EXECUTED WOMAN'S MOTHER 'CRIES ALL DAY'

Frail 74-year-old, imprisoned in Vietnam, refuses to eat or speak

Hanoi -- Behind the grim, grey walls of Vietnam's Xuan Phuong Prison,
74-year-old Tran Thi Cam spends her days quietly weeping, refusing to
eat or speak.

From cell to cell, the word has spread through the prison grapevine:
Her daughter has been executed for smuggling drugs. And with that, the
old woman's will to live, and her hope of being granted amnesty, are
withering away.

"She lies in bed and cries all day," said Tran Hieu, the husband of
Ms. Tran's daughter, Nguyen Thi Hiep, who was executed last week after
spending four years at the prison. "My mother-in-law is sick and old,
and we fear she will die in prison. We want her to die in the embrace
of her family, not the embrace of jail guards."

A look of grief washes over Mr. Tran's face as he glances at the
shrine he has set up for Ms. Nguyen in the living room of his small
Hanoi apartment. His 43-year-old wife, a seamstress and mother of two
boys who arrived in Canada in the mid-1980s as a boat person, was
executed shortly after dawn on April 25 despite repeated efforts by
Ottawa to save her.

It is part of the Buddhist tradition that the body of the dead be
handed back to family members. After 49 days of prayers, tribute and
mourning, the loved one is interred and the soul goes to the
afterlife. But Vietnam's prison officials, who embrace the Communist
state's atheistic principles, are refusing to release Ms. Nguyen's
remains for three years.

A trip to the prison's killing field, where visitors are unwanted and
signs warn "no pictures," suggests that authorities' treatment of the
dead is designed to exacerbate the grief.

On one side of the shallow, unmarked grave that executioners dug for
Ms. Nguyen stretches the sprawling expanse of the Hanoi City dump, a
festering mountain where peasants toil under a white-hot sun.

On the other side is a flood dike. Built of red earth, it is salted
with hundreds of used bullets, remnants from the firing squads who
have shot prisoners, blindfolded and gagged as Ms. Nguyen was.

Adding to the insults, Ms. Nguyen's body now lies under a shallow pond
of stagnant water. Prison executioners always open up the nearby
sluice gates, say villagers, flooding the killing field to wash away
the blood. The lake also hides -- and erodes -- the burial mounds that
are reminders of the grim, early-morning work on Hanoi's periphery.

"Foreigners should not come here," said one of the villagers, who was
escorting his water buffalo through a nearby field. "This is not what
our government would like you to see. Go away."

Pouring water into the killing field is part of a strategy to wash
away the dead, Mr. Tran said. "They don't want there to be anything
left."

But like other families whose relatives are buried here, Mr. Tran has
paid some peasants to add sand to his wife's grave and to build a
small bamboo fence around it in an effort to keep the bones from being
washed away.

"There are only two things that are important now," he said, holding a
picture he managed to take of the grave, showing the rose bushes he
has planted.

"The Canadian government must help me get back my wife's body. And
they must help my mother-in-law be free. She is innocent. And I will
stay here until this happens. There is nothing that can happen to me
now that would be worse than what has already happened."

The Canadian government had been trying to convince Vietnam's leaders
that Ms. Nguyen, a Canadian citizen, and her mother, may have been
innocents set up as drug mules. But Vietnam's government ignored the
pleas and ordered her executed, an act that has opened up a deep rift
in relations between Hanoi and Ottawa.

The Vietnamese government has refused to release Ms. Nguyen's mother.
Her name was absent from a list on April 30 that granted amnesty to
12,000 hardened prisoners, including murderers.

"The Vietnam government does not respect Canada," Mr. Tran said,
adding that his wife protested her innocence until she was shot. "I
want an explanation of why they ignored the Canadian government. This
has been a nightmare -- a four-year-long nightmare."

It started in 1996, when his wife and her mother were getting on a
plane at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport. Lacquer paintings they were carrying
for an acquaintance, they said, were found stuffed with 5.4 kilos of
heroin, worth about $5-million.

They were both arrested, put on trial and convicted. Ms. Nguyen was
sentenced to death, her mother to life imprisonment.

But it was hardly a cut-and-dried case, at least from the Canadian
perspective. The charges against another woman, caught entering
Toronto's Pearson Airport with lacquer paintings that contained heroin
hidden in a similar manner and were destined for the same convicted
drug trafficker, were dropped. Canadian police decided that she had
been set up, and they say they had presented evidence to Vietnamese
authorities that Ms. Nguyen and her mother were used in the same way.

But as Mr. Tran sits in front of his wife's shrine, silently gazing at
a picture taken of her in the waiting lounge at Charles De Gaulle
Airport during a vacation in Paris, it is clear he has moved beyond
the ins and outs of trying to prove his wife's innocence. Watching
white tendrils of smoke rise from the incense burning on the altar, he
chooses to dwell on painful flashbacks of his wife's last months in
prison.

"My wife's life was horrible," he said, tears coming to his eyes as he
recalled the prison -- a rat-infested collection of crumbling, yellow
buildings that have been cited by human-rights groups for their
deplorable conditions.

"She was shackled to her bed most of the time. When I saw her she
could hardly walk. When we met, for 45 minutes, once a month, she sat
on the other side of glass, and spoke on the phone. We never talked
about the case, because the guards would have stopped our visits. . .
. I could never touch her in four years."

Above the whir of the fans stirring the sweltering heat of Hanoi's
late afternoon, Mr. Tran's description brought soft sobs from other
family members, who had until then been sitting quietly, saying nothing.

"My wife was a prisoner for four years," said Mr. Tran, his voice more
sad than bitter. "And she is still a prisoner."

It might be a long wait, though, for Mr. Tran, who came to Hanoi days
after his wife was arrested and never left. The Vietnamese government
has shown no sign of remorse for the execution, nor has it said
anything about giving back Ms. Nguyen's remains.

As for her mother, she is a landed immigrant, not a Canadian citizen,
meaning she is not legally the responsibility of the Canadian government.

"All we can do is ask that she be released on humanitarian grounds,"
said an embassy official. "We have no idea why the Vietnamese
government is acting in this way."

Mr. Tran says he has not yet been able to bring himself to tell his
mother-in-law of the execution.

"We have not officially told her that her daughter, my wife, is dead.
We wanted to do that gradually, to spare her too much pain. But a
prison is full of talk and when she looks into people's eyes, even
though they don't tell her, she knows what she has heard is true."

As for Mr. Tran, a former soccer player for Vietnam's national team
whose family fought for the Communist revolution, he asks only that
the nightmare end as quickly as possible.

"Then I will go back to Canada. I don't know if I will come back to
Vietnam ever again. I have family in Hanoi, but Vietnam is a very sad
place for me now."