News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci
(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Vietnam Refugee Office Closed

Date: December 21, 1998

After 25 years of operation, the UN High Commission for Refugees will close its southern, Saigon or now, Ho Chi Minh City office.

After an expenditure of over $100 million US dollars and over 1 million refugees either relocated or returned, they consider their mission a success. A smaller Hanoi office will be opened to help foster refugee law.

We cannot forget that through the refugee center and camps, countless witnesses to American POW-MIA captures, deaths, and captivity, passed through. Yet US officials failed to interview even one of these people. With perhaps thousands of witnesses massed, the US went blissfully on its way and ignored the gold-mine that sat, waiting, in the camps. Eventually scattering to the winds as refugees were allowed to emigrate or were returned to the hostility of Communist Vietnam. It was only, ONLY, when the parents of Nicholas Brooks... family members George and Gladys Brooks, upon speaking with a young refugee who had information on US POWs AFTER 1973, that the knowledge of US failure to interview refugees became glaringly obvious. The US continued to ignore this group of witnesses, and it was an announcement by the families that refugees had information but were not being interviewed that finally forced the USG into action.

Grudingly.

Another page is turned on the history of Vietnam and its aftermath. As they close the doors of the refugee office, we can only wonder what secrets passed through those doors... never uttered, never known.