Y-Piek Nie was released in 2010 and died of it eleven years later

Before he signed his release papers the police held a party for him, with food and bottles of soda. His family say the soda was poisoned. He went home, married, had three children, and began to fail in 2019.

The years inside

Y-Piek Nie was born in 1975 in Buon Jung village, in Ea Ayong commune, Krong Pac district, Dak Lak province. He was arrested on 14 January 2006 and sent to the prison at Xuan Phuc camp.

After five years the police accused him of violating article 87 of Vietnamese law, and charged him with discrimination on religious and political grounds. He was tortured with electric shocks. When officers took him to the investigators he was beaten and hung up, which left him in severe pain.

The day he was let out

The government released him on 7 January 2010. Before he signed the paperwork, the police held a party: they cooked food, and they gave him sodas to drink. His family say the sodas were poisoned. Then they let him go home.

We have no money, nothing to take care of ourselves with.

The eleven years after

He felt nothing at the time. He went home, married a woman from Buon Mbriu village in Ea Kar district, and they had three children together.

In 2019 he began to lose his strength, tired every day. Knowing he would not last much longer, he asked his wife to take him to his sister’s house; he said he would die there and that they would see to his funeral. She did as he asked. About a day after he arrived, he began to bleed from his mouth and his nose. He died on 16 September 2021, and was buried on 19 September.

He had a hard life and a poor family. He came and went with empty hands.

What we are reporting, and what we are not

The arrest, the imprisonment, the torture, the release and the dates of his illness and death are as his family gave them to us. That the sodas at the release party were poisoned, and that this is what killed him eleven years later, is his family’s conclusion. No autopsy was performed that we know of, and no medical finding has ever been given to them. We record it as what his family believe, and as one of a pattern of accounts our community has brought us about men released from Vietnamese prisons.

Why it matters

A release can look like mercy on paper. What our families describe is a sentence that goes home with the man and finishes the job years later, long after the prison has closed its file on him. We cannot prove what was in those bottles. We can record that a healthy man walked out in 2010, that his family were told to celebrate it, and that he bled to death in his sister’s house in 2021.