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Accompanied
by a sudden artillery and mortar barrage and flares casting a metallic
glow, two North Vietnamese battalions stormed across lightly defended
bridges and lotus-choked moats into the former Vietnamese imperial
capital of Hue before dawn on January 31, 1968.
It was part of nearly simultaneous surprise attacks by Communist
military forces against nearly every significant city or town in
South Vietnam during the lunar new year, or Tet, holiday. The Tet
Offensive, as the nationwide attacks would become known, shocked
the U.S. government and public into reconsidering and eventually
terminating the U.S. military effort in Vietnam.
Hue was occupied for twenty-five days before the North Vietnamese
were ousted. During that time, the troops and the political officers
who came with them ruled over large parts of the city. One of the
central objectives of the occupation, according to a written plan
prepared in advance, was to "destroy and disorganize"
the administrative machinery that the South Vietnamese regime had
established since Vietnam was divided by international agreement
in 1954. The effort to root out "enemy" functionaries,
according to the plan, was to extend "from the province and
district levels to city wards, streets and wharves." The political
officers arrived with a carefully prepared "target list"
of 196 places, organized on a block-by-block basis, to be given
priority attention, including U.S. and South Vietnamese offices
and the homes of the officials who worked there, as well as the
homes of those who were deemed to be leading or cooperating with
their efforts, including foreigners. Once in charge, the occupation
forces set about expanding its target lists with the assistance
of local sympathizers.
So many were killed. Le Van Rot, the owner of the most popular Chinese
soup restaurant in the city, was the government block chief of his
area. Four armed men, two from Hue and two from North Vietnam, came
to his shop and arrested him, accusing him of being a spy. They
bound his arms behind his back with wire and began to tug him toward
the door. When he resisted, one of them put a bullet through his
head.
Then there was Pham Van Tuong. He worked part-time as a janitor
at the government information office. Four men in black pajamas
came to his house, calling on him by name to come out of the bunker
where he and his family had taken refuge. But when he did come out,
along with his five-year-old son, his three-year-old daughter, and
two of his nephews, there was a burst of gunfire. All five were
shot to death.
Dr. Horst Gunther Krainick was a German pediatrician and professor
of internal medicine who had worked for seven years with teams of
Germans and Vietnamese to establish a medical school at Hue University.
Krainick stayed in his university apartment after the fall of the
city, believing he and his wife would not be harmed. Unknown to
them, they were on the original target list. On the fifth day of
the occupation, an armed squad arrived and put the Krainicks and
two other German doctors into a commandeered Volks-wagen bus. Their
bodies were found later in a potato field, all victims of an executioner's
bullets.
The same day, North Vietnamese troops came in force to the Roman
Catholic cathedral, where many people had taken refuge from the
fighting. Four hundred men were ordered out, some by name and others
apparently because they were of military age or prosperous appearance.
When the group was assembled, the political officer on the scene
told people not to fear; the men were merely being taken away temporarily
for political indoctrination. Nineteen months later, three defectors
led U.S. soldiers to a creekbed in a double canopy jungle ten miles
from Hue where the skulls and bones of those who had been taken
away had lain ever since. Those killed included South Vietnamese
servicemen, civil servants, students, and ordinary citizens. The
skulls revealed they had been shot or brained with blunt instruments.
Altogether, South Vietnamese authorities counted about twenty-eight
hundred victims of deliberate slaughter during the Tet Offensive
in Hue. The fate of some was known immediately. The bodies of others
emerged later from mass graves in nearby jungles or the coastal
salt flats. Like those taken from the cathedral, they had been shot
to death, bludgeoned, or buried alive.
After Hue was retaken, the South Vietnamese authorities were reported
to be guilty of some of the same practices. I learned from a U.S.
team that "black teams" of South Vietnamese assassins
were sent in to eliminate those who were believed to have aided
the enemy during the occupation. On March 14, three weeks after
South Vietnam regained control, more than twenty prisoners, including
some women and schoolboys, were brought to provincial military headquarters
with burlap bags covering their heads and hands tightly wired behind
their backs. After being taken into a stone building that was reputed
to be a place of execution, all the prisoners disappeared.
It is, of course, unlawful to execute an accused person without
giving him a fair trial first. Two bodies of law apply—humanitarian
law, which applies in an armed conflict, and human rights law, which
applies even where the laws of war do not.
Under international humanitarian law, the sorts of killings that
took place in Hue are usually termed "willful killing without
judicial process." If the victims are enemy prisoners of war
(including accredited journalists and civilian suppliers and contractors
attached to enemy armed forces), or medical or religious personnel
attached to the armed services, such executions are grave breaches
under the Third Geneva Convention. If they are enemy civilians,
it is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The requirements for fair trials of military personnel and civilians
are similar. Each accused person has rights: against self-incrimination,
against being convicted on the basis of an ex post facto law, for
being advised of his or her rights, of having the right to counsel,
to be told the particulars of the charge, to prepare a defense,
to call witnesses, to have an interpreter, and to appeal. “As
it is prohibited to kill protected persons during an international
armed conflict, so it is prohibited to kill those taking no active
part in hostilities which constitute an internal armed conflict,”
the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia said
in November 1998. The key element is “the death of the victim
as a result of the actions of the accused.” Even when it is
unclear whether a situation is an armed conflict, human rights law
forbids extrajudicial executions.
(See death squads; disappearances;
due process.)
The Camera as Witness
By Alex Levac
On April 13, 1984, four young Palestinians commandeered bus number
300 as it made its way from Tel Aviv to the southern city of Ashkelon,
and forced it to Dir el-Ballah, a small town in the northern Gaza
Strip which at the time was under Israeli occupation. There the
bus was surrounded by soldiers and police. Just before sunrise,
after an all-night standoff, crack troops stormed the bus, turning
the silent pre-dawn into a delirium of screaming, gunfire, and explosions
that lasted several minutes.
With other photographers and reporters who had evaded police roadblocks
to get to the scene, I ran toward the noise in the near total darkness.
Suddenly, I found myself confronting two men who alternated between
dragging and propping up a third person. Convinced that he was one
of the many passengers rescued from the bus, I snapped just one
picture. The two men were on me instantly, demanding that I surrender
the film from my camera. With a sleight of hand, I managed to give
them an unused roll, and they were on their way.
On the journey back to Tel Aviv, I heard the army spokesman telling
Israeli radio that one passenger had been killed, a few had been
wounded, and the rest rescued unharmed. He said that two of the
Palestinian hijackers had died in the raid and that two others had
been captured when the troops stormed the bus. However, an hour
later, the next news broadcast reported that all four hijackers
had died when the troops stormed the bus. And that version became
the official government line.
It wasn't until I developed the film that I realized why the men
in the picture, members of the Shin Bet—the domestic security
service—wanted my film. The man they were dragging off, I discovered
to my astonishment, wasn't a passenger at all. He was one of the
hijackers—young, handcuffed to his captors, and very much alive.
At least one of the Palestinians had survived the raid. The picture
was proof that the security officials had lied. The truth peered
out from the eyes of this young Palestinian, bound but living. Here
was a man who only a short time earlier had been terrorizing a bus
full of passengers and striking fear in the hearts of all Israelis.
The more I looked, the more complete his transformation had become
from an abhorrent figure to a pitiful one—a man in need of
protection from the two Shin Bet agents guarding him. Moments earlier
the agents had been heroes rescuing passengers on a bus. Now, standing
on either side of their captive, they were the bad guys. Does the
knowledge of impending death shape our judgment? From the moment
of his death, the Palestinian became a reflection of our own mortal
image. Are we to erase him from our collective memory and let him
disappear under a mound of earth, or do we raise his ghost and grapple
with his right to live, to be tried, to be a human being?
Every photojournalist wants to make an impact, wants his picture
to be worth a thousand words. The power of my photograph of the
Palestinian hijacker escorted to his death by his Shin Bet captors
is drawn from what the observer does not see but is compelled to
imagine—the moment the agents crush the Palestinian's skull
with a stone, the moment of death.
(See hostages.)
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