Hunger for Justice

Every pressroom has him--the unobtrusive character who is not a professional newsman but who is always around, his duties uncertain, his status undetermined, tolerated and even liked by the pros. But few can boast a more memorable character than Vo Song Thiet, a tiny, bespectacled Vietnamese who bicycled into Geneva in 1954 and has been a fixture of the Palais des Nations' pressroom ever since.

Vo arrived as the diplomats were gathering to carve up Viet Nam. He pitched his green tent on a patch of lawn outside the Palais des Nations. To protest the division of his homeland, he went on a hunger strike, but the diplomats purring past in their black cars paid no attention, and only blood transfusions saved Vo's life. After his recovery, Vo--a teacher in Viet Nam, where the French often jailed him for his nationalist views--wangled accreditation as a newsman, commandeered a desk in the Palais, and started his own newsletter (in French) to campaign against the partition.

Month after month Vo worked on, an implacable, improbable figure huddled in his corner, typing out endless copy. He had no money. His appeals were stenciled on the blank sides of U.N. press releases; his lunch was carrots and lettuce. A sympathetic Swiss matron let him move his tent to her grounds. When the winter nights got too cold, he crept into a doll-house on the estate and slept with a hot-water bottle over his heart.

The partition plan went through, but Vo fought on--in his own odd way. Every July, in sorrowful memory of the month when partition took place, he fasted for a week. This July, Vo vanished from his pressroom corner; newsmen remembered that he had talked of going on an "indefinite" hunger strike. He did. Last week, his weight down to 90 Ibs., staying alive only with occasional pinches of salt, bowls of rice broth and fruit juice, Vo totted up his recent appeals to world figures, including U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, Nikita Khrushchev, President Eisenhower, Vietnamese Communist Boss Ho Chi Minh.

"I suffer more and more from the shameful state of affairs in my country," he whispered. "If all my appeals bear no fruit, I shall leave Geneva and go to my cave in the Bernese Oberland near Fribourg. I will then start a new fasting period, this time unto eternity." Newsmen at the Palais des Nations guessed that Vo would continue his curious protest--just as Viet Nam would go on being partitioned.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.