World Notes VIET NAM

After overrunning South Viet Nam in 1975, the victorious Communist regime in the North assigned more than 100,000 vanquished southerners to indefinite sentences in "re-education" camps. Last week officials in Hanoi announced a sweeping amnesty for 6,685 inmates of the camps and other prisons, including 480 military and civilian officials of the former U.S.-backed Saigon government. The mass pardon was one of the largest since the end of the Viet Nam War.

Though estimates vary, at least 7,000 political prisoners are believed to remain in the camps, where they are subjected to a tedious regimen of political indoctrination. Those prisoners, said Radio Hanoi, "are still in the camps because they stubbornly refuse to change their ways."