by Jon Swain
The bikes were a central part of Hanoi’s communist uniform, like the clothes they wore, the drab olive-green shirts, the trousers, the rubber sandals and the pith helmets. No flirtatious girls in graceful aó dài dresses glided like dancers down these streets. It still had the drama of a wartime capital. At dawn public loudspeakers poured out martial music and exhortations to work while people did PT under the spreading tamarind trees. Compared to sultry, sophisticated, brash Saigon, Hanoi – soon-to-be capital of a unified Vietnam – had a depressing dreariness. It was only many years later, on a return visit, that I realised I had been wrong and appreciated the extraordinary beauty of its crumbling colonial buildings set around the lakes and the unique quality of its people, who toiled and sweated and strived for happiness without much opportunity for expressions of individual freedom.
But for now, the strict conformity of this victorious city and the cold solemnity of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, with the white-gloved guards goosestepping up and down, filled me with infinite sadness. I was still raw from the falls of Saigon and Phnom Penh. It came as no surprise to learn that the Russians had helped to build the mausoleum after Ho’s death in 1969 and that the first delegation to pay homage there was from the Soviet Union. The Soviet star was riding high over North Vietnam in those days and continued to do so until the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade later.
I watched the first shift of children on their way to school at 5.30 each morning, young pioneers with red scarves knotted around the neck, as in Moscow. And a gaggle of tiny children was permanently outside the hotel, cadging tin badges of Lenin from passing Russians, who gave them with the same eagerness that the American GIs had doled out gum to shoeshine boys in Saigon in the angry and not so distant past.
During the war, almost all foreigners in Hanoi were fraternal delegates from the so-called Socialist republics and the assumption was strong, especially among the young, that any ‘round-eye’ was a Lien-xo or Russian. I found I resented this mistake. The easiest way out was to say I was French; for whom there seemed a certain nostalgia among the older generation. ‘You French have no money, but a heart,’ they said.
We stayed at the Thong Nhat, the Unity Hotel, which during French rule had been the Métropole, much frequented by French officers. I looked for traces of the old French days – Chez Betty in the rue Paul Bert where, in 1954, volontaires who were not parachutists downed their last pots at the bar before jumping for the first time in their lives, at night, into the fiery hell of Dien Bien Phu. They were Frenchmen, légionnaires, but also Vietnamese, Africans all simple soldiers of the Corps Expéditionnaire – and there were always more volunteers than places in the planes. The last men into Dien Bien Phu jumped on the night of 5–6 May. Some landed in the barbed wire; one fell into the morgue near the underground hospital, where Doctor Paul Grauwin was amputating limbs without anaesthetic. Blundering through the ghostly darkness in search of his unit, he found himself hanging on to the human limbs of corpse after corpse of dead French soldiers for support. By the time he was rescued, he had drained an entire waterbottle of pastis and his face had a deathly tinge. A day later, on 7 May at 5.30p.m., Dien Bien Phu fell. I wondered what had become of Grauwin.
In the Hanoi museum, Major Minh, my Vietnamese guide, stolid-faced and proud, showed me a mock-up of the battle, complete with sound effects and a little red flag that popped up over the French command bunker at the end, to show it had finally been overrun. Appropriately, in this city where the bicycle was king, pride of place was given to one of the convoy of primitive machines which had ferried ammunition for the Viet Minh across hundreds of miles of jungle terrain to the front; and the copy of a message of encouragement from Winston Churchill to Général Christian de la Croix de Castries, the garrison commander, just before the end, was also on display. How pointless Churchill’s message seemed now. And there at Do Son, my history lesson of what the Vietnamese communists called the Patriotic War came full circle when, unheralded, I came across a smiling General Vo Nguyen Giap, legendary victor of Dien Bien Phu and the just-ended war against the Americans, strolling along the beach, as if on holiday, a group of army officers at his side. He stopped to chat with a couple of local girls. Then he came and exchanged pleasantries with us and signed autographs on the back of Ho Chi Minh postcards before strolling on again, a slight figure but one of evident moral strength.
Even more memorable than that rare sighting of Giap was a day spent at Ha Long bay. In Saigon, my French journalist friends who had covered the Indo-China war used to talk with a far-away look in their eyes about the beauty of Ha Long. The bay had the ethereal quality of a Chinese silk screen: towering rocks covered with vegetation jutted like dragons’ fangs out of fifty miles of emerald water. Coastal junks with their bat-wing sails, reddish-brown, glided through the rock-studded bay; the whole composition so peaceful and unusual that it seemed not of this world. I was not surprised that the French called it the eighth wonder of the world.
There were not many diversions during our tour, but that evening produced a gratifyingly amusing incident. A party of Czech tourists, many of them Prague intellectuals, were dining at our Do Son hotel. They befriended our French party and we were soon toasting one another and singing national songs. The Czechs became monumentally drunk and, throwing caution to the winds, burst into anti-Russian songs. Our Vietnamese hosts were bewildered and they were soon out of their depth as the jokes and songs took on a vigorously hostile, anti-Soviet tone; they looked down at the floor in evident embarrassment. Eventually, the Soviet technicians staying in the hotel stood up as one and stomped into the night; then even the card-carrying members of the French Communist Party had the courage to raise a cheer.
The road back to Hanoi carried us through rice fields refreshed with rain, past abandoned concrete pill-boxes, sad and decaying vestiges of the French war, part of a chain of defences the Foreign Legion had built in the Red River Delta. I was ruminating on the impossible courage of that French war when Major Minh, our stern-faced guide who was sitting next to me, started to talk. He lectured me about the crimes committed by the American forces in South Vietnam, in particular how there had been an American campaign to destroy the Vietnamese race by lacing 33, the local beer, with a sterilising agent. I thought things had gone far enough and told him that he could rightly accuse the US forces of all kinds of atrocities, but genocide, through a secret sterilisation programme of the local beer was not one of them and it was ridiculous to insist otherwise. The cat was well and truly out of the bag, and I owned up to my wicked past as a member of the capitalist press who for the past five years had worked as a journalist in Saigon.
I fully expected to be expelled; on the contrary, Minh and I subsequently had a series of most sensible conversations about the war, and at the end of the trip he stood up, his tight mouth breaking into a wide smile, and told the assembled members of the French Communist Party that there was among its group only one foreigner worthy of membership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. That was – pointing a pudgy finger at me – Ong [Monsieur] Jon Swain. The Vietnamese are an exasperating people, but they can be full of the oddest surprises.
Alas, of Chez Betty and other places there was not a trace. No one remembered them; my questions were met by blank silence.
Many nights, I sat in my little house opposite Samsen railway station and pondered the tragedy inside Cambodia’s sealed borders. Many times I went up to the border, as close as the Thai soldiers would allow me to go, and gazed at the little bridge across the stream which we had crossed after Phnom Penh’s fall. Many times I talked to refugees who had just come out. Cambodia’s self-imposed isolation made their claims impossible to verify, but their swollen feet, torn clothes and emaciated bodies gave the reports authenticity.
The great surge of emotion that had swept the world when Phnom Penh fell to the communists had by now fallen away to silence and what was happening in Cambodia, still completely closed to outsiders, was attracting little attention or indig
nation. Yet I knew, in my heart, that if any country deserved the world’s compassion and interest, it was Cambodia: ghastly stories were coming out of killings, atrocities and starvation. The world probably will never know how many died or had their lives irreparably broken by the Khmer Rouge’s rush to forge this new society. After five years of war which killed or wounded nearly a million people – a seventh of the population – I would argue that even one was one too many.
Five years of war had been followed not by a kind of peace and stability, as in Vietnam, which was sad enough anyway, but by a year of grim revolution. Kaj Bjork, Sweden’s ambassador to Peking, was the only westerner allowed to visit the country and glimpse what was happening. When he returned from Cambodia, he reported that the Khmer Rouge revolution had been ‘more radical and far-reaching than either the Chinese or Russian revolutions’. The countrywide upheaval had been planned long in advance by these dour radicals under their leader Pol Pot. It was a revolutionary imperative – the surest, fastest way to destroy the old ‘exploitive society’ of the towns. The Khmer Rouge saw no need to move at a slower, kindlier pace.
It was now clear that their revolution had obliterated what little progress had been made in the past hundred years and was in the process of destroying an ancient civilisation which had stayed intact for centuries. The US embassy in Thailand, which had set up a monitoring team on the Thai-Cambodia border, was rashly saying that the worst Khmer Rouge excesses were over. How wrong they turned out to be. The worst was yet to come.
But to get a better picture, as 17 April approached, the first anniversary of the ‘liberation’, I drove up to Surin province of Thailand to stay with Bizot, to try to make some sense of the Cambodian tragedy. It was a long drive and I arrived as the sun sank and darkness closed over the fields. I found the Frenchman living in a wooden house in the little town of Prasat, about thirty kilometres from the Cambodian frontier.
As I walked down the lane into his garden, a bucket of water thrown by a giggling Thai girl hit me full in the face. It was the Songkran Water Festival, celebrating the Thai New Year, and farangs were choice targets for the traditional soaking.
I had to smile – the Frenchman had not changed one bit. He was still perfectly in tune with his surroundings. Thanks to the Khmer Rouge, he had seen his work in Cambodia rendered futile. He had lost thousands of irreplaceable books. He had lost his Cambodian family and his house. Yet here he was in a faded sarong, his boxer dog Avi at his side, still surrounded by girls and immersed once more in his Khmer Buddhist texts. We sat up late into the night, our minds flying back to the fall of Phnom Penh, our confinement in the embassy, the sad partings. Hélène, his daughter, was safely in France, but of her mother – banished to the countryside – there was no news. However, Bizot was getting fleeting information from Cambodians trickling across the border; what they told him chilled the heart.
At the end of the war, most refugees wished only to return to their villages, to rebuild their homes, to farm and pick up the threads of their old lives. The Khmer Rouge had denied them this right and dispossessed them. It had forced them out into the countryside at gunpoint and made them settle and work in strange and sometimes distant places. It had severed their links with the past in all sorts of ways. In particular, it had done away with traditional musical instruments, abolished festivals, burned books and records and confiscated Buddhist manuscripts. Bizot, familiar with Cambodian culture, said the Khmer Rouge had robbed the people of Cambodia of life’s few pleasures. Phnom Penh radio frequently reported that Cambodia was a country of ‘genuine happiness’. However, the Khmer Rouge had sacrificed gaiety and spontaneity for uniform drabness. What used to be an elaborate, joyful marriage ceremony steeped in Buddhist tradition had been replaced by a cold handshake. There were no schools for the children, and the character as well as the mood of the country was changing.
New villages, built to accommodate the tens of thousands of people driven into the countryside and forced to fend for themselves, were of a tedious style. The wooden houses on stilts, with their Buddhist corner shrines and floors polished by years of bare feet, had been condemned as decadent and bourgeois and were fast vanishing. With them went the soul of the Cambodian village. In their place, the Khmer Rouge were said to be making the people build wooden shacks close to the ground, not where the peasant wanted – on winding paths to confuse the evil spirits – but laid out in tidy rows, like a housing estate. It was a way of deepening the gulf between the present and the past and controlling the people employed in the new collectives. Meanwhile, in empty Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge leadership was doing very nicely, living in the trim French villas around the embassies.
Everything now pointed to Cambodia remaining closed and withdrawn into itself for a long time, until the Khmer Rouge had attained the goals of their revolution. These were to turn Cambodia into a strong, independent country which, to quote Phnom Penh radio, had ‘neither rich nor poor, exploiter nor exploited’, was economically self-supporting and beholden to nobody. But what was plain was that these changes had been so radical, the sacrifices demanded of the people so great, that it was hard for Cambodians to believe they were living in the country of their birth. With the passing of time their wounds might heal, but for the present they ranked among the saddest people on earth.
On Bizot’s advice, I drove along the border road on the Thai side to the ruins of the great Khmer temple of Preah Vihear, on top of an escarpment closed in by forest which was Thai territory. The temple was Cambodian and was held by a detachment of Khmer Rouge soldiers; above it floated the blood-red flag of their Democratic Kampuchea. Five hundred yards away, the Thai military manned a hilltop position with machine guns. This was as close as I was allowed, and from it I could look down on Cambodia.
It was a blistering hot day and the Thai soldiers were sheltering from the heat, but I was determined to see Cambodia and stepped out of the thickly wooded jungle. Below me was the whole of the vast north Cambodian plain, open and brown in the heat, but without visible signs of life. Nothing moved; not a living thing, not even a thread of smoke from a village fire. It was deathly still. For more than an hour, I sat staring into this void, my head filled with memories. Inevitably my thoughts turned to Pran. As I gazed down on the barren and uninhabited countryside, I asked myself was he dead, or was he somewhere beyond my vision, trapped and toiling in the giant labour camp Cambodia had become?
The Eyes of Vietnam
Little by little, a curtain now began to rise on a new Indo-Chinese horror. The war in Vietnam was over. The Americans and the army of South Vietnam had been defeated. The country was unified. The killing had stopped. But in a sense there was something more murderous than gunfire. Many people, indeed many ordinary people, ignorant of politics, were in despair. They were suffering greatly, their spirits crushed by the creed of communism and a continuous rotting of the system. A dark hopelessness filled their souls. And so first hundreds, then thousands of Vietnamese put to sea in small fishing boats from the heavily guarded shores of Vietnam.
Each boatload was representative of Vietnam’s unhappy post-war society: there were teachers, writers, lawyers, students, former soldiers and young men of draft age. There were aircraft mechanics and shopkeepers and single mothers who fled because of official discrimination against their Amerasian children, the offspring of American GIs. There were whores; there were farmers and fishermen and, sometimes, there were disillusioned former Viet Cong fleeing the regime they fought so fiercely to install. The communist government often encouraged them to leave, regarding them as potential troublemakers. Many of the refugees were ethnic Chinese, former businessmen from Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown, who were being persecuted by Vietnam’s vociferously anti-Chinese post-war government.
After a special UN conference, Hanoi was forced to abandon its policy of evicting its unwanted Chinese and to adopt a programme of ‘orderly departures’ by air. But there were also numerous disenchanted Vietnamese who regarded escape, preferably
to the United States, as the only hope the future held. Desperately they put to sea in unseaworthy boats.
Many did not live to taste the freedom they sought. Just hours after they sailed from little fishing ports in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam, they found rape, robbery and a watery death in the Gulf of Thailand.
The pirates who attacked them were Thai fishermen. Piracy has prospered in the waters of the Gulf of Thailand for centuries, but falling fish catches, rising fuel costs, and the presence of gold and of defenceless and attractive women turned these law-abiding fishermen into monsters. The suffering of the Vietnamese boat people was almost beyond imagination; it consumed anyone who came into contact with it; for years after the war was over, I found myself coming back again and again to the subject and visiting the camps, principally in Thailand, where they were held. World opinion was slow to react to the horrors of piracy, however. The camps were controlled by the Thai army and visitors needed an official pass and an escort. But sometimes it was possible to sneak in, in the guise of an aid worker; then the Vietnamese would open their hearts, secure in the knowledge that they were not being eavesdropped on by the Thais.
I was astonished to find boat people who appeared to have come to terms with the horror of their flight and could talk dispassionately about their ordeals even to a complete stranger like myself. However, one day I met a mother who had virtually lost the will to live, a tragic representative of all their suffering. A Thai policeman had pulled her by the hair from the hold of a boat where she was hiding and had deliberately thrown her baby son into the water to drown when she resisted. And I still think back with sorrow to sixteen-year-old La Kieu Ly, soft-faced and graceful; she was the sole survivor of a boat raided by pirates.