First Indochina War - War Crimes & Re-education Camps

War Crimes & Re-education Camps

• The Boudarel Affair. Georges Boudarel was a French communist militant who used brainwashing and torture against French Union POWs in Việt Minh reeducation camps. The French national association of POWs brought Boudarel to court for a war crime charge. Most of the French Union prisoners died in the Việt Minh camps and many POWs from the Vietnamese National Army were missing.

• Passage to Freedom was a Franco-American operation to evacuate refugees. Loyal Indochinese evacuated to metropolitan France were kept in detention camps.

• In 1957, the French Chief of Staff with Raoul Salan would use the POWs experience with the Viet Minh reeducation camps to create two "Instruction Center for Pacification and Counter-Insurgency" (Centre d'Instruction à la Pacification et à la Contre-Guérilla aka CIPCG) and train thousands of officers during the Algerian War.