In June 1969, in response to a request by the Communist Party, which was preparing to participate in the Paris peace conference, we formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government. At first I was proposed for the interior ministry, but because of my law degree, we finally concluded that I could function most effectively as minister of justice. I had about fifty officials at the Ministry of Justice in the jungle. Only a few of the PRO cabinet members were communists: Nguyen Huu Tho, president of the NLF; Huynh Tan Phat, prime minister of the PRO: General Tran Nam Trung, minister of defense; and Nguyen Thi Binh, minister of foreign affairs; and even these people were Southerners committed to the idea of a separate policy for South Vietnam. Almost all of the NLF leadership were of the same mind, as were most of our supporters from around the world.
The Hanoi leadership knew all this and orchestrated their position toward us accordingly. They accepted and supported the NLF platform at every point, and gave the firmest assurances of respect for the principle of South Vietnamese self-determination. Later, of course, we discovered that the North Vietnamese communists had engaged in a deliberate deception to achieve what had been their true goal from the start, the destruction of South Vietnam as a political or social entity in any way separate from the North. They succeeded in their deception by portraying themselves as brothers who had fought the same battles we were fighting and by exploiting our patriotism in the most cynical fashion. Nevertheless, the eventual denouement would not have taken place except for several wholly unpredictable developments.
After the Paris peace agreement was signed in 1973, most of us were preparing to create a neutralist government, balanced between Northern leftists and Southern rightists. We hoped that America and the other signers would play an active role in protecting the agreement. Certainly no one expected Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. No one expected America’s easy and startlingly rapid abandonment of the country. I myself, the soon-to-be minister of justice, was preparing a reconciliation policy that specifically excluded reprisals. But the sudden collapse of the South Vietnamese regime (caused partly by the hasty departure of many top Saigon leaders), together with abandonment by the Americans, left me and other “independent socialists” with no counterweight to the huge influx of Northern communists. It is important to note that our views were not based solely on naiveté. During the sixties neither the NLF leaders nor the Politburo ever hoped for total military victory against the Americans and their clients. Our entire strategy was formulated with the expectation that eventually we would be involved in some kind of coalition government. Such a government would have been immune to outright North Vietnamese domination and could have expected substantial international support.
The political climate was at that time a complex mix of three distinct factions: communist, non-communist, and anti-communist. The silent majority, if I can use that expression, were the non-communists. Le Due Tho, who negotiated the Paris peace agreement with Dr. Kissinger, in his news conference in Paris in 1972, said:
For our part we have said many times, since I returned to Paris, this is the fifth time we have declared clearly that the DRV government [Hanoi] and the PRO [Viet Cong] have never wished to force a Communist government on South Vietnam. We only want there to be in South Vietnam a National Reconciliation government having three segments, supporting peace, independence, neutrality and democracy. I can clarify for you what the three segments are: one segment belonging to patriots…people who don’t like the US, but who also may not support the PRG and DRV; one segment belonging to the PRG; one belonging to the Saigon government. A government like this would reflect the real political situation in South Vietnam and would be a resolution in accord with the situation and with logic.
Until March 1975, no one among us, including the Politburo members, imagined the Saigon regime’s collapse and the abandonment by the Americans. We were preparing for a coalition government.
Under these circumstances, a coalition government dedicated to concord and reconciliation was (and still is) the most pragmatic as well as the most humane means toward national unity. Such a government would also be in accord with the strong Vietnamese moral tradition of showing grace to the defeated and forgetting past hatred, a tradition that historically marked Vietnamese conduct even toward the Mongol and Chinese aggressors. The solemn communist promises of reconciliation without reprisals and with respect for Southern independence that were so attractive to the West and to the South Vietnamese people thus appeared to be built on a realistic assessment of the military situation, the internal political climate, and the Vietnamese character. It was our assessment as well, and it shaped our strategy for the postwar period.
Almost every Vietnamese family had ties with both communists and anti-communists. A million North Vietnamese escaped to the South in 1954, leaving millions of their relatives behind living under and working for the communist regime. Many Viet Cong guerrillas had relatives in the South Vietnamese army and throughout the war there were innumerable defections, both overt and hidden, from one side to the other. Family attachments, avarice, patriotism, and self-interest caused sympathies to shift and evolve so that the line between loyalties was rarely clear. (The three-star general Tran Van Trung, head of the psychological warfare of the Thieu regime, hid in his house his sister-in-law Mme. Duong Thi Chi, a Viet Cong cadre, who was head of the people’s uprising committee in Hue. She is now a member of the National Assembly. A four-star general, Cao Van Vien, commander-in-chief of the ARVN, hid in his villa one of his wife’s nephews who was the son of a communist army general. A three-star general, Hoang Xuan Lam, hid in his house a communist commando colonel who was his relative. General Lam was once commander of the first military corps of South Vietnam.)
Unfortunately when the war did end, North Vietnamese vindictiveness and fanaticism blossomed into a ferocious exercise of power. Hundreds of thousands of former officials and army officers of the Saigon regime were imprisoned in “re-education camps.” Literally millions of ordinary citizens were forced to leave their homes and settle in the so-Called New Economic Zones. One month after the “re-education” program was imposed, few of those arrested were released. I asked the communist leaders why they didn’t free the people in the camps as promised. I was told that the authorities had said only that the former officials and army officers of the Saigon regime should bring with them food enough for a month. The government had never promised that the term of “re-education” would last for a month!
A rigid authoritarianism settled down over the entire country, an authoritarianism supported by the third largest army in the world, although Vietnam is among the twenty poorest nations in the world. And where in all this are the feelings of the common people? Members of the former resistance, their sympathizers, and those who supported the Viet Cong are now filled with bitterness. These innocent people swear openly that had they another chance, their choice would be very different. One often hears sentiments such as this one: “I wouldn’t give them even a grain of rice now. I would pull them out of their hiding places and denounce them to the authorities.” At the same time, the myth of Ho Chi Minh, the great patriot, has dissolved to nothingness.
The radical and hidden nature of the Northern takeover resulted in the displacement of virtually every moderate and neutralist element. There was simply nothing to stop the most rapacious .and destructive communist plans from being carried out. Carpet-bagging Northern officials fought each other, sometimes at gunpoint, for the best offices, the most comfortable houses, the most lucrative positions.
Despite their misfortune, the people still kept their sense of humor: They frequently ridiculed the Party’s slogans. Formerly Ho Chi Minh called on the population in the North to double and triple their efforts to liberate their brothers and sisters of the South. Nowadays one hears the same slogans, lightly changed as follows: “Everybody should double his efforts to buy a radio and bike for the Party officials, and triple his production so that the officials can have a new house and a pr
etty girlfriend.”
Throughout the country, the people have passively resisted forced collectivization. The Party for its part tries to ascribe economic failure to natural calamities and the destruction of war, but in fact the underlying causes are social and psychological. On the one hand there is widespread popular discontent and on the other hand the failures of a totalitarian regime. Behind the fagade of unanimity, the silence and resignation of the population, there is the threatening reality that the Party’s daily Nhan Dan (Pravda of Vietnam) can no longer dissimulate: “Our plant and other equipment run at only 50 percent of their capacity.” Theft of public goods and property is common. There is no close cooperation between the different bureaucracies and sometimes these clash. We know what will become of the regime if this situation persists. The cadres work less because they no longer believe in their communist leaders. In June 1981, Hoang Tung, Party theoretician and editor of Nhan Dan, in a desperate effort to save the situation, asked Moscow to grant a billion rubles to Vietnam to save the country from collapse, an indication of Hanoi’s deep dependence on the Soviet Union. Moreover, Hanoi allowed the Soviets to build piers and other facilities to service nuclear submarines at the former U.S. supply base at Cam Ranh Bay.
Vietnam is now practically an instrument of Soviet expansionism in Southeast Asia. There are at least 10,000 Soviet advisers in Vietnam today. Since joining Comecon in June 1978, Vietnam has steadily become an integral part of the Soviet system, especially so because the leaders of Hanoi have transposed to Indochina the Soviet model of Eastern Europe. Le Duan, the secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, told the Fourth Party Congress on December 26, 1976 that “the Vietnamese revolution is an integral part of the world revolution,” and he firmly insisted that “the Vietnamese revolution is to fulfill the internationalist duty and the international obligation” it owes to the Soviet Union. In my talks with Party leaders, I told them: “You can make a revolution without clothes but you cannot make a revolution by hunger, repression, and building gulags.” I protested that they had cheaply sold Vietnam’s independence to the USSR. The Vietnamese people hated the Soviets intensely, calling them “Americans without dollars”; many Western visitors have been attacked by the children and the people because they were mistaken for Russians.
Certainly the occupation of Cambodia does not mean the end of the regime’s international ambitions. Because of its consistent military and ideological involvement in the revolutionary movements in the region, and the support and military power of the Soviet Union, Hanoi has the will and also the means of exporting the revolution beyond the borders of Indochina when conditions permit. Moreover, the Soviet Union’s Communist Party has assigned its Vietnamese brothers the job of training not only Laotian and Cambodian communists, but also other communists in the region, particularly those of Thailand and Malaysia. This takes place in the Central School of Nationalities of Hoa Binh in North Vietnam and at the Nguyen Ai Quoc Institute (a familiar name of Ho Chi Minh), the training school of the Party leaders.
Not many people can believe these things, just as they could not believe in the past that the North would take over the South and set up a communist regime. But the truth is that for the first time in our history, people have risked their lives to leave Vietnam; large numbers of Vietnamese never tried to flee their country to escape French domination or the American intervention. The refugee exodus began in earnest as the active population was systematically drafted into the protracted war against Cambodia and occupied Laos. For the first time since 1945, when famine killed two million people, Vietnam has been facing grave and widespread food shortages because fanatical leaders have sacrificed their people in order to fulfill the obligations of “internationalism.”
The developing catastrophe brought back to me the memory of my father visiting me in prison in 1967 and saying: “I can’t understand why you abandoned everything—a good job, a bright future, a happy family—to join the communists. In return for your sacrifice they will never give you the smallest part of what you have now. Worse, they will betray you and persecute you all your life.”
I answered that he would simply have to accept the fact that he was giving one of his six children to struggle for a free and independent Vietnam. In that jail cell I felt I was fulfilling my obligation to fight against the military dictatorship that was oppressing my country. And to me it was not just an obligation, it was an honor. In my fervor I believed Ho Chi Minh’s protestations that nationalists and communists could coexist in a “special” Vietnamese form of socialism.
I was tragically wrong. Like many Western intellectuals, I believed that the Northern communists, who had made heroic sacrifices in their own struggle for independence, would never by choice become dependent on any superpower. With other liberals I shared the romantic notion that those who had fought so persistently against oppression would not themselves become oppressors. The truth, however, has nothing romantic about it. The North Vietnamese communists, survivors of protracted, blood-drenched campaigns against colonialism, interventionism, and human oppression, became in their turn colonialists, interventionists, and architects of one of the world’s most rigid regimes, becoming at the same time dependent clients of the Soviets.
The golden opportunity to harness the energy of 55 million people to rebuild their shattered country came in April 1975 when foreign involvement ended. That was the moment to initiate a policy of national reconciliation without reprisals, to establish a representative government that would include a spectrum of political parties and pursue a foreign policy of nonalignment. That was the moment to foster a spirit of brotherhood and focus the country’s attention on the task of national reconstruction.
The communists, however, chose aggrandizement rather than reconciliation. The moment of military victory was the moment they began to eliminate the NLF. Many of my friends lamented, “They buried the NLF without even a ceremony.” At the simple farewell dinner we held to formally disband the NLF in 1976, neither the Party nor the government sent a representative. It was a gesture of scorn toward the nationalistic and democratic principles for which the Viet Cong had bled so copiously and which the international liberal community had sustained so faithfully.
In their incessant and predatory pursuit of concentrated power, the communists have divided Vietnam instead of healing it. Their strategy has been to dislocate as much of the social fabric as possible in order to preclude the formation of a coherent opposition. Even the Party itself has been kept off balance. One-third of the Central Committee was purged during the Fourth Congress in 1976. Soon after, the 1.5 million Party members of 1976 were reduced to 700,000. By 1980 new members were recruited to bring the membership to about 1.7 million. Under the pretext of eliminating pro-Chinese and corrupt elements, some 300,000 members were purged during the Fifth Party Congress of 1982. Also purged were thirty-three members of the Central Committee and six members of the Politburo, including General Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.
Political power is now being concentrated in the families of Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh’s successor, and of Le Due Tho, Kissinger’s Paris adversary. Le Hong, Le Duan’s son, is chief of security for the Politburo. Le Anh, another son, commands the missile defenses for the entire country. Le Duan’s son-in-law is head of the air force and his brother-in-law has charge of the Party propaganda apparatus. Le Due Tho’s brother, Nguyen Due Thuan, has become secretary general of the trade unions while another brother, Mai Chi Tho, is mayor of Ho Chi Minh City and chief of security in the South. His cousin, Nguyen Due Tarn, has been promoted to the powerful position of chief of Party organization.
I was given the opportunity to work for this government. After the communists had eliminated the NLF and imprisoned most of those they considered potential enemies, they offered me the position of vice-minister of nutrition. I refused. I could not ally myself with a regime that had proved itself inhuman and that the people hated so passionately. During the 1960s, I gave up a go
od job to fight for certain ideals—which are still the ideals of the Vietnamese people: independence, democracy, and social welfare. I have now to acknowledge my responsibility for the disastrous state of my country.
After refusing the government’s offer, I lived on a small farm outside Saigon to escape continual surveillance. But I still had two escorts, a car, and a high salary. Finally, though, in November 1979, I managed to deceive my escorts and flee the country on a boat loaded with forty refugees.
If anything, my obligation to my countrymen is greater now because the oppression they are suffering is unparalleled in Vietnam’s history. The wars against the French and Americans, grim though they were, still had a dimension of humanity to them. Today the Vietnamese in particular and the Indochinese in general are fighting against the most obdurate and persistent imperialists of the century, the Soviets. And there are no antiwar movements in Moscow.
What is worse, public opinion in the free world is not yet ready to support resistance to the Vietnamese communists or their Russian patrons. There is still a confused feeling that those who are against communism must be reactionary while those who are progressive will necessarily support the socialist regimes of this world.
But the stark lesson of Vietnamese concentration camps and Vietnamese boat people should affect even this ingrained attitude. No previous regime in my country brought such numbers of people to such desperation. Not the military dictators, not the colonialists, not even the ancient Chinese overlords. It is a lesson that my compatriots and I learned through witnessing and through suffering in our own lives the fate of our countrymen. It is a lesson that must eventually move the conscience of the world.
There Will Be War Volume III Page 31