VietNam y el perdón
Years ago in Gander, Newfoundland, a young Vietnamese woman disembarked from a plane refuelling from Moscow to Cuba and asked for asylum in Canada. Her name is Kim Phuc and she was the girl on the famous 1972 photograph that brought the world's attention to the horrors of the Vietnam war.
If there was one photograph that captured the horrific nature of all wars, one photograph that tore at our collective conscience, it was the picture of a nine year old girl, running naked down a road, screaming in agony from the jellied gasoline coating her body and burning through skin and muscle down to the bone. According the the eyewitness account of Wolfgang P. May, Advisor of a South Vietnamese battallion in Trung Lap, her village, a few miles NW of Saigon, was bombed with napalm on the 8th of July 1972, and the little girl was among the victims. It would take 14 years and 17 operations to save her life and restore her appearance. And when she finally felt well enough to put it behind her, that very photograph would make her a victim, all over again.
"Napalm is the worst pain that can ever be imagined. It is to feel that you are burning under your skin. I would faint each time that my nurses submerged my body in the healing sollution and started to cut away the dead skin", expalins Kim.
Kim's Story is both a universal and a deeply personal story. It parallells the fate of Vietnam itself. Both Kim's suffering, and her courageous recovery mirrors the plight of a whole people during and after the war. It is also the story of how one little girl's tragedy would be used by all sides. Peace activists, journalists from all over the world, and Vietnamese government officials saw Kim as a symbol to be used, not a person. Therefore, she has tried over the years to tell her story just once as a testimony, and then, she wanted to move on. That wasn't possible.
Kim was born in 1963 in the hamlet of Trang Bang, 30 miles north of Saigon. Her full name means "Golden Happiness" in Vietnamese. She remembers happiness despite a childhood of war. On that tragic day in June 1972, the tiny hamlet of Trang Bang was occupied by North Vietnamese forces. The South Vietnamese Army's 25th Division was called in and heavy bombing began. At 2pm the South Vietnamese dropped white phosphorous marker bombs. As she ran with the other children, four drums of napalm dropped on the road. Two of her infant brothers were killed instantly.
"I saw the bombs. I saw the fire. There was a terrible heat," Kim remembers. "I tore off my burning clothes. But the burning didn't stop. Soldiers poured water over me from their canteens. Then I fainted."
The AP photographer who captured those horrific moments was Nick Ut. He captures with his camera a group of children, Kim Phúc among them, running away in fear. After a few seconds she encounters soldiers who give her water (people may see the pictures on the WEB) and pour some over her burns. Then Nick Ut drove her to a hospital. He would never forget that one little girl. He continued to visit her in the hospital, bring her books and gifts and eventually set up a fund for donations to her family.
The photograph he snapped of her agony was instantly transmitted around the world. It would win him a Pulitzer and change both their lives. Kim would spend the next 14 months in the hospital. She was covered with third-degree burns over half her body and was not expected to live. Her pain was almost unbearable. Her surgeon Dr. Mark Gorney of San Francisco volunteered at the Barksy children's plastic surgery hospital in Saigon. When he first saw her, Kim's chin was welded to her chest by scar tissue and her left arm was burnt almost to the bone. During this period, documentary footage was shot on Kim's recovery. Her mother was by her bedside, helping the little girl through the trauma. Kim said to herself she would become a doctor like the man who saved her. After two years of treatments, Kim returned to her village.
In 1982, ten years after the famous photograph, Kim's life changed again. She was in pre-medical studies in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) when the Vietnamese government contacted her. They had been looking for her for over a year at the request of a Dutch journalist who wanted to "find the girl in the photograph." When his subsequent documentary on her revived her fame, they yanked her out of the University. The Vietnamese government decided she was too valuable to them and started to supervise her daily schedule as a "national symbol of the war." Every time she tried to evade the officials, another foreign journalist would ask them to track her down and expose her. "It was a nightmare" she says. "Let me study! That's the only thing I want", she would ask the authorities repeatedly. "It was awful. I didn't understand: why me? Why could my friends continue their studies and not me? I felt as though I had always been a victim. At 19, I no longer had any hope and wanted to die."
In 1985 the foreign press corps flocked to Ho Chi Minh City to cover the tenth anniversary of Vietnam's "Liberation". Kim was again offered up by authorities as one of their main celebrities, and all three main US. networks carried interviews with "the girl in the photograph". Finally, in 1986, the government agreed to let Kim continue her studies, under their supervision, in Cuba where she met Bui Hoy Toan, another Vietnamese student being coached by the Cuban government.. Even there she was "managed" and when an American peace group invited her to tour the United States in 1989, Vietnamese officials cancelled the trip at the last moment. But an article in the Los Angeles Times written in preparation for the failed tour revived Kim's fame once more. She received hundreds of letter from American Vietnam veterans "apologising to me."
When she decided to marry Bui Hoy Toan in 1992, Vietnamese officials gave them permission to honeymoon in Moscow. But secretly she was planning their escape. On her flight back she deserted with her husband on their refueling stop at Gander, Newfoundland, where they asked for political asylum. That was 17 years ago to this day. They now live in Ajax, Ontario
All these years later, the photograph of the little girl retains its haunting power. To Kim it is "my photograph, of my own war". Yet somehow it belongs to everyone; the one image more than any other that turned public opinion against that war. Rev. John Plummer, a Vietnam veteran, who believed he took part in co-ordinating the air strike with the South Vietnamese Air Force met with Phúc briefly and was publicly forgiven after she gave a speech at the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day in 1996. Next year, during an interview with Unesco Press she explained:
"I have lived with my pain; I know the value of love when you want to heal. I have lived with hatred, and now I know the power of forgiveness. Today, I am alive, I live without hatred, without the spirit of revenge, and I can tell all those who caused my suffering: I forgive you. That is the only way to save peace, to speak of tolerance and non-violence."
Kim Phuc converted to Christianism and then gave her own account of her transformation: “My life was like a cup of coffee. Very dark: with hatred, anger, bitterness, sorrow…” After reading the Bible, she asked God, “How can I clean everything in my heart if it’s full of coffee?” The answer, she explains, was in letting her cup be poured out every day, “until it became empty and God spilled His love into my cup. I am not involved in politics or religion. I just let them know it’s about the love of God and the love of people. That is more powerful than any weapon of war.”
Her biography, The Girl in the Picture, was written by Denise Chong (Viking, 1999). She inspired a foundation that bears her name. The Kim Phuc Foundation International helps children who are the victims of war and violence. In East Timor, Romania and, most recently, Afghanistan. It gives them medical, physical and psychological assistance, fit them out with prosthetic devices if they've lost a limb and, help them to get over the trauma they have gone through.
[ Read also "The Plight of the Montagnards in Vietnam" ]
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