Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991 TAG: 9103240074
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
"Are you the Georges Boudarel who ruthlessly ran Camp Number 122?" asked Jean-Jacques Beucler, the former chief of the Veterans Affairs Office, who was held prisoner by the Vietminh in the 1950s. "The audience should know what an ignoble man it is dealing with. You have blood on your hands."
Beucler was mistaken about the camp's identification number. But Georges Boudarel did not deny the basic accusation: in 1953 and 1954, he admitted, he had served as political director of Camp 113 in Mien Nguoc, North Vietnam, responsible for the Communist indoctrination of French prisoners.
Mien Nguoc, which means "the country of contrary waters," seems a strangely appropriate name, for Beucler's very public denunciation has torn open 40-year-old divisions and debates surrounding France's involvement in Vietnam.
It has made allies of Boudarel's former prisoners and the extreme right-wing National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Leftist intellectuals are supporting the one-time chief brainwasher in a Communist re-education camp, who has since renounced his Stalinist past and become one of France's most valued experts on Vietnam.
None of the survivors accuse Boudarel of physically torturing them. As political director, they said, he brainwashed hungry, overworked prisoners and schooled them in Marxist ways of self-criticism, confession and denouncing fellow prisoners. The prisoners' enthusiasm for publicly denouncing their colonialist past and embracing Marxism determined their chances of being released from the camps where disease and malnutrition were rampant.
"He is there, stopped before us, tall, slender and slightly stooped, his eyes surveying the entire brigade as if he was trying to distinguish the weak ones, those who could be influenced," Claude Bayle, a survivor of Camp 113, recalls in his soon-to-be-published memoirs. "Here liberation is not given, it is earned," Bayle quoted Georges Boudarel as saying.
In his public statements so far, Boudarel has apologized for his Stalinist past, but not for deserting over to the Vietminh side in 1950.
He also admitted regrets for refusing to distribute a parachute drop of medicine from the Red Cross and for sending a Frenchman about to be liberated back to certain death at Camp 113 for having stolen an egg on the long march to the French post.
When he first pointed the finger at the 64-year-old professor, Beucler said his only goal was to satisfy a pledge to a dead friend that he would unmask Boudarel, and to bring out the unrecognized suffering of the French soldiers and officers in Indochina, widely renounced during their captivity by the post-World War II anti-colonial mood back in France.
Last Wednesday, 18 of his former prisoners at Camp 113 brought suit for crimes against humanity.
by CNB