Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Wed, 9 Sep 1992 17:42:40 -0400
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: VN hijacker was former southern fighter pilot

09/09

Vietnam hijacker was former southern fighter pilot

    By Kathleen Callo
    HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, Sept 9, Reuter - A hijacker who parachuted from a
Vietnam Airlines plane over Ho Chi Minh City last Friday was a former south
Vietnamese fighter pilot who made a spectacular escape from a re-education camp.
    Residents of the city, who asked not to be identified, said Ly Tong won hero
status among anti-communist Vietnamese in the United States after escaping from
a re-education camp in Vietnam in 1980.
    He embarked on an extraordinary 2,500 km (1,600 mile) journey across
Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia before being resettled in the United States.
    Tong, now a naturalised U.S. citizen, forced a Vietnam Airlines plane to fly
low on Friday as he dropped anti-government leaflets, then parachuted out.
    The leaflets, typed in Vietnamese, said the collapse of the Soviet Union and
communist eastern Europe had sounded the death knell for Hanoi's communists.
    "Only the Vietnamese communists, while in their last breath, are still
stubbornly trying, with a governing clique, old, out of date, to go against the
tide of progress of humankind," the leaflets said.
    Vietnamese officials said on Saturday they would prosecute Tong, who was
captured by security forces a couple of hours after landing in a field in Nha Be
district, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City.
    "He (Tong) was a little bit mentally unstable...he has been considered a
kind of eccentric national hero by the overseas Vietnamese," one intellectual
said, requesting anonymity.
    Journalist Barry Wain described the journey of Ly Van Tong -- residents here
say it was the same man -- in a February 1983 article in the Asian Wall Street
Journal.
    Wain wrote that after his escape from the re-education camp Tong hiked,
cycled, hitchhiked, travelled by train and bus, and swam his way from Vietnam to
Singapore, where he was granted resettlement in the United States.
    During the remarkable 17-month trip, he escaped from three prisons, worked
as a fisherman and went sightseeing as a tourist. Finally he swam across the
Johore Strait from Malaysia to Singapore and took a taxi, still wet, to the U.S.
embassy.
    Tong, 44, described himself as the "commander of the uprising forces" in the
leaflets he dropped from the Airbus 300 on Friday. The leaflets urged Vietnamese
to demonstrate, hold strikes, occupy radio and television stations, and persuade
soldiers to defect.
    It called on Vietnamese to "coordinate between the overseas and the internal
forces in a general uprising to overthrow the cruel, inhuman Hanoi regime and to
build an independent, free and prosperous Vietnam."
    Residents who knew of his case said Tong had planned to carry out the
hijacking on September 2, Vietnam's national day marking the declaration of
independence by Ho Chi Minh in 1945 from occupying Japanese forces and French
colonial rulers.
    Intellectuals in Ho Chi Minh City said the hijacking might prompt
authorities to re-tighten security.
    Senior Communist Party officials in Hanoi told Reuters this week that there
were 231 illegal, anti-government groups -- some with only two or three members
-- now operating in Vietnam, and that some had overseas connections.
    They said the number of such groups had increased after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and communism in eastern Europe.
    For several days before the hijacking, official newspapers ran
strongly-worded editorials warning of "hostile forces" trying to sabotage the
Vietnamese government and the Communist Party.
    The senior party officials later said the editorials were the result of a
party decision to warn the public more openly than in the past about perceived
security threats.
    Vietnam has an extensive police and security system that keeps close watch
on locals and foreigners. But restrictions on people's movements and the ability
to gather privately have been significally eased in recent years.
    After launching free-market reforms in the mid-1980s encouraging foreign
investment, the government and party have made it easier for many of the
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled after the war ended in 1975 to
return.
    "The Vietnamese government has been very flexible, very liberal in recent
years," said one intellectual in Ho Chi Minh City.
    "I've seen a lot of people who would be considered undesirables, like senior
officials of former south Vietnamese political parties, coming back to visit
from the U.S."
    The intellectual said he now expected security to be tightened once more.
    But one senior party official, asked if Vietnam might start re-closing its
door to the outside world, said: "We can't. That would be suicide."
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