Interviews with Doan View Hoat

And our friends abroad tried to protest against the sentence and lobbied the governments in Europe and America to intervene. And so they lowered down to 15 years in jail. And then finally in 1998, also thanks to intervention from American government and many other NGOs and governments, even United Nations, I was released with the condition that I have to leave the country to join my wife and my children in America in 1998.

Doan Viet Hoat is a writer, scholar and former longtime prisoner of conscience from Vietnam. He has been called “the Sakharov of Vietnam,” a reference to Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. Hoat protested the South Vietnamese government’s suppression of certain Buddhist religious leaders in the 1960s while still a student.

In April 1975, when North Vietnam took over South Vietnam, Hoat remained in Vietnam. He was imprisoned in 1976 when the Communist government embarked on mass arrests of South Vietnamese intellectuals.

He spent the next 12 years in a cramped cell shared with 40 other prisoners.

Upon his release, Hoat began publishing an underground magazine entitled Freedom Forum (Dien Dan Tu Do). After a few months, he was arrested and detained without trial for two years. In March 1993, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for “attempting to overthrow the people’s government.” Throughout his imprisonment, Hoat continued to issue statements on democracy and to offer criticisms of the regime that were smuggled out of prison. He was then sent to a labor camp in a remote part of the country where he spent four and a half years in solitary confinement.

In 1998, after intense international pressure, Hoat was released and sent into exile. He now lives in the United States and continues his activities to promote human rights and democratic reforms in Vietnam.