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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011  "and women of all ages and ways of life, detained without trial in a concentration camp as an act of reprisal, were victims of a wholesale food-poisoning which resulted in more than a thousand dead on the very first day. The survivors were hurriedly taken to other camps or left dying behind the Phu Loi barbed wire .... ""

The Phu Loi Massacre became one of the cases which und erwrote Hanoi's appeal to the world in 1959 and 1960 to end: ""… this regime of terror and massacre set up by Ngo Dinh Diem in the south of our country at the behest of the U.S. imperialists. It is the duty of all honest people to extinguish this hotbed of 1-rar ....According to available data which cannot be complete from July, 1954) date of the signing of the Geneva Agreeme nts, to February) 1959) 180)84 3 former resistance members were arrested) 50)000 others were subj ected to a regime of forced labour in the so-called 'Agricultural colonies .' The Phu Loi camp is part of this network of sorrow and affliction which Ngo Dinh Diem) the henchman of the American imperialists, hopes to quench the aspirations for freedom independence and national unity of our people . . . /footnote; The famous declaratlon of Diem) during his visit to Washington in 1957: 'The United States' frontier extends as far as the 17th parallel in Vietnam.' " 121/"

At the forefront of the "movement of protest If were Southerners in North Vietnam) who could write or speak vith special poignancy about the event. Thus, the regroupees became a strategic propaganda as well as personnel resource for the DRV.

2. The Fatherland Front. Policy on the regroupees, and orchestration of propaganda relating to reunification 1-Tith South Vietnam, was apparently reserved to the top echelon of the Lao Dong Party. There is some evidence of the existence as early as 1957 of a branch of the Lao Dong Party Central Committee called the "Reunification Department," which had purviev over all matters relating to regroupees; the Department or Commission was surfaced at the Third party Congress, September, 1960. 122/ A prisoner talten in 1964) a regroupee from Binh Dinh Provinc e) indicated that he worked for this Department for some years prior to infiltrating in 1963) with duties of supervising civilian cadres. He described the Department's having a personnel management system) with formal records land reports, education programs for cadres and their children; he also stated that the Committee decided which regroupees would be ordered South. 123/ The head of the Reunification Department of the Lao Dong Party possibly' since 1957, and at least since 1960, was Nguyen Van Vinh, an NVA Major General, a Deputy Chief of Staff of the NVA, a Vice Minister of Defense and a member of the Party Central Committee. Rh