Shooting Stirs New Animosity in Viet Emigres

FRESNO —  Like many Vietnamese refugees who speak of peace with Hanoi, Doan Van Toai had become a target of mounting wrath among those in immigrant Vietnamese communities who condemn such talk as nothing short of high treason.

Recently, Toai became the target of much more than threats. Two Asian men gunned down the internationally known writer in broad daylight as he walked on a busy residential street two blocks from his Fresno home.

Toai survived the shooting. While no clear motive has been established, the incident revived longstanding, unresolved animosities and raised again the specter of organized political violence that in the recent past has plagued Vietnamese communities, mostly in California.

A number of arsons, beatings and killings in the 1980s have been attributed to clandestine right-wing groups bent on “punishing” Vietnamese who show sympathy toward the Communist regime of Hanoi.

Many questions continue to surround Toai’s shooting. Does it signal a return of political violence? Was it one more random, sporadic outburst in a long history of tensions that still divide the emigre Vietnamese community? Or, could it have been a simple, private dispute?

Echoes Sentiment

“The shooting happened because too many anti-Communists do not like his views,” declared Hoang An, editor of a Fresno-based Vietnamese newspaper, But Thep (Steel Pen), echoing a sentiment expressed both by Toai’s supporters and his enemies.

The FBI, which entered the case immediately, and the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department emphasize, however, that they are not ruling out other motives for the Aug. 16 shooting.

Organized crime, extortion rings and armed robberies have increasingly plagued Southeast Asian neighborhoods, and a full range of nonpolitical motives--including possible personal or business disputes--are being investigated, authorities said. Toai’s wife had been seeking a divorce, and detectives have questioned her at length.

Regardless of how the Toai shooting is eventually resolved, the passion that has welled up around it dramatizes deep divisions among Vietnamese immigrants. Many applauded the attempted murder; others were outraged. Nearly 15 years after the fall of Saigon to the Communists, many Vietnamese here are still fighting the war. And now, as Washington tentatively considers opening diplomatic relations with Hanoi, bitter rage may be escalating.

Vietnamese communities have been polarized, especially by the increased ease with which many ex-patriots have recently traveled to Hanoi, sent money and goods back, or arranged business dealings, said Matthew Chanoff, program director of the Institute for Democracy in Vietnam, which Toai heads.

“Some go back, others say they’ll never go back and condemn those that do,” Chanoff said in a telephone interview from Washington. “People from the former Saigon regime are quite upset about” the possibility that the United States and Vietnam could normalize relations--a development that would further isolate the extreme anti-Communist factions of America’s immigrant communities.

Toai has long advocated dialogue with Hanoi as a way to press for political and economic reform in Vietnam. This view, and the fact that he sympathized with the North Vietnamese during the war, caused many to label him a Communist, even though he was jailed by Vietnam’s Communists and his two books are considered anti-Communist. Toai’s political past, as he has described it, included sympathy with the Communists during the war years; assisting the new regime on a finance committee after the fall of the Saigon government; 28 months in a Communist prison because of objections he raised to confiscation of private property, and, finally, his immigration to the United States in late 1977. Vietnam granted him a visa because of his French-born wife, Toai said in a 1979 interview with The Times.

Death Threats Intensify

Toai has said he began receiving death threats years ago, but they intensified last fall, associates said, when he organized a conference in Washington on the future of U.S.-Vietnamese relations, a forum that his critics perceived as pro-normalization.

During the conference, Chanoff recalled, about 20 Vietnamese men and women stood up in the middle of the audience and took off their coats, exposing shirts with slogans that read, in English and Vietnamese: “Trust Hanoi, never!”

Later, Toai had to be spirited out a back door before the program ended to avoid angry, belligerent crowds outside, Chanoff said.

Outrage at Toai grew, his associates say, as he was named “public enemy No. 1” by a group of former Saigon government officials, and after a Vietnamese community news agency incorrectly translated one of Toai’s editorials, making it sound as though he opposed resettling political prisoners in the United States.

If Toai’s shooting turns out to be a political assassination attempt, the incident would join a list of more than a dozen violent acts since 1980 against Vietnamese activists and journalists who espoused controversial viewpoints. An arson fire in 1987 killed Garden Grove publisher Tap Van Pham. In 1986, a former Saigon housing official, Tran Khanh Van, was shot in Orange County’s Little Saigon. Novelist Long Vu suffered partial paralysis after a severe beating in Westminster last year. Van and Vu had advocated reestablishing links with Vietnam; Pham had published ads from companies believed to be dealing with Hanoi.

More recently, businessmen and others who have traveled to Vietnam have been threatened, including a restaurateur in Chicago whose home was firebombed in April.

“There are similarities that cannot be denied, but we are not going to declare it (a political or terrorist) act, or say that that is probably what happened,” said George Vinson, agent in charge of the FBI office in Fresno.

“In these emigre communities, there is so much factionalism and dispute, it’s tough to say” what the motives really are, Vinson said. “We are trying to make sense of it.”

Sheriff’s Department detectives also are trying to find out more about how Toai earns a living. He lists his occupation as gardener and resides in a fashionable area of Fresno. His family in Vietnam had been part of the educated elite--many of whom fled, taking along much of their wealth--and he is also paid speaking fees and has sold two books.

Toai was in critical but stable condition Saturday and is expected to recover. Shot twice in the back and once in the mouth, he has not been able to talk to investigators.

Toai was as hated in some circles as he was admired in others. Supporters abound among Washington politicians, while working-class Vietnamese and many Vietnamese newspapers view him as a traitor.

Imprisonment, Torture

“The man I worked with suffered from the ravages of the North Vietnamese,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said, referring to Toai’s imprisonment and torture in a Vietnamese reeducation camp, which Toai recounted in his book, “The Vietnamese Gulag.”

Toai had met congressional leaders such as McCain, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) and others in periodic trips to the nation’s capital, where he lobbied for the release of prisoners from reeducation camps and immigration of Amerasian children to the United States.

McCain, himself a Vietnam POW for five years who serves as an honorary chairman for Toai’s magazine, Vietnam Update, described Toai as a well-educated and articulate writer who felt betrayed by the North Vietnamese as they broke wartime promises of democracy.

The owner of a small restaurant in Fresno, who to this day vividly recalls from 12 years ago every detail of her 12-day voyage in a tiny boat to escape Vietnam, proclaimed last week that “99% of the people are happy” that Toai was shot. “Only two (gunmen) went (after him), but everybody wanted to kill him,” she said.

Joining in similar sentiments, the manager of a convenience store, a former South Vietnamese soldier, said coexistence with the Communist regime of Hanoi cannot be permitted. The fervor of his comments underscored just how close-at-heart the issue continues to be held.

‘We Want to Win the War’

“We hope the Communists can be beaten off so we can get the country back,” he said. “We don’t want to live with the Communists; we want to win the war.”

For this man, who like many who spoke out against Toai did not want his name published, Toai was a student who led anti-war protests and never risked his life; this refugee and his like-minded friends were soldiers who felt that people like Toai undermined the war effort.

The issue that is reviving tensions the most now is the emerging prospect of renewed ties with Vietnam. The United States has conditioned rapprochement on withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia by the target date of Sept. 25; continued cooperation on POW/MIA issues, and release of several thousand reeducation camp prisoners, among other requirements.

A State Department official specializing in Far Eastern affairs said Washington and Hanoi, which have already exchanged humanitarian and medical delegations, will continue to move closer if the conditions are met. Seven American delegations have gone to Vietnam in just the last year.

“We know that the (U.S. Vietnamese) right-wing element understands things in only black and white . . . but those concerns are for individual congressmen with these people in their districts, and not a concern for the art and practice of foreign policy,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Reason for Grudge

McCain said that he, “more than anyone,” has a reason to hold a grudge against the North Vietnamese. “But we have to move forward when we need to do so, and some improvement of relations with Vietnam would help with the POW-MIA and refugee issue,” he said.

In the wake of Toai’s shooting, the issue is so sensitive that Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), whose district includes about 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, said he did not wish to comment on normalization for fear it might fan emotional flames.

“I just came from a talk with older Vietnamese people. You have to understand that returning to Vietnam still remains a dream for them. When I spoke, I realized how they would love to be sitting in the shade or sun in their beautiful country. We’re helping them understand. . . . Talk of normalization right now, even with some of the most peaceful, can cause a lot of heated emotion,” Edwards said.

In Orange and Los Angeles counties, where about 200,000 exiles account for the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, feelings run even more deeply.

For 40-year-old Chuyen V. Nguyen, who flew South Vietnamese Skyraiders against the Viet Cong, it is too soon to heal the wounds.

“As long as the regime is suppressing people in reeducation camps with an iron will, people like me in the Vietnamese community abroad will not give up our fight,” said Nguyen, who fled Vietnam with his wife and child in 1975.

There are other right-wing voices who are more militant than Nguyen. They believe that for political or monetary reasons, some Vietnamese--like Toai--have wrongly advocated diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

The Vietnamese refugees who have resettled in the United States have a significant amount of pride, “a face-saving thing,” when it comes to talks between the United States and Vietnam, said Douglas Pike, Indochina Studies director at UC Berkeley.

“It’s the same as the Irish, they’re still fighting the war in San Francisco as well as Belfast,” Pike said. “ . . . The Irish still talk about things that occurred in the 17th Century.”

Anh Tam, publisher of the Fresno-based newspaper Anhsang Dan Toc, tried to use his editorial pages to clear Toai of the accusations that he was a Communist. In an interview in his small office, he lamented the violence that permeates the Vietnamese refugee community.

“They think you have to push Communists down with guns. That’s wrong. We have to talk to them, make the Communists change,” Tam, 54, said. “Right now, they don’t understand. They will, in time.”

Tracy Wilkinson reported from Fresno and Los Angeles. David Reyes reported from Orange County.