A somewhat different version of the present article will be included in The Revolution in World Politics, a collection of papers edited by Morton A. Kaplan, which is scheduled for spring publication by Wiley.
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While Laos and then Berlin and then Katanga have been dominating the front pages in recent months, a situation of equally critical proportions has been building up in South Viet Nam, where the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem is struggling for survival against well-organized strongly sustained guerilla forces—the Viet Cong—inspired and supported by the Communist Viet Minh government of the North. So serious had this situation become by last October that President Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor to South Viet Nam for the purpose of reporting to him on the kind of measures—political as well as military—which might be taken to prevent the fall of the country to the Communists of the North.
Following general taylor’s mission, the American military and economic commitment was augmented. By mid-December, 2,000 American troops were reported to be functioning in South Viet Nam in a “training and advisory” capacity only. It is clear, however, that some of these troops were taking part in tactical operations in battle areas, and casualties have already been reported. This additional aid is presumably contingent upon a broad program of administrative and political reform which President Diem has promised to undertake. Indeed, if such reforms cannot be implemented, the unification of the whole of Viet Nam under Viet Minh hegemony may very well become impossible to prevent.
The most important aspect of the struggle at present is a contest for the allegiance of the peasantry, the largest single segment of the population. Although the peasants are politically unorganized, they constitute both the base and core of Vietnamese society and are, therefore, the medium in which the Viet Cong’s guerilla activity is centered. (Mao Tse Tung has likened the peasantry to water, and guerillas to the fish that inhabit it.)
As might be expected, the effectiveness of Viet Cong activity is intimately connected with the Southern peasants’ attitude toward President Ngo Dinh Diem’s government: where this attitude is either neutral or hostile, the probable concomitant will be a toleration or support of the Communist guerillas that enables them to operate successfully. However, since the peasantry as a group has no organized opposition of its own through which it can protest against the Diem government, its support or toleration of the Viet Cong does not necessarily imply an enthusiasm for the Communists.
There are several important sources of peasant discontent. As in many other emergent areas, the processes of rapid change which the 20th century has brought to Southeast Asia, largely through the impact of colonial rule, have severely jolted traditional society, creating stresses which in turn give rise to anxiety and unrest. There is a huge gap in Viet Nam between the style of life and the aspirations of the urban elite, which runs the country, and the peasantry, which sees its rulers as aliens dedicated to altering their traditional ways. This gap has been a major factor in Diem’s inability to win peasant support.
Another trouble has been the disappointment of peasant expectations for greater prosperity and social justice after French colonial rule was ended. The peasantry played an important role in the struggle for independence from France—a struggle led by the urban intellectuals who united the peasantry behind them. When the French reimposed colonial rule after World War II, nationalist guerillas, largely Viet Minh directed, utilized peasant sympathy and support in their constant harassment of the French administration. And the French discovered that it was virtually impossible to eliminate guerilla activity having a solid base in the villages: they could control the cities and the areas along main roads during the day, but at night, in the countryside, the Viet Minh ruled.
The victory over “foreign exploitation,” however, did not produce the results that the peasantry had hoped for. To begin with, the nation was physically severed at the 17th parallel. Northern refugees inundated the South; political-religious sects vied for local autonomy; diverse political factions conspired to seize power; and the Communists applied violence in their agitation to overthrow the Southern regime. Under these conditions, neither democracy nor prosperity could develop. Expectations expanded more rapidly than the ability to satisfy them, and the new regime was faced with what has been called a “revolution of rising frustrations.” When the French departed, the unifying symbol of the common enemy was eliminated from a society otherwise rent by divisive forces; and no strong substitute was readily available.
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Viet Nam is divided into three distinct sections—the North, the Center, and the South (formerly known as Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin-China). Though the sections have actually been unified for a long period and have employed a common language, differences in dialect, custom, and tradition are nevertheless sufficiently important to make natives of each section appear somewhat as strangers to each other. President Diem and his family come from Hué, the former capital of the Center, and many of his key bureaucrats are from the Center also, or from the North. Thus to the Southern peasantry, the regime that succeeded French rule still to some extent seems an alien one.
Religious factionalism is a further source of estrangement between the Diem regime and the peasantry. The ancestor cult, with roots in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, is the most widespread religion of the country, and, of the present sects that have developed from this cult, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao claim several million adherents. The fact that President Diem and his family are Roman Catholics inevitably makes identification between the peasantry and the government more difficult—partly because Catholicism is a Western religion, and so, perhaps, a reminder of French rule.
A strong leader—endowed with charismatic appeal—might overcome the many divisive forces. But Diem’s political background has hampered his efforts to unify the country behind him. It was Ho Chi Minh of North Viet Nam, not Ngo Dinh Diem, who was the revered leader of the Vietnamese struggle for freedom against the French. To be sure, Diem has a reputation among the intellectuals as an incorruptible opponent of French colonialism. But having more or less withdrawn from public life after resigning in 1933 from Bao Dai’s cabinet in protest against French policies, and having spent a number of years abroad (some of them in Catholic seminaries in the United States and Belgium)—he was not known by the broader population as an active participant in the nationalist revolution.
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An ascetic bachelor and a pious Catholic, Diem is aloof in personal life, and as the son of a prominent mandarin at the court of Hué, he often exhibits traits of the haughty aristocrat. With his rather de Gaulle-like sense of destiny he acts as if he has received a mandate from heaven to lead Viet Nam to unity, security, and even grandeur.
To consolidate his power, Diem has used the familiar techniques of the modern autocrat. Pictures of him are plastered everywhere, even in the most remote mountain villages, and banners proclaim the glory of his personal leadership throughout the countryside. The press and radio are daily filled with fulsome praise of his prowess. In recent years, despite his difficulty in overcoming his aloofness, he has circulated widely among the rural populace, attempting to inspire peasant support. Though he may have been successful in generating some respect, if not enthusiasm, for himself, he has surely not been able to overcome a widespread impression that his family and entourage are venal. The political system which Diem has constructed in his bitter struggle for control depends largely on relatives and a few trusted advisers. One of his younger brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu, is the chief political figure in Saigon. Nhu wields power through the Revolutionary Workers Party (Can Lao)—a semi-secret, elite organization which co-opts key members throughout the country; and when he deems it necessary, he also calls upon support from the National Revolutionary Movement (NRM), the official party with mass membership. Both Nhu and his wife are also elected members of the National Assembly—a supposedly democratic body in which, however, no genuine opposition parties are represented.1
Madame Nhu, who is politically active as a leader of the feminist movement and whose father was appointed Ambassador to the United States, lives with her husband in the Presidential Palace, and (since Diem is a bachelor) serves as official hostess and first lady. She has a widespread reputation as a vigorous entrepreneur, able to combine clever business transactions with adroit political manipulation.
Diem has three other brothers, who also wield great power. (A fifth brother was executed by the Viet Minh in 1946, a fact which intensified the President’s hatred of the Communists.) The youngest, Ngo Dinh Can, rules Central Viet Nam in autocratic fashion from his headquarters in Hue. A third brother, Ngo Dinh Luyen, serves as Ambassador to Great Britain, the Benelux countries, and several newly independent African nations. The eldest of the family, Ngo Dinh Thuc, is now a Catholic archbishop in Hue, and exercises strong ideological influence on the President. Thuc has instituted an academy at Vinh Long, with five of his priests composing the faculty and with civil servants, army officers, and schoolteachers composing the student body, to spread “Personal-ism,” the official philosophy of the Diem government.2
In placing his family in positions of major influence, Diem is following a time-honored Oriental practice which is plainly more offensive to modernist intellectuals than to the traditionalist peasantry. Nevertheless, the fact that the family regime consists of aristocratic Catholics from the alien Center section does nothing to endear the government to the Southern peasants, and also increases their willingness to believe the widespread rumors of corruption in ruling circles.
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On May 13, 1959, the ultimate aim of the Viet Minh government of the North was made clear by the statement of its central committee that the time had come to “struggle heroically and perseveringly to smash the government of President Diem.” One of the main gambits used in pursuit of this objective is the argument of the Viet Cong agents that Communism not only best serves the interests of the peasantry but that it represents the wave of the future. In order to make this thesis convincing to the peasants, the Viet Cong has adopted the strategy of trying to produce concrete evidence that the Southern regime is too weak and ineffective to provide proper protection or services for its population.
The moves of the Viet Cong guerillas to produce such evidence have been many and thorough for several years. Village and hamlet chiefs, local police commissioners, youth leaders, members of the security forces—in fact all government functionaries—have been vulnerable to assassination. During 1960, for example, some 4,000 officials were killed as a result of Viet Cong activity. Yet Viet Cong terrorism is discriminating, with victims being carefully selected. Prime targets are unpopular local officials, since their elimination both demonstrates Viet Cong strength and appears to protect the interests of the peasantry. Sometimes all the inhabitants of a village will be assembled at night under Viet Cong orders to witness the execution of such an official, said to be a “traitor” to the “national revolution.” Continuously alert to local sentiment, the guerillas develop contacts with disgruntled members of the religious sects and other important village groups in order to mark down additional targets for either death or harassment. The letter to a hamlet official cited below, one of several examined by the author on a research trip in a Southern village in April 1960, shows one method of Viet Cong operation:
Battalion Thong Kiet
Company 256
No. 35/CTQSCoalition of
the Armed
Forces of
the Religious
Sects Against
Americans and
DiemTo: Tam-Anh, Secretary of My-Thanh B Hamlet
My-Thuan Village, Binh Minh District (Vinh Long Province)
While the situation is critical, the fighting movement of the people becomes stronger and stronger every day. The Americans and Diem oppress the people without pity. They use dictatorship, one religion, and a one-family system to govern the country. They are entirely isolated from the people, and their regime is declining at its very roots. . . . Their regime is a barbarian and bloody one.
Based on the above situation, the Revolution and the people do not recognize this regime nor the various reactionary organizations of the Americans and Diem. For this reason, the Revolution and the People have recently taken opposition measures at various places, as well as here in My Thuan that you, undoubtedly, have heard of and seen.
Since the day the hamlet chief paid for his crime, you have committed many indecent deeds, sometimes secretly and other times openly. Hiding from the people and by-passing the Revolution, you have stubbornly continued to work for the rebels. To be exact, you recently tied two draft evaders and handed them over to the Americans and Diem, sold family declaration forms, and collected money from the people. . . . You collaborate closely with the hamlet officials, carry out plots against the peace by the Americans and Diem, side with landowners in the fixing of riceland rent, force farmers to pay high rent, and tend rented lands for landowners.
All these actions, which are very detrimental to the Revolution and the People, prove that you may be the future hamlet chief. It would be very dangerous if you did not repent soon.
We, the commanding staff of Company 256 of Battalion Ly Thuong Kiet wholeheartedly warn you so that you can correct yourself. Resign immediately from your function as secretary and stop collaborating with rebels. If you still stubbornly do so, you will be entirely responsible before the Revolution and the People.
War Zone March 29,1960
BCH Company 256
—Sealed—
Other viet Cong tactics designed to demonstrate the weakness of the Diem regime include disruption of administration and retardation of economic development. To this end, the guerillas cut communications, block roads, blast bridges, and plunder rubber plantations. Combined with all these activities is an incessant propaganda campaign. The Viet Cong disseminate thousands of leaflets denouncing the Diem government, some printed crudely under field conditions, others prepared with greater care in the North, in Cambodia, or clandestinely in Southern towns. Political lectures are also given in areas under Communist control, and whispering campaigns are carried on at every opportunity. The main purpose of all this propaganda is to convince the peasants that the Americans have replaced the French as the imperialist power and that Communism (presented in simplistic terms) is the only true fulfillment of the nationalist revolution.
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The viet cong guerilla force, whose size is estimated at between 12,000 and 20,000, comes from a variety of sources. Many of those sent from the North are Southerners who fled from their native region in 1954 after the signing of the Geneva Accord. Some work their way south through Laos, infiltrating the mountains of the Haut Plateau region to agitate among the non-Vietnamese mountaineers. A larger number follow the Ho Chi Minh Trail, wandering unchallenged through Cambodia, and slipping with ease into the dense jungle and marshes of the Southern delta areas, past the long frontiers which are impossible to patrol effectively. Still others reach the Southern coastal regions by sailing the South China Sea from Cambodia in boats which are indistinguishable from the fishing junks plying coastal waters.
It is difficult to say exactly what proportion of this guerilla force is actually from the North,3 but it is widely believed that the Viet Cong leaders are furnished from there and work under the general direction of Hanoi. Arms, ammunition, and supplies are also sent from the North, though here again it is difficult to estimate what proportion of the total originates from this source. Since Laos has tipped farther into Pathet Lao control and since large quantities of Soviet bloc weapons were shipped to Laos during the hostilities, it seems reasonable to surmise that a new supply of weapons is being carried into South Viet Nam across Laotian and Cambodian borders.
Many of the guerillas come from the Southern peasantry itself. Though most of the Communist forces were removed from the South when the Geneva Accord was signed, a nucleus was left behind to become the core of Viet Cong cadres and to gather new recruits. Moreover, a number of disgruntled adherents of Cao Dai and Hoa Hao have joined the Viet Cong in protest against the Diem government. Other Southern recruits include social misfits and the usual quota of men lured by opportunities for adventure and violence.
But not all Southern members of the Viet Cong are volunteers. In regions where the Viet Cong is in control, participation in guerilla activities amounts to a draft call enforced by social pressures and various kinds of sanctions. There is some dragooning. During one period, for instance, the Viet Cong kidnapped people, forced them to engage in subversive activities, and then used their fear of being punished by the government to blackmail them into continuing. What makes this blackmail particularly effective is the fact that no general amnesty policy (such as prevailed in Malaya) has been developed by the government to encourage recruits to abandon their guerilla activities voluntarily.
Ironically, the anti-Viet Cong operations of the government have supplied yet another source of Viet Cong support. Though President Diem has promised severe punishment to any member of his security forces who pillages, rapes, loots, or in any other way acts outside the bounds of military propriety, such measures are difficult to enforce in the climate of anti-guerilla jungle warfare. In addition, when government troops swoop into an area where guerilla agents are reported to be operating, uncommitted and innocent villagers often become targets of the security forces who are unable to distinguish them from the Viet Cong. All this sometimes leads to a resentment so great that joining in Viet Cong activities seems the only way to express it adequately.
But even if they do not actually join in with Viet Cong activity, many peasants—caught between the fear of Communist reprisal and antipathy to the government—are unwilling to cooperate in the effort to flush the guerillas out. And where such cooperation is lacking, the government’s task becomes almost impossible.
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The success of the Viet Cong guerillas in disrupting normal activity and creating havoc has raised the question both in Washington and in Saigon of initiating reverse activity against the Northern regime of Ho Chi Minh. If unfulfilled expectations contribute to present support of the Viet Cong in the South, it would seem that a greater degree of support should be available if the Diem regime were to agitate in the North.4 Expectations there have been even less satisfied than in the South; living conditions are poor, and the grounds are increasing for resentment against totalitarian government policies. The regimented wretchedness of the North Vietnamese masses has been emphasized by Joseph Alsop5 in advocating Southern guerilla activity in the North:
North viet nam, in other words, is a ripe target for precisely the kind of underground assault now being made on South Viet Nam—if anyone had the guts to take the risk of sponsoring and supporting this kind of assault. . . .
You cannot permit an enemy unlimited freedom to hit you whenever and wherever he pleases, while never hitting back yourself, without suffering mortal damage in the end.
The problem, however, is not quite one of “guts.” Assuming that the Northern population would offer a susceptible base for subversion, the Diem government would still have to find men as willing to endure tremendous hardship and constant peril as the Viet Cong have been. But what would supply their inspiration? The leaders of the guerilla movement in the South have their Communist doctrine to inspire them, and they are further reinforced by the nationalist fervor that originally motivated activity against the French. No comparable inspiration has developed for the Southerners, and it seems highly unlikely that President Diem’s “Personalism” could ever provide one.
It is, of course, possible—though by no means certain—that recruits might be found among refugees from the North, especially among the committed Catholics. The desire of those refugees to return to their native region coupled with their anti-Communism would perhaps provide them with sufficient motivation to lead guerilla operations and recruit new members from the dissatisfied Northern peasantry. It is also conceivable that a Southern propaganda campaign picturing the Chinese, the traditional enemy of the Vietnamese, as the new imperialists would arouse sufficient nationalist sentiment in the North to generate action.
Yet even if enough guerillas could be recruited to carry on subversion in the North, the possible results would still need to be carefully weighed by the South. What might appear to be the greatest hope for success—the instigation of a popular revolution in North Viet Nam—could instead turn out to be a new Hungary, with the Communist Chinese playing the role of the Russians. On the other hand, Southern guerilla activity might be designed to harass the North sufficiently to bring about negotiations whereby each side would agree to cease subversion. Though such success seems unlikely, this possibility appears to lie behind the determination of Diem and his American advisers to carry out guerilla activity in the North.
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The main impact that Viet Cong subversion has had on the South Viet Nam government has been to goad it into enacting tighter controls and repressive measures which further disaffect the peasantry—at a time when the designing of policies that could win popular support is Diem’s most urgent job. The bitter challenge of the Communists has combined with the separatist pull of the religious sects to strengthen the centralist tendencies of the regime and to contribute to Diem’s belief that power must be wielded by the few he can trust.
The security forces, supplemented by the political and administrative machinery, provide the chief instruments of control. There is an army of 150,000, and the government has announced its intention to add 20,000 more troops following the receipt of additional U.S. funds. The Civil Guard, a quasi-military organization which supplements the army in the provinces, has enlisted over 50,000; the police force, under national control, is some 8,000 strong; and the Sûreté (secret police) is estimated at 7,700 members. In addition, local self-defense units, not including the youth corps receiving military training, number more than 45,000. The ratio of security forces to the total population, therefore, might be calculated at one to forty-three.
Administration is conducted through a highly centralized bureaucracy, strongly controlled by the Presidency. The ministers who head the administrative departments—with the exception of a few close to the President’s official family—exercise little independent policy-making function, for their real job is to carry out the instructions of Diem and his inner clique. Governmental programs are framed in Saigon and communicated through the province, the district, and the village. Although the lower echelons may resent the great pressure put on them to execute policies imposed by higher headquarters—policies which may or may not be adapted to peasant needs and desires—they are not encouraged to communicate any opposition or criticism.
The pattern of local administration in rural areas resembles the pattern in enemy-occupied territory during wartime. The posts of province and district chiefs are held primarily by army officers, who are inclined to feel that fighting the Communists, rather than the normal routine of administration, is their primary task. These officials operate in garrison-like quarters surrounded by barbed-wire barricades, and travel into the countryside only under heavy guard.
In some provincial towns citizens are required to display colored balls in front of their lodgings to indicate the number of people present—a control device to aid the police. No villager anywhere may leave his village for more than a day without a visa signed by the chief. There are also internment camps (now holding an estimated 25,000) to which anyone suspected of subversive activity may be committed by administrative fiat. Administrators at every echelon also employ informers to gather accounts of the Viet Cong. Thus the intelligence networks, though inefficient, are spread throughout the society.6
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A striking illustration of the kind of trouble the government has run into, in trying to deal with subversion in the countryside, is provided by its experience with a program of resettling that segment of the peasantry which inhabits the regions of greatest Viet Cong activity. According to this plan, which was inaugurated early in 1959, certain families were to be regrouped into areas where they could be placed under heavy surveillance. One of the two groups to be moved was known as “Viet Cong families”—those whom local authorities believed to be sympathetic toward the Communists or who, because they had relatives in the North or in the Viet Cong organization in the South, were considered especially vulnerable to Viet Cong persuasion. These “Viet Cong families” were to be concentrated in agglomeration centers, known in Vietnamese as khi khu. Other centers, khi ap, were to concentrate families thought to be reliable, patriotic, and loyal to the Southern government, but who (because they lived in remote areas) were difficult to protect from the blandishments and threats of the Viet Cong. Both groups, therefore, would be settled in places where neither would be in a position to give aid, comfort, or information to the underground.
The plan at once stirred protest. The designation of “Viet Cong families” depended upon the arbitrary judgment of local officials whose basis for decision was often no more than their own prejudices. The “loyal families,” too, felt wronged in being associated with the “Viet Cong families.” Further, the plan was conceived in terms of pure military security without economic and social factors being taken into account. But before the plan was widely put into effect, it gave way to the establishment of “agrovilles.”
These agrovilles—announced by Diem on July 7, 1959—are settlements, bordering on major roads and arteries of communication, into which a formerly dispersed rural population was to be concentrated. The purpose was to create living areas around which barricades could be constructed, guard posts established, and population movement controlled. In this way, it was presumed, people would be protected from susceptibility to Viet Cong tax collection, information gathering, terrorism, and recruitment.
This program, too, roused protest. It mobilized the peasantry to work, without compensation, on ten-day shifts. Neither food nor transportation was provided, and each worker was required to bring his own work implements. Duty at some of the agrovilles extended into the harvest season, preventing the peasant in some cases from bringing in the crop from his own rice fields. Very few families—as might have been anticipated—wished to leave their traditional homesteads, with their gardens, trees, and surrounding rice fields; and they especially resented being separated from the ancestral tombs beside which they regularly worshiped. The new home sites were barren, without trees to provide shade from the torrid sun, in an area composed of a vast checkerboard of canals crisscrossing square plots of land on which there was only untended grass and a mud foundation for a hut. Few of the farm animals could be moved to the new plots; there was no place to house them. In particular, the water buffaloes, the sturdy draught animals of the monsoon tropics, were not permitted to enter the agrovilles because their hooves would damage the new mud roads. Promises that the future would bring the peasants schools, maternity clinics, electricity—city life in the countryside—did not assuage their discontent or their objection to being required to purchase land for which they had no desire.
The activity of the Viet Cong against the agrovilles was vituperative. They ordered those under their persuasion not to cooperate with the government in the implementation of its program. They burned and sacked the sites under construction whenever possible, and threatened government officials responsible for administering the program. The chief of Vinh Long province, in an interview in April of 1960, told of the tremendous pressure he was under from Saigon to complete an agroville in his province. Speeding up the work would be his death warrant, he predicted, since regular trips to the site would make him an easy target for the Viet Cong. Ten days after the interview, he was assassinated, even though he had gone to the agroville accompanied by armed body guards and a heavily fortified jeep.
Two major theories have been put forward to explain the special vigor of the Viet Cong’s anti-agroville activity. According to the first theory, the Viet Cong realized that the agrovilles would, when fully operative, succeed in eliminating peasant vulnerability to demands of the underground. The other theory holds that the Communists were, as usual, exploiting peasant bitterness against the government. But in any case, the main result of the agroville experiment has been to stir up further discontent among the peasants, thus increasing their propensity to protest against the Diem government through support of the Viet Cong. Whether this additional resentment is outbalanced by the increased physical security provided by the agrovilles remains open to question. In any case, President Diem is committed to continuing the construction of agrovilles, perhaps with some modifications, and the U.S. government (following the report of a study commission headed by Professor Eugene Staley in the summer of 1961) appears willing to give financial support to the program.
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What makes the cooperation of the peasantry—even apart from its role in the anti-guerilla struggle—particularly crucial to Diem is the fact that his support among other groups will hinge to a great extent on his success in winning over the peasants. Currently, there is no important segment of Vietnamese society whose strong loyalty the government can claim. Although some 750,000 Catholic refugees from the North provided solid backing for Diem in the years immediately following the Geneva Accord, more recently they have exhibited mounting dissatisfaction with his government. Further, Diem’s land reform program and his anti-business bias have not endeared his regime to the business and landowning elites. The bureaucracy, though obedient, is not enthusiastic about Diem either; recent Vietnamese history has taught functionaries to be adaptable but cautious with their political allegiance.7 Vietnamese intellectuals are also disgruntled with the present political system. This group, the most articulate of all the classes in emergent societies, has an importance far out of proportion to its number, because it provides the potential leadership. In Viet Nam it is severely critical of the government’s narrow base, its nepotism, corruption, and repressive measures.
Another group, the military, judging from the pattern of coups elsewhere in Asia, represents a constant threat to the regime. Although the officer corps in South Viet Nam does not make its attitude toward the regime easily discernible, there is reason to believe that considerable dissatisfaction exists. The army has a youthful, energetic, progressive cadre of officers who have received Western-style military training, either under French aegis or, more recently, in U. S. service schools. They are strongly nationalist, anti-Communist, and impatient to see their nation develop strength and prestige. But rumors are rampant that promotions are based on personal favoritism, family connections, political affiliation, and membership in the Catholic Church. Additional grounds for dissatisfaction stem from President Diem’s policy of staffing important posts with officers personally loyal to him and shifting units by direct communication with them, thus ignoring the normal chain of command and sometimes leaving military commanders wondering what has become of their subordinate units.
The army officers and the intellectuals realize that if the peasants incline farther toward the Viet Minh, the nation may well be lost to the Communists. Fear of this fate was a major factor in the thinking of the few officers who undertook the abortive coup d’etat of November 1960 in which some of the most dissatisfied intellectuals joined. Though Diem was successful in checking this ill-planned coup, the conditions which brought it about have not changed, and the danger of similar attempts in the future remains.
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An encouraging aspect of Vietnamese life in recent years has been a steady, if undramatic, amelioration of material living conditions—especially for the peasantry. American aid, covering almost two-thirds of South Viet Nam’s current budget expenditures, has contributed significantly to this improvement. New canals, irrigation projects, roads, and communication networks have been developed. Consumer items have become readily available. And the export of rice, the staple ingredient of the Vietnamese diet, has not increased in proportion to the increase in production, suggesting that there has probably been a rise in consumption.
A land reform program favorable to the peasantry was also enacted in 1955. It includes provisions for rent reduction, land tenure security, and transfer, and it limits a landowner to one hundred hectares of rice land, plus up to fifteen hectares for each family ancestral cult under his responsibility.8 Still, it is doubtful if the government has earned recognition commensurate with this general achievement, for the expectations of the peasantry during the same period seem to have mounted even higher than its standard of living.
It would seem, then, that guerillas in the countryside will continue to be a serious problem for South Viet Nam in the foreseeable future. Because of the difficulty in preventing constant infiltration through the jungle terrain of the long Cambodian and Laotian frontiers, the task of eliminating the stream of new recruits, equipment, and direction from the North seems almost insuperable. Even in Malaya, where the guerillas did not enjoy these advantages, it took over ten years for 40,000 well-trained, organized, and equipped Commonwealth troops, together with more than 100,000 police and special constables, to win the struggle. For Viet Nam, aggressive and flexible military measures are necessary to eliminate the guerillas, but force alone cannot solve the problem. Whether the right political, economic, and social policies can be found and made effective in time remains one of the most significant open questions of the current world crisis.
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p>1 Housed in Saigon in an opera house built by the French, the National Assembly is the subject of an anecdote which reveals its popular reputation. “When the French were here,” the story goes, “a tragedy played once a week. Now there is comedy every day.”
2 A philosophical moralism with French Catholic roots, Personalism rejects both capitalist and Communist “materialism.” It is based on a spiritual conception of man in the community, striving to reconcile the need for collective discipline and social justice with individual liberty.
3 U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara estimates that it is two-thirds.
4 Northern refugees often point out that Communism has a greater appeal in the South than in the Center or North, since the South has never known what Viet Minh control means.
5 “’The Double Standard,” New York Herald Tribune (April 19, 1961).
6 An anecdote about the abundant intelligence activities of the government is instructive. The story is told that in the region of Camau, six intelligence networks were paying for information: the army, the Civil Guard, the Sûreté, Can Lao, the province chief, and the district chief. All were receiving their information from one source—a Viet Cong agent.
7 A civil servant who has served since 1939 would by now have had to adjust to French colonial rule, to a Japanese-controlled Vichy regime, to a Bao Dai government dominated by the Japanese, to rule by the Viet Minh, to the postwar French system, and to the government of President Diem.
8 Curiously, government policy and Viet Cong operations have together brought about the abolition of absentee landlordism. The government’s land reform process requires the landowner to sell to the government, after which the occupants of the land make the purchase. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, have forbidden the peasantry to cooperate in this program, and in areas where the Viet Cong are powerful, the peasants do not generally pay rent; indeed, the absentee landlord would risk assassination if he attempted to collect his rents.
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