JUST after the 11 p.m. curfew, a convoy of green and white police vans slid into a small alley off Phat Diem Street in Saigon's Second District. Policemen toting M-16 rifles and wooden clubs jumped out and sealed off the alley at either end. Pushing brusquely into each apartment, they demanded identity cards. Suspected Viet Cong sympathizers, draft dodgers or army deserters were hustled off to a van.
Every night in Saigon, some 200 to 300 people are arrested in similar police sweeps, and others are grabbed without warning on the street during the day. Since last spring's North Vietnamese offensive and especially after the beginning of peace talks, there has been an alarming upswing in arrests. Offenses are as diverse as suspected Communist leanings, or having a relative in the North, or being neutral—which violates an admonition of President Nguyen Van Thieu: "No neutralism in the Communist way."
The fate of Saigon's political prisoners is one of the most troublesome issues bedeviling the prospects of peace. Hanoi claims that the nine-point agreement worked out by Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho provides that "all captured and detained personnel will be returned simultaneously with the U.S. troop withdrawal." But to release the prisoners would present a delicate problem to President Thieu. Most of them are resentful enough to support any leftist opposition and work to bring his government down.
Thieu's purge of suspected enemies has been so massive that even the government may not know how many prisoners it has—or how many of them can be rightly classified as political. Besides 58,000 prisoners of war (including 11,200 North Vietnamese), 80,000 South Vietnamese political prisoners are in jail, according to South Vietnamese sources. U.S. observers estimate that there are perhaps 90,000 people in prison all together, including not only political prisoners but also P.O.W.s and common criminals.
They have no recourse to justice.
Under martial law, clamped on the country in May, anyone who is considered a threat to national security—a vague charge, to be sure —can be held in "preventive detention" indefinitely without trial. Even prisoners who have finished their sentences can still be held if they are considered dangerous to security. Opposition Leader Truong Dinh Dzu, who ran against Thieu in 1967 as a peace candidate and was subsequently jailed for advocating a coalition government, was due to be released in May. He is still behind bars, although his quarters are comfortable and his family is allowed to visit him.