{\p——— aii

US. bombing, artillery

Killed thousands in Hue

j
' Even so unlikely a character
x Tran Van Dinh, a former dip-
Mat at the South Vietnamese
‘4 bassy in Washington, is fed
With the lies used by the Ni-
on Administration ‘to keep the
‘. Army in Vietnam. :
he government and the mass
nedia have been hammering
(Way at their version of the
ite massacre” for over a year.
l, € U.S. has to keep a large
ned presence in Vietnam, Laos
hee Thailand, they tell you, or
4 * be a repetition of Hue, where
‘, 00 were slaughtered «in all
‘tts of inhuman ways by the
nommies” while they were ‘in
‘trol of that ancient city.
h ell, Hue is Tran Van Dinh’s
Ome town. And during the oc-
‘“Upation of the ancient imperial

von Front (NLF) in the Tet
Dj wsive of early 1968, both
hos younger brother and ne-
€w were slaughtered in an in-
an way. But Dinh later
Thed that it wasn’t Vietcong
© did it.
a the Nov. 6 issue of The
aa Republic, Dinh denies the
€ged Vietcong atrocities and
Ug

’ leg

ts the blame for the high
jycth toll on American bombing.
: wtims were buried together in
yuPorary graves because Hue
88 under siege from U.S. artil-
me not because people were
bf €d up in front of troughs by
eeodthirsty guerrilla execution-
+8. “Nobody could get out of
a area to buy a coffin for de-
®nt burial,” Dinh points out.
iat former attache is rather
pect about the propaganda
lleage the U.S. is trying to get
jut of the exhumation of ‘mass
as

HOW MANY?

tahe question that now must
i asked is how many Pink-

/'8s have there been.
one: Kennedy's report that
rg &r 300,000 South Vietnamese
thins have been killed in
4 © last four years colors any
‘Peculations in this direction
ti'th a tinge of the grotesque.
ly May also explain the out-
yadish Viet Cong and North
4, mamese casualties claimed
V the U.S.

Not only did the country’s
wscience die in that Asian
1 "9ge, but the credibility of a
Stion fighting for justice and
fprocracy suffered a similar
te,

The massacre is abhorrent
the conscience of the Ameri-
iw People.” That's not en-
ae Mr. President. Only a
Fed Nuremberg could satis-

the cravings of justice.

The Ryersonian.

)“Dital by the National Libera- . ii

The ruins of a Vietnamese hos-
pital after a U.S. air raid.

graves” at Hue, an operation
greeted with much fanfare in the
U.S. press, while the corpses of
the “Pinkville” villagers are not
dug up because “they are old
bodies.”’ The saturation bombing
of Hue and the “Pinkville” mas-
sacre occurred at about the
same time.

Dinh’s account backs up the
description of the Hue occupa-
tion published by “South Viet-
nam in Struggle,” an English
language newspaper printed in
liberated South Vietnam:

“The adversary bombarded
from warships. Hue, the ancient
imperial city, today is almost
completely obliterated by the
American bombing and _ shell-
ing.”

It took three weeks for the
Americans to “liberate” Hue and
it’s hardly surprising that their
bombs took several thousand
lives in that time.

It is true that the NLF execu-
ted some of the people’s most
brutal overlords, but to form an
accurate picture of the extent of
these executions, Dinh refers us
to Len E. Ackland, now a gradu-
ate student at Johns Hopkins
University, who was in Hue dur-
ing the Tet offensive of 1968.

Ackland’s testimony:

“When on the first day of the
attack, about 20 Vietcong enter-
ed Gia Hoe (a precinct of 25,000
residents 1n Hue) in order to
secure the area, they carried
with them a list of those who
were to be killed immediately
as ‘enemies of the people.’ Ac-

cording to Le Ngan, director of

Hue’s special police, the list
consisted: of five names, all those
of officers or special police.”

Also, Ackland reports, the
Catholic priest in Gia Hoi told
him pointblank that “none of his
clergy or parishoners were
harmed by the NLF.”

OPEN LETTER TO
U.S. CHRISTIANS

‘HELP END THE

KILLING

AND

DESTRUCTION...

Partial text of an Open Letter
to Christians of the U.S.A., sign-

ed by Rev. Dinh Van Huong and .

93 other Vietnamese Catholics
living in France:

In the name of the rights of
the Vietnamese people, in the
name of the human solidarity,
and above all in the name of our
common faith in God, we, Viet-
namese Catholics, believe that
we have a duty to address this
letter to you, Christian brethren
of the United States of America,
so that you may know some of
our deepest feelings on the Viet-
namese problem in which your
nation is implicated.

As you are aware, war has
not ceased to devastate our
country for nearly 30 years and
its cruelty attained a degree
without any equivalent in his-
tory, taking into account the
means used, dating from the day
that American troops landed on
our soil.

In fact, North Vietnam has
lived continually night and day
during four long years under
the most terrifying rain of
American bombs.

On the average, each North
Vietnamese has beeh assaulted
by 8.8 pounds of bombs of all
sorts. In the religious field, there
are hardly any churches left un-
touched. In all the length of the
vast province of the Quang Binh,
for example, one single chapel
is still standing. During all these
4 long years, while Christians
of America have with the usual
good conscience taken part in
religious services in the most
modern and luxurious churches,
a million North Vietnamese
Catholics had to take part at the
same religious offices at 4
o’clock in the morning in under-
ground shelters built in haste
and with whatever materials
they chanced to find. While
Christians in the U.S.A. prayed
for world peace, hundreds of
thousands tons of bombs, made
with the most advanced techni-

ques, sowed death and destruc- .

tion everywhere, in towns, in
villages, in the hamlets of North
Vietnam.

At present North Vietnam has
begun to breathe a little but it
continues nevertheless to live in
profound anguish. In fact, be-

‘fore the incalculable ruins caus-

ed by American bombs, every
normal man is shocked and stu-
pified and asks himself when
and with what may the country
be rebuilt.

At the same time in South
Vietnam terror reigns always
and everywhere, night and day
without stopping thousands and
thousands of tons of the Ameri-
can bombs are sowed on the
heads of 17 million innocent
people. The presence of half a
million American troops in
South Vietnam is a most fright-

ful destructive force. Morally, —

you already know too well, this
presence saps all human values,
the number of prostitutes, of:
children of unknown fathers and
of mixed parentage grows each
day in a disquieting manner.
Boys and girls of an entire gen-

eration are tainted and corrup-
ted by the fact of war.

In truth, it is not possible to
recite all the misery the war has
caused to the populations of
Vietnam. What matters is to
find as soon as possible means
to end these useless sufferings.

Believing that all men, created
in the image of God, are his chil-
dren and brothers to each other,
we may not have a quiet con-
science if we are concerned only
with our own personal affairs,
regardless of the bombs which
massacre, innocent men.

Being on the other hand dis-
ciples of the Christ who has
ordered us to promote peace,
you and we have the duty to
work to hasten the end of the
killing and destruction.

That is what some Christians
in the United States have be-
come conscious of and have
undertaken to carry out.

For this reason we express

here our sincere thanks to pas- .

tors, priests, the. Faithful and

PAGODAS AND NAPALM

‘According to President
Nixon, the Son My massacre
was an “isolated incident” in
the U.S. “record of generosity
and decency in Vietnam.”

The kindly, generous, philan-
thropic U.S. imperialists have
“built roads, schools, churches
and pagodas,” he said. ~

What he didn’t say is that _
many Vietnamese. roads now

run through a desert created
by U.S. bombs and chemical
weapons.

Many of the children who
should be at school have been
blown to pieces or burnt to
death by napalm.

And not all the churches and
pagodas in the world can com-
pensate the Vietnamese who
mourn the loss of father, moth-
er, child, sister or brother.

Nixon’s aim is to make a
scapegoat of a handful of sol-
diers who were carrying out a
policy decided on in Washing-
ton.

Morning Star.

-

dropped each year.

the Christian students of the
United States who have fought
for peace in Vietnam during

these last years. We think par-

ticularly of the Catholic Peace
Fellowship of the Christian
Family Movement and of the
American Section of the World

Council of Churches. We may

never forget the pastors, priests
and theologians like. Berrigain,
Tavard, Riga, Connet, etc.

We bow deeply before the
Supreme Sacrifice of Roger La
Porte and of Norman Morrison,
who believed in the same God
as we and accepted to disappear
by fire that peace might return
to Vietnam. : :

~ s *

But the road to peace is still
strewn by a thousand difficul-
ties. The Paris Conference has
reached an impasse. It is neces-
sary that we recognize dlearly
where the obstacles confe from.

In our opinion the real obsta-
cles are that the U.S. Govern-
ment does not recognize that the
American intervention in Viet-
nam, that the presence of half
a million of its troops in this
country and that the massive
bombardments which have anni-
hilated all the villages yester-
day in the North and today in
the South are criminal acts
which violate the fundamental
rights and the sacred sovereign-
ty of our people.

Any country driven by force
into such a corner ought to be
determined to resist to the end.
Consequently, all Vietnamese,
Communists or- rion-Commun-
ists, Christians or non-Chris-
tians are opposed to it, as one,
with all their force.

Whether we are Americans
or Vietnamese, we share the
same faith in Christ Our Lord,
It is thus in accordance with our
religion that we work together
to put an end, as soon as possi-
ble, to this destructive war.

On our side, we are deter-
mined to find, together with all
our compatriots, the best solu-
tion possible to the Vietnam
problem, based on our relation-
ships among fellow citizens, on
the concessions that are indis-
pensable, and on the common
effort to work for the construc-
tion of an independent and pros-
perous Vietnam in which liberty
of belief and all the fundamental
Human Rights will be guaran-
teed.

On your side, we ask of you:

1. To do everything to ex-
plain to the American people
clearly, the deepest aspirations
of the Vietnamese people, those
of peace and independence.

2. To persuade the govern-
ment of the United States to re-
call immediately all its troops
from South Vietnam, an_ in-
dispensable condition to end the
war in Vietnam and to enable
you to contribute towards build-
ing peace in the world.

Young iatnemasa boys sitting on one of the millions of bombs

PACIFIC TRIBUNE —DECEMBER'19; 1969—Page?*"