April 2000

Summary of news for the entire month.
For recent and daily news, please go to: InterNetwork

00 APR 00: 2,029 Americans remain 'officially' unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War: ARMY: 640 (VN-10, VS-488; LA-107; CB-35); NAVY: 412 (VN-281, VS-92; LA-28; CB-3; CH/OW-8); USMC: 262 (VN-24, VS-203; LA-21; CB-14); USAF: 675 (VN-233; VS-165; LA-260; CB-17); and COAST GUARD: 1 (VS-1). 39 civilians remain unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War: VS-22, LA-12, and CB-5. 554 Americans have been accounted-for post 1973: VN-402, LA-143, CB-7, and CH-2. Persian Gulf War - unsatisfactory accounting. Korean War - 8,139 remain unaccounted-for, 42 possible remains returned, 4 identifications. World War II - Over 78,000 remain unaccounted-for.

02 APR 00: Norton Publishing Company and Ms Monica Jensen-Stevenson have settled the lawsuit for libel brought by F. Harold Kushner, MD, COL (Ret.) USA. Ms Jensen-Stevenson, the author of Spite-House, published by Norton, had asserted in her book that Dr. Kushner, while a POW in South Vietnam had unnecessarily removed a healthy toenail and inflicted pain on Robert Garwood, a convicted collaborator, and had hoarded medicine stolen by Garwood, and had not dispensed it to the sickest prisoners. Details of the settlement released by Dr. Kushner are that Norton and Ms Jensen-Stevenson will pay to Dr. Kushner the sum of $100,000 and publish a statement in a national newspaper (NY Times, Dec 22, '99) as well as the Daytona Beach Morning Journal (Dec 24, '99). The essence of the statement signed by Ms Jensen-Stevenson is that her only source for the assertions in question was Robert Garwood, that she could not corroborate those assertions by interviews with other survivors, that she meant no injury or harm to Dr Kushner. She noted that the other prisoners are well aware of what happened and will testify in Dr Kushner's behalf if necessary. Dr Kushner stated that he would donate his award to a veterans' charity. "This was not about money," he said; "this was about truth." He continued, "I feel vindicated now, and more importantly, the ten Americans who died in my arms in the jungle are vindicated. We promised them justice."

03 APR 00: Dismissing decades of accumulated evidence in one of the most prominent high-priority POW/MIA cases from the Korean War, the chief of the Pentagon's office for POW/MIA affairs has decided that the U.S. government has no proof that Army Cpl. Roger Dumas of Connecticut "was ever captured and held prisoner." Robert L. Jones, deputy assistant secretary of defense for missing personnel affairs, issued his surprising finding in a Feb. 23 letter to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Co), who forwarded it with a cover letter concurring in the decision to Robert Dumas, of Canterbury, Conn., a brother of the missing soldier and a longtime activist in the POW/MIA movement. "This is unbelievable and outrageous," said Robert Dumas. In his letter, Jones wrote that, despite a post-war determination by the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission and a 1986 judgment by a federal court ordering Roger Dumas' status changed from missing-in-action to prisoner-of-war, "neither my agency nor any other Government agency has uncovered evidence, other than that which was solicited by Corporal Dumas' family, to indicate that he was ever captured and held prisoner by communist forces during the Korean War." "If he (Jones) thinks there's no evidence," said Dumas, "he must not read his own department's reports."

04 APR 00: Even though it was hot, damp and dirty in the village of Don Phu, Vietnam, the American military men and women who volunteered to go there said they loved it because they were doing something worthwhile. About 20 young service members traveled to Southeast Asia to help honor America's pledge to bring home its fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen. Every bucket of mud that passed hand to hand at the evacuation site, about 20 miles southwest of Hanoi, revealed a bit more about the fate of a missing U.S. pilot. The mission itself is very noble. "I think coming out here to try to find the remains of any of our missing soldiers is awesome." While the mission is "sad," Trout said, "I think that's what adds to it -- we know we're doing this for a good cause. We're trying to bring closure to this. We know that it's very important for the families back in the United States." Many of those who volunteered were not yet born when U.S. combat troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. Some have fathers who served there.

05 APR 00: The U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, has a worldwide mission ranging from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the deserts of the Middle East and the glaciers of Tibet. About 170 military and civilian personnel staff the unit known as CILHI, which is a field-operating element of the Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operations Center, U.S. Army Personnel Command. Their primary mission is to search for, recover and identify remains of service members, certain civilian personnel and allied personnel unaccounted for from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and other conflicts and contingencies. Many of CILHIs recent efforts have focused on the former battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Since 1992, CILHI has conducted extensive joint recovery operations in Southeast Asia under the operational control of Joint Task Force Full Accounting, mandated by Congress to achieve the fullest possible accounting of service members whose remains were not recovered following the Vietnam War. Missions to Vietnam and Laos typically take place five times a year, with six teams deploying to Vietnam and three or four teams deploying to Laos. Two teams deploy to Cambodia once a year. About 2,100 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War.

06 APR 00: JTF-FA Commander BG Harry Axson, USA, held meetings in Da Nang, Vietnam, April 5-6th, to discuss with Vietnamese officials possible solutions to problems that arise in the POW/MIA accounting effort. Since the Vietnamese have demonstrated increased willingness to conduct unilateral actions, the US is seeking ways to make the investigations and recovery process more effective and efficient. Representatives accompanied General Axson from CILHI, DIAs Stony Beach and Defense POW/MIA Office.

07 APR 00: A newly appointed UN coordinator on Thursday told Kuwaiti relatives of some 600 people missing since the 1990-91 Gulf crisis that the world body should send experts to search for them. "That is a legitimate demand and the only thing is the stubbornness of the Iraqis, they do not want to see anyone now in their territories...But that is, I think, temporary," said Yuri Vorontsov, a retired Russian diplomat and U.N. coordinator for missing Kuwaitis. 605 people never returned. Of these, 570 were Kuwaitis and 35 were Indian, Bahraini, Omani, Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian and Saudi residents of Kuwait. Since the end of the war, Iraq submitted incomplete preliminary information on 126 of the 605 cases. They returned one set of remains to Kuwait, and one live missing person was found and returned.

09 APR 00: DASD Bob Jones and US-Russia Joint Commission Executive Secretary Norm Kass will travel to Russia to visit archival repositories and hold discussions. The reported objective is to gain greater access by US specialists to important military archives. The US is also seeking access to former Soviet officials who would likely have knowledge regarding Vietnam War losses.

10 APR 00: Thousands of relatives welcomed home Sunday about 500 Iraqi prisoners of war held more than a decade by Iran. Soldiers on both sides of the border clapped and waved banners as the Iraqi prisoners, weary and battered, walked unsteadily before being hugged by relatives, some of whom had spent two nights in the desert waiting for the release. Iraq and Iran have so far repatriated nearly 100,000 POWs from the 1980-1988 war between the two nations. Both sides accuse the other of giving false reports on how many prisoners are still being held. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which arranged the latest repatriation, will not discuss details. A group of former POWs is pushing the caretakers of America's pastime to add prisoners from the Korean War and World War II to the list of guests invited to any regular-season major league baseball game free of charge. "It's not really the money, it's the gesture," said Bart Billings of La Costa, who founded the annual POW conferences in Andersonville, GA, site of the National Prisoner of War Museum. "But if you look at it strictly as a business decision, it's a tremendous opportunity," he said. "These people are going to be coming to games with family and friends. They're going to buy tickets, eat popcorn and everything else." So far, Major League executives have not exactly warmed to the idea. They told Billings they were ill equipped to deal with the administrative chores of running such a program. But the San Diego Padres have stepped to the plate ahead of their counterparts. Beginning with Military Opening Day, the team will open its gates free to any former prisoner of war. "It's because of the leadership of the owners," said Jack Ensch, military marketing director for the Padres and himself a former POW. "They realize the importance of what the veterans have contributed to this country."

12 APR 00: Iran has completed the repatriation of 1,999 prisoners captured during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, Red Cross and Iraqi officials said on Wednesday. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which supervised the releases over the past few days, said it was the biggest repatriation of Iraqi POWs since 1998 when more than 5,000 were freed. "Between 8 and 11 April, some 1,999 Iraqi prisoners were released," Beat Schweitzer, the ICRC representative in Iraq, told Reuters. "The ICRC believes that this important event by Iran would speed up the process of finding answers for other open questions (on others missing in action)," Schweitzer said.

13 APR 00: Memorial Day services will be held at the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery. This year, like many others in the past, the President of the United States is scheduled to appear. The President will be laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and then will address the nation in the Amphitheater. These services are open to the public and are tentatively scheduled to begin at 1000 hours on Memorial Day. Should you plan on attending, please plan on arriving early (the Cemetery opens to the public at 0800 hours) since seating in the Amphitheater is limited and due to the additional security surrounding the President's visit. If you can't attend, please stop for a moment and remember all of those heroes who sacrifices so much for the freedoms that we all enjoy today.

14 APR 00: An Indian soldier who spent 25 years in jail in Pakistan for what he said was an accidental border crossing returned on Friday to an emotional homecoming at New Delhi airport. "I don't know whether I am dreaming. I don't know how to express my joy to be in my motherland," an ecstatic Roop Lal told Reuters at the airport. Pakistani authorities arrested Roop Lal in November 1974 on charges of spying. News reports say that Pakistan's Chief Executive, General Pervez Musharraf, allowed the release of Roop Lal as a goodwill gesture.

17 APR 00: Armenia handed over two Azeri prisoners of war, captured in fighting over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the National Security Ministry said. According to the local branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which mediated the release, Armenia is holding another 11 Azeris. Azerbaijan, it says, has freed all Armenian prisoners. But Azeri National Security Ministry spokesman Araz Gurbanov said 783 Azeris -- including women, children and elderly people -- were still being held. After war broke out between the two former Soviet states in 1988, when Karabakh's ethnic Armenian majority broke away from Azerbaijan's rule, 5,096 Azeris went missing, Gurbanov said. Armenia around 100 Armenians remain in detention in Azerbaijan. 18 APR 00: Iran said on Sunday that Iraq was still holding around 3,000 Iranian prisoners from the 1980-88 war between the two countries. "Iranian prisoners still remaining in Iraq are around 3,000," General Abdollah Najafi, chairman of Iran's prisoners of war committee, told reporters. "In our dealings with (Iraqi) POWs, Islamic and humanitarian principles were observed over and above the Geneva Conventions," he said. He said some 9,000 Iraqi POWs had refused to return to Iraq and had settled in different parts of Iran. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said last week that more than 4,600 Iraqis captured by Iran during the war were unwilling to return home. Beat Schweizer, the ICRC representative in Iraq, told Reuters some Iraqi POWs had managed to travel outside Iran but had not returned to Iraq. The fate of the POWs remains an irritant to relations between Iran and Iraq nearly 12 years after the end of the war, which cost a million lives. Najafi said Iran had released 57,712 Iraqi prisoners since 1981, in return for 39,417 Iranians released by Iraq.

19 APR 00: Israels Supreme Court on Monday upheld the release of 13 Lebanese prisoners, but Prime Minister Ehud Barak said he was considering legislation that would overrule the court's authority and keep some of the prisoners in custody for several months. Apparently reacting to Barak's announcement, the army canceled plans to release the 13 late Tuesday morning. The court ruling gives the army a Wednesday deadline for their release. The case has pitted the government against the Supreme Court, which in recent months has outlawed tactics Israel has long used in battles against Arab guerrillas and militants. Last week, the court decided that Israel cannot hold detainees as bargaining chips for Israeli navigator Ron Arad, who was shot down and captured alive in Lebanon in 1986. That decision followed a September ruling barring security services from using force while interrogating Palestinian detainees. The court said Monday there was no legal basis to hear the Lebanese prisoner case again, rejecting a petition from a group called Terror Victims Association to convene a larger panel of judges to discuss the case.

19 APR 00: On Sept. 29, 2000, American veterans of the Korean War will meet in Seoul, South Korea, to present a gigantic display of flowers in memory of the 8,000-plus U.S. servicemen whose status remains "missing in action" nearly 50 years after hostilities ended. Floral presentations at the Korean National War Memorial will culminate weeklong activities held jointly with veterans from other nations that participated in the United Nations action. Sponsor of the event is Korea Task Force 2000, a nonprofit organization formed by Korean War survivors to honor comrades who never returned. Like most veterans organizations, Korea Task Force 2000 is impatient with the slow recovery of MIA remains. Since 1996, 12 teams in North Korea have located 42 bodies believed to be Americans. Three have been positively identified, and returned home for burial. "Only three MIA returns after four years of searching is a sign the effort is seriously flawed," Dapron claims. "A major problem is North Korean intransigence. But our government has not shown enough commitment, either.

"Documents stored in Department of Defense archives could pinpoint areas north of the 38th parallel where heavy fighting took place. These old records were scheduled for release, but President Clinton recently extended their secrecy classification for an additional 18 months. With this information available, hundreds of MIA remains might be located almost immediately. Those of us who made it back from the war feel a responsibility to call attention to the MIA situation. Our memorial service in Seoul, with its huge array of floral tributes, will help. It also gives others an opportunity to show their respect for the missing by contributing flowers for the ceremony."

20 APR 00: Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged Arab countries to keep up pressure on Iraq to account for the 605 Kuwaitis missing since Baghdad invaded the small state in 1990. The recent exchanges of Iraqi and Iranian prisoners of war "gives a beam of hope that similar developments may happen in regard to those missing in the aftermath of the Gulf War," Annan said Wednesday in a report to the Security Council. The report was Annan's first since he appointed a special coordinator on the issue, former Russian Ambassador Yuli Vorontsov, in February to try to energize efforts to account for the missing. Vorontsov visited Kuwait this month and met with families of the 605 people still missing from Iraq's seven-month occupation. Iraq has not responded to Vorontsov's requests to visit. Baghdad maintains that it has released all war prisoners, but lost track of 127 in an uprising after the war. It has withdrawn from an international committee looking into the issue, accusing Kuwait of failing to account for 1,150 missing Iraqis. Kuwait says it has received case files on only 70 Iraqis and is investigating those, even though the government does not consider itself legally responsible for Iraqis who disappeared while Kuwait was under occupation. Annan noted that Arab officials told Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "that progress in solving the issue of Kuwaiti missing persons would improve Iraq's stance in the world and, in particular, ameliorate the political climate among the Arab states."

21 APR 00: Six sets of remains believed to be those of unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen from the war in Southeast Asia are scheduled to be repatriated to the United States in a ceremony to be held at Noi Bai International Airport on April 25. A team of 112 mostly Hawaii-based military and civilian specialists who were deployed to Vietnam in February and March recovered the remains. Thirty-one cases involving potential aircraft and ground losses were investigated during the 30-day operation, and eight sites were excavated.

APR 22 00: Israel said it would investigate information in an Arab newspaper that three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon 18 years ago are buried in a neighboring Arab country. "This information certainly will be checked," Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh told Israel Radio. "There isn't a stone left unturned in the difficult, and I would say tragic, struggle to find out what became of our missing in action," he said.

25 APR 00: Six sets of remains believed to be those of unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen from the war in Southeast Asia were repatriated to the United States in a ceremony at Hanoi's Noi Bai International Airport. Since 1973, 555 American service members, formerly listed as unaccounted-for, have been recovered, identified and returned to their families. There are currently 2,028 Americans still unaccounted-for from the war in Southeast Asia, 1,518 in Vietnam. The repatriation ceremony is a solemn ceremony in which remains are signed over from the Vietnamese Government to the Commander of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting's Detachment 2. The remains are then ceremoniously placed into transfer cases by an honor guard consisting of personnel from all four U.S. military services. The cases are draped with a U.S. Flag before being loaded onto an Air Force strategic aircraft for the long trip back to the United States. The remains will be flown from Hanoi to Andersen AFB, Guam, where another repatriation ceremony will be held to signify their return to U.S. soil. Upon arriving at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, the remains will receive honors and be transported to the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory-Hawaii for forensic identification analysis.

27 APR 00: A team of 99 mostly Hawaii-based U.S. military specialists leave for Vietnam, with hopes of recovering remains that may lead to the identification of American service members listed as missing in action since the war in Southeast Asia. Members from Joint Task Force-Full Accounting at Camp Smith and the U.S. Army's Central Identification Lab at Hickam Air Force Base will join technical representatives from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to begin joint investigations and remains recovery operations in 17 Vietnamese provinces and cities. Forty-nine cases involving aircraft and ground losses are scheduled for investigation during the 30-day operation. There are six primary excavation sites and nine alternate locations. The 99-team members are comprised of 49 U.S. Army, 30 Air Force, 8 Navy, 4 Marines, and 8 Department of Defense civilians.

27 APR 00: Scott O'Grady's F-16 Found. American military officials confirmed Friday that wreckage found in northwestern Bosnia is from the F-16 piloted by U.S. Air Force Capt. Scott O'Grady when he was shot down on June 2, 1995. Six days after O'Grady was shot down, U.S. Marines, braving Serbian missiles and rebel guns, flew helicopters into hostile territory and rescued the pilot who had remained in hiding after being shot down.

Members of a de-mining team had recently reported the location of scattered wreckage of a military aircraft. The wreckage was located between the towns of Prijedor and Drvar in what is now Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb half of postwar Bosnia. The crash site is densely thicketed and in a mountainous area of known and suspected mine hazards. A survey team conducted a thorough search of the area, discovering the main impact point and many pieces of the aircraft spread over a wide area. They found several man-size pieces of the wing and airframe, but most of the wreckage consisted of small metal fragments.

30 APR 00: The 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Saigon Government ending the Vietnam War is observed.

30 APR 00: REMINDER - DOD/DPMO Family Updates - 19/20 May Charleston, SC
Family Notice - A Northeast Regional Meeting is scheduled for April 29th at the Naval Education Training Center in Newport, RI. Representatives of the JTF-FA, CILHI, DPMO, AFDIL and the Service Casualty Offices will be invited to give briefings. Notices of the meeting will soon be sent to family members in Regions II and III, including NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD, WV, VA, DC, ME, NH, VT, MA, CT and RI. Veterans and other concerned citizens are also welcome.

POW-MIA Issue Update May 2000