Nguyen Van Lem
Encyclopedia
Summary execution
A summary execution is a variety of execution in which a person is killed on the spot without trial or after a show trial. Summary executions have been practiced by the police, military, and paramilitary organizations and are associated with guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, terrorism, and...
in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. The execution was captured on film by photojournalist
Photojournalism
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
Eddie Adams
Eddie Adams (photographer)
Eddie Adams was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and his coverage of 13 wars.-Combat photographer:...
, and the momentous image became a symbol of the inhumanity of war. The execution was explained at the time as being the consequence of Lém's suspected guerrilla
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
activity and war crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...
s, and otherwise due to a general "wartime mentality."
Biography
On the second day of Tet, amid fierce street fighting, Lém was captured and brought to Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc LoanNguyen Ngoc Loan
General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was the Republic of Vietnam's Chief of National Police. Nguyễn gained international attention when he executed handcuffed prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong soldier, on February 1, 1968 in front of Vo Suu, an NBC cameraman, and Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer...
, then Chief of the Republic of Vietnam National Police. Using his personal sidearm, General Loan summarily executed Lém in front of AP
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
photographer Eddie Adams
Eddie Adams (photographer)
Eddie Adams was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photographer and photojournalist noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and his coverage of 13 wars.-Combat photographer:...
and NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
television cameraman Vo Suu. The photograph and footage were broadcast worldwide, galvanizing the anti-war
Anti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
movement; Adams won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
for his photograph.
South Vietnamese sources said that Lém commanded a Vietcong death squad
Death squad
A death squad is an armed military, police, insurgent, or terrorist squad that conducts extrajudicial killings, assassinations, and forced disappearances of persons as part of a war, insurgency or terror campaign...
, which on that day had targeted South Vietnamese National Police officers, or in their stead, the police officers' families. Corroborating with this, Lém was captured at the site of a mass grave that included the bodies of at least seven police family members. Photographer Adams confirmed the South Vietnamese account, although he was only present for the execution. Lém's widow confirmed that her husband was a member of the Vietcong and she did not see him after the Tet Offensive began. Shortly after the execution, a South Vietnamese official who had not been present said that Lém was only a political operative.
Though military lawyers have yet to definitively decide whether Loan's action violated the Geneva Conventions
Geneva Conventions
The Geneva Conventions comprise four treaties, and three additional protocols, that establish the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment of the victims of war...
for treatment of prisoners of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
(Lém had not been wearing a uniform; nor was he, it is alleged, fighting enemy soldiers at the time), where POW status was granted independently of the laws of war; it was limited to Viet Cong seized during military operations.
External links
- Account of the execution and photograph spoken by the photographer Eddie Adams.
- The Saigon Execution, a thorough account by an AP photo editor including research after the war.
- Tu mot tam anh (Saigon Execution) on Google VideoGoogle VideoGoogle Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...
- Another video of the execution