Many thousands more must have died trying to escape by sea, but I would assume there is no way to tell how many--people who died on unseaworthy boats (like Elian Gonzalez's mother did trying to get away from another Communist paradise).
Yes, but for obvious reasons the Vietnamese government is not helping out. The best estimates I've seen put the numbers at several million between 1975 and 1982. The exact number will never be known, I'm afraid.
I believe morethan one million people died in the "killing fields" -- I suppose this is not a large enough number of bodies for Morris/NYT to mention. Just as they don't mention the millions dead by Mao's cultural revolution that set the authoritarian stage for what is modern day China. The thrust of this article is that Vietnam is imitating China. That is BAD news.
"After Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975, the summary executions of tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese began... Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China sea... The anti-war movement in America also facilitated the communist takeovers of Laos and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia led to a killing field in which some three million Cambodians were exterminated. Paul Johnson has given a succinct, detailed, gut-wrenching account of this tragedy in his classic work Modern Times." - Jamie Glazov on May 14, 2002
"When Nixon went down in Watergate, the Democrats cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell... In 1975 the Democrats cut military and economic aid to the two regimes we had been defending against the Communists... Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered 2.5 million people." - David Horowitz on October 14, 2004 at Geogetown University