Dear
friends,
The
Vietnamese Community in Australia
organized a mass protest today in commemoration of April 30, 1975 by going to
the Vietnam Embassy, then to the Thai Embassy, to seek the release of
Vietnamese American Ly Tong, who was a pilot in the Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam's Black Eagle squadron.
In April
1975, the last days before the fall of Saigon when the USA did not honor its promise to help South Vietnam
under attack, Ly Tong was shot down by a Soviet anti-aircraft rocket while he
was valiently flying an A-37 in combat. He was imprisoned in a
concentration prison camp in North Vietnam
(called a "re-education" camp) and escaped through Cambodia to Thailand,
then to Singapore
where he successfully petitioned the U.S. Embassy for political asylum.
In becoming
a Vietnamese American he earned a Master's Degree at the University of New Orleans.
In 1984, he received a letter from President Ronald Reagan for his
heroic escape for freedom.
In 1992, Ly
Tong hijacked a Vietnamese Airlines airliner and forced the pilot to fly
over Saigon, whereupon he dropped
anticommunist leaflets. Ly Tong then parachuted from the plane (no
passengers or crew were endangered) whereupon he was captured by Vietnamese
soldiers and sent to prison once again.
He was
released in an amnesty program in 1998, and returned to the U.S.
In January,
2000 he rented a small plane in Florida and
flew over Havana,
dropping thousands of leaflets encouraging Cubans to overthrow the Communist
dictatorship of Fidel Castro. He was greeted by a parade of Cuban
Americans in Florida
after this successful event, but his pilot's license was suspended.
In
November, 2000, Ly Tong hijacked a plane in Thailand,
once again dropping leaflets over Saigon and
not harming anyone. He was jailed in Thailand,
who have now instituted proceedings to extradite him to Vietnam on May
17, 2006. He began a hunger strike in the Thai prison at Raydong on March
28, 2006.
Ly Tong
managed to get a note to the Vietnamese Diaspora via a prison guard with the
information that he was to extradited and that the Thailand government had agreed on
the charge of "violating Vietnamese air space."
This
resulted in the protest by 2500 people of the Vietnamese community in
Australia today, April 30,
2006, seeking prison transfer for Ly Tong to the USA rather than trial and imprisonment in Vietnam.
Background
material in English is gathered from the following website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ly_Tong
There are links on Wikipedia (which is an Internet phenomenon of free and
immediate publishing) to Vietnamese language sites and articles about Ly Tong.
Thank you
to Nguyen Chi Thien, the poet, who is in Canberra
speaking and meeting with the Vietnamese community and is pictured in this
photograph.
Thank you,
Vietnamese community in Australia
for transmitting the photograph for Viet-Am Review.
Jean Libby, editor
