Vietnam War

==== In Vietnam ====
{{Further|Re-education camp (Vietnam)|Mayaguez incident}}
[[File:B52 CRASH WRECKAGE AT HUU TIEP LAKE HA NOI FEB 2012 (6887035292).jpg|thumb|upright|B-52 wreckage in Huu Tiep Lake, [[Hanoi]]. Downed during [[Operation Linebacker II]], its remains have been turned into a war monument.]]
On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Robbers |first=Gerhard |title=Encyclopedia of world constitutions |publisher=[[Infobase Publishing]] |year=2007 |isbn=978-0-8160-6078-8 |page=[{{GBurl|id=M3A-xgf1yM4C|p=1021}} 1021]}}</ref> Despite speculation that the victorious North Vietnamese would, in President Nixon's words, "massacre the civilians there [South Vietnam] by the millions," there is a widespread consensus that no mass executions took place.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Elliot |first=Duong Van Mai |title=RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era |publisher=RAND Corporation |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-8330-4754-0 |pages=499, 512–513 |chapter=The End of the War |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g9o8fAo2R6wC&pg=PA499}}</ref>{{Refn|group="A"|A study by Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson estimated that 65,000 South Vietnamese were executed for political reasons between 1975 and 1983, based on a survey of 615 Vietnamese refugees who claimed to have personally witnessed 47 executions. However, "their methodology was reviewed and criticized as invalid by authors [[Gareth Porter]] and James Roberts." Sixteen of the 47 names used to extrapolate this "bloodbath" were duplicates; this extremely high duplication rate (34%) strongly suggests Desbarats and Jackson were drawing from a small number of total executions. Rather than arguing that this duplication rate proves there were very few executions in post-war Vietnam, Porter and Roberts suggest it is an artifact of the self-selected nature of the participants in the Desbarats-Jackson study, as the authors followed subjects' recommendations on other refugees to interview.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Elliot |first=Duong Van Mai |title=RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era |publisher=RAND Corporation |year=2010 |isbn=978-0-8330-4754-0 |pages=512–513 |chapter=The End of the War |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g9o8fAo2R6wC&pg=PA512 }}<br />cf. {{Cite journal |last1=Porter |first1=Gareth |last2=Roberts |first2=James |date=Summer 1988 |title=Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation: A Review of ''A Methodology for Estimating Political Executions in Vietnam, 1975–1983'', Jacqueline Desbarats; Karl D. Jackson. |journal=Pacific Affairs |volume=61 |issue=2 |pages=303–310 |doi=10.2307/2759306 |jstor=2759306}}</ref> Nevertheless, there exist unverified reports of mass executions.<ref>''see'' Nguyen Cong Hoan' testimony in {{Cite report |url=http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002939991 |title=Human Rights in Vietnam: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations: House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session |date=26 July 1977 |publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office |pages=149, 153}};<br />''see also'' {{Cite journal |last1=Desbarats |first1=Jacqueline |last2=Jackson |first2=Karl D. |date=September 1985 |title=Vietnam 1975–1982: The Cruel Peace |journal=The Washington Quarterly |volume=8 |issue=4 |pages=169–182 |doi=10.1080/01636608509477343 |pmid=11618274}}</ref>}} However, in the years following the war, a vast number of South Vietnamese were sent to [[Re-education camp (Vietnam)|re-education camps]] where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor.<ref>{{Cite web |last1=Sagan |first1=Ginetta |last2=Denney |first2=Stephen |date=October–November 1982 |title=Re-education in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering and Death |url=https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982 |access-date=1 September 2016 |website=The Indochina Newsletter}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Nghia |first=M. Vo |title=The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam |publisher=McFarland |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-7864-1714-8}}</ref> According to Amnesty International Report 1979, this figure varied considerably depend on different observers: "...{{Nbsp}}included such figures as "50,000 to 80,000" (''Le Monde'', 19 April 1978), "150,000" (Reuters from Bien Hoa, 2 November 1977), "150,000 to 200,000" (''The Washington Post'', 20 December 1978), and "300,000" (Agence France Presse from Hanoi, 12 February 1978)."<ref>{{Cite web |year=1979 |title=Amnesty International Report, 1979 |url=https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL100011979ENGLISH.PDF |access-date=26 March 2018 |publisher=Amnesty International |page=116|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230323142937/https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol10/001/1979/en/|archive-date=March 23, 2023}}</ref> Such variations may be because "Some estimates may include not only detainees but also people sent from the cities to the countryside." According to a native observer, 443,360 people had to register for a period in re-education camps in Saigon alone, and while some of them were released after a few days, others stayed there for more than a decade.<ref>''Huy, Đức. Bên Thắng Cuộc. OsinBook.''</ref> Between 1975 and 1980, more than 1 million northerners migrated south to regions formerly in the Republic of Vietnam, while, as part of the [[New Economic Zones program]], around 750,000 to over 1 million southerners were moved mostly to uninhabited mountainous forested areas.<ref name="Desbarats">{{Cite book |last=Desbarats |first=Jacqueline |title=Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation |series=Indochina report ; no. 11 |publisher=Executive Publications |location=Singapore |date=1987}}</ref><ref name="Chapman">{{Cite news |last=Chapman |first=William |date=17 August 1979 |title=Hanoi Rebuts Refugees on 'Economic Zones' |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/08/17/hanoi-rebuts-refugees-on-economic-zones/a26c10ab-3791-4d76-9c4a-db4f7d48be32/ |access-date=30 June 2021|archive-date=June 14, 2023|archiveurl=https://archive.today/20230614164256/https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/08/17/hanoi-rebuts-refugees-on-economic-zones/a26c10ab-3791-4d76-9c4a-db4f7d48be32/}}</ref>
[[File:35 Vietnamese boat people 2.JPEG|thumb|upright|Vietnamese refugees fleeing Vietnam, 1984]]

[[Gabriel García Márquez]], a [[Nobel Prize]] winning writer, described South Vietnam as a "False paradise" after the war, when he visited in 1980:
{{Blockquote|The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculous and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South.<ref>{{Cite magazine |title=Read Gabriel García Márquez's Moving Vietnam Piece |magazine=Rolling Stone |url=https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-vietnam-wars-19800529 |access-date=25 April 2018}}</ref>}}
The U.S. used its [[United Nations Security Council veto power|security council veto]] to block Vietnam's recognition by the United Nations three times, an obstacle to the country receiving international aid.<ref>{{Cite news |date=21 September 1977 |title=Vietnam Is Admitted to the U.N. As 32d General Assembly Opens |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/21/archives/vietnam-is-admitted-to-the-un-as-32d-general-assembly-opens.html |access-date=27 April 2018 |issn=0362-4331|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230409052642/https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/21/archives/vietnam-is-admitted-to-the-un-as-32d-general-assembly-opens.html|archive-date=April 9, 2023}}</ref>