Nguyen Truong Chinh proudly holds up intricately crafted animals, flowers and hearts — secret gifts made from plastic bags by a son on Vietnam’s death row.
The palm-sized creations that his son and other inmates have furtively made and smuggled out of their solitary cells offer a rare glimpse of prison life in Vietnam, believed to be one of the world’s leading executioners.
They are also an emotional lifeline for desperate parents fighting to free the children that they say have been wrongly convicted.
Photo: AFP
“Any time we receive the gifts from my son I feel like he’s here with me, like he’s come back home,” Chinh said, clenching his jaw to hold back tears.
His 35-year-old son, Nguyen Van Chuong, convicted of murdering a police officer a decade ago, is one of a handful of prisoners known to have made the artwork that is officially banned on death row.
The families suspect that they made the pieces with discarded plastic bags passed on by fellow prisoners, shredded and woven into figurines.
They were once smuggled out by prisoners released after serving their terms, but relatives stopped receiving them a few years ago, leading Chinh and other parents to fear that guards have cracked down on the forbidden prison pastime.
They are too scared to ask about the practice during brief monthly visits closely monitored by prison staff.
However, Chinh said that the art still drives his decade-long fight to free his son, who he insists was nowhere near the scene of the crime that he was convicted of.
“When I see the animals, I know somehow that my son is stable enough to create these things, that he is mentally strong,” said Chinh, sitting with a bag full of documents on his son’s case.
“They motivate our fight for justice,” he added.
Little is known about Vietnam’s prison system, but in a report last year, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security said that 429 people were executed from August 2013 to June 2016.
That is an average of 147 per year — putting Vietnam among the world’s top executioners along with China and Iran. Details about prison conditions are scarce and media access heavily restricted.
However, the law requires death row inmates to be held in solitary confinement and monitored around the clock. Prisoners deemed “dangerous” have one foot shackled for most of the day, released only for 15 minutes to bathe inside their cell, where they also eat and use the toilet.
“In many cases, acts of torture, coupled with the denial of medical care, have resulted in deaths in custody that are almost never investigated by the authorities,” Andrea Giorgetta from International Federation for Human Rights told reporters.
The ministry’s report said that 36 death row inmates died behind bars between 2011 and 2016, without saying how.
In letters to his family, Chuong said that he was tortured in custody: hung upside down and naked with a dirty sock in his mouth and beaten during interrogation.
Police electrocuted his genitals and prodded him with needles until he confessed under duress, he wrote.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected allegations of torture as “false information” in a statement and said it does not do anything to harm the “honor and dignity” of inmates.
Relatives of the death row artists say that their work offers a necessary diversion from constant fear of execution. Prisoners are given little notice before their execution, which since 2010 has been carried out by lethal injection.
Before then, inmates were awakened before dawn, given a final meal and a cigarette, tied to a post and shot by five officers, with one final “humane shot” to the head, a report released by the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights in 2016 said.
Today, locally manufactured drugs are used to kill prisoners, although advocates complained of inhumane deaths after a man reportedly took two hours to die in 2011.
It is an unimaginable end for the families who refuse to give up hope that their sons will one day be freed.
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