1970s, spearheaded opposition to the pro-U.S. Thieu regime, but failed to cast his lot with the Communist revolutionaries. He was swept into a Communist prison in late 1975, and here tells the story of a would-be Third Force intellectual’s struggle to survive over the following two years. His vivid descriptions of prison life are interspersed with memoirs of his days as a student leader. The material is fascinating, but the narrative flashback technique is irritating. Political memoirs need not be written as if they were movie scripts. (by Steven I. Levine, Sch. of International Service, American Univ., Washington, D.C. – From Library Journal – © 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Réf. : Doan Van Toai (with David Chanoff), The Vietnamese Gulag, Simon & Schuster, 1986, 351 p.

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Der vietnamesische Gulag

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Un document rare de Doan Van Toai

Doan Van Toai, Dossier sur les prisons au Viêt Nam, Paris, R. Laffont, 1978. First Edition. Quarto (30cm); staple-bound, pictorial wrappers; [30]p.

Extremely scarce, hastily-assembled white paper on the status of political prisoners in Vietnam, published a year prior to Van Toai’s landmark work Le Goulag Vietnamien (“The Vietnamese Gulag”), which exposed the brutalities of the Communist regime following the United States’ exit from South Vietnam in 1975. Assembles a number of documents including a “Declaration of disinherited Vietnamese on Human Rights” (1977); “The Vietnamese Patriotic Prisoners’ Testament”; “Document on the penitentiary regime under the communist government of Vietnam” (1978), as well as press releases and news items taken from French and American media. Rare: OCLC locates only one copy in North America (Harvard Yenching Lib – catalogued under the English title “Documents on Prisons in Vietnam).

Source : Lorne Bair Rare Books

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