by Will Podmore
The US government’s supposed justification for attacking Vietnam was the Tonkin Gulf Incident of 4 August 1964, when US naval vessels attacked Vietnam.33 As the CIA’s Director testified, “The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their offshore islands.”34 The USA attacked Vietnam, not vice versa. The British government backed the US aggression by all means short of direct military intervention, including ‘in country’ operations by SIS and special forces.35
The British and US governments support the coup in Indonesia
The US and British governments both wanted to oust Indonesia’s President Dewi Sukarno, who had led Indonesia’s independence struggle against the Dutch government. From 1958 to 1965, the US government trained, funded, advised and supplied Indonesia’s army so that it could launch a coup.36 The army’s scheme was to blame the Indonesian Communist Party [PKI] for an attempted coup, launch a full-scale war on the party, keep Sukarno as a figurehead president and take over the government. The army kept the US embassy informed, and knew that it could count on US diplomatic, military and economic support.37 In 1962, President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan ‘agreed to liquidate President Sukarno’.38
Edward Peck, assistant secretary of state in the Foreign Office, said on 27 November 1964, “there might therefore be much to be said for encouraging a premature PKI coup during Sukarno’s lifetime.”39 The US Ambassador to Indonesia, Howard P. Jones, said on 10 March 1965, “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.”40 In May, the Indonesian government released a copy of a telegram from the British Ambassador to the Foreign Office which noted that ‘our local army friends’ were working on a secret ‘enterprise’.41
On 5 October, the US Ambassador urged Washington to ‘Spread the story of PKI’s guilt, treachery and brutality’, adding that this was ‘perhaps the most needed immediate assistance we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely US effort’.42 Also on 5 October, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, told the Foreign Office, “a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to change … . The crucial question still remains whether the generals will pluck up enough courage to take decisive action.”
The Foreign Office replied that the generals are ‘going to need all the help they can get’ and pledged British backing.43 The Foreign Office hoped to ‘encourage anti-Communist Indonesians to more vigorous action in the hope of crushing Communism in Indonesia altogether’.44 On 9 October, it reported that it was mounting ‘short term unattributable ploys designed to keep the Indonesian pot boiling’.45 In February 1965, the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, which produced black propaganda, set up the South East Asia Monitoring Unit in Singapore to focus the propaganda war. In July, the Foreign Office appointed a Political Warfare Coordinator in Singapore.46 The governments of Britain, the USA, Australia and Malaysia all used the media to blame the PKI.47
In November, the leading Indonesian general, Major-General Suharto, ordered the destruction of the PKI, claiming he was preventing a revolution. The generals and their apologists accused the PKI of being innately genocidal, a projection to excuse their own genocide.48 Neither the PKI, nor President Sukarno, had prepared a coup.49 As the Australian Joint Intelligence Committee acknowledged, “evidence of actual PKI involvement – that is of prior planning by the Central Committee – is largely circumstantial.”50
The US Ambassador wrote that he ‘made it clear that Embassy and USG generally sympathetic with and admiring of what army doing’.51 When the generals approached the US and British governments for more arms for the killing, they duly provided. The CIA gave the army lists of names – list A, those to be killed, list B, those to be imprisoned - just as it had given lists of names to the Guatemalan army for its 1954 coup.52 This was standard CIA procedure, also used in Chile in 1971.53
Harold Wilson’s Labour government also supplied the generals with intelligence. Britain became the largest seller of arms to Indonesia and gave Suharto £2 billions’ worth of export credits. British companies supplied bombs, Hawk ground-attack aircraft, Tactica riot-control vehicles and machine-guns. British warships escorted a ship taking Indonesian troops through the Malacca Straits so that they could join in the killing. The government downgraded its commitment to Borneo in order to avoid ‘biting the Generals in the rear’, as the British Ambassador said.54
The army and other forces killed perhaps a million trade unionists, members of peasant organisations and others. President Richard Nixon boasted that the US aggression in Vietnam ‘provided a shield behind which the anti-communist forces found the courage and capacity to stage their counter-coup’.55
US war crimes in Vietnam
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, every US army division in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973 committed war crimes, as a 1970s Pentagon study found. A 1968 memorandum by a US Deputy Chief of Staff admitted, “The incidents authoritatively alleged show a cruel, sophisticated, calculated torture for information and make pious hypocritical arguments of statements about our treatment of POWs by the President …”56 Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson stated that American prisoners in the hands of the Vietnamese seemed to have been better treated than vice versa.57 Lieutenant Francis Reitemeyer recalled that he was taught to use ‘the most extreme forms of torture’ at the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird.58
The USA’s Phoenix programme was an assault on the Vietnamese people. After the 1971 Congressional hearings, Congress members Pete McCloskey, John Conyers, Ben Rosenthal and Bella Abzug concluded, “the Phoenix program is an instrument of terror; that torture is a regularly accepted part of interrogation … U.S. civilians and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with U.S. dollars.”59
Corporal Bart Osborn testified of the operations he knew about, “I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.”60 The CIA’s chief of operations in I Corps in 1970 admitted, “Sure we got involved in assassinations. That’s what PRU [Provincial Reconnaissance Units] were set up for – assassination. I’m sure the word never appeared in any outlines or policy directives, but what else do you call a targeted kill?”61
Journalist Don Luce called the South a ‘Prison Regime’ and wrote, “Phoenix was created, organized and funded by the CIA. The district and provincial interrogation centers were constructed with American funds, and provided with American advisers. Quotas were set by Americans. The national system of identifying suspects was devised by Americans and underwritten by the U.S. Informers are paid with US funds. American tax dollars have covered the expansion of the police and paramilitary units who arrest suspects.”62 By 1972, there were an estimated 200,000 political prisoners in the South.
Vietnam’s victory
It was always a national liberation struggle, waged by the whole Vietnamese people. Even CIA consultant Thomas L. Ahern Jr. acknowledged, “It is now clear that Hanoi directed an insurgency based on indigenous cadre organization drawn largely from the Southern peasantry.”63 Ho Chi Minh asked President Johnson in 1966, “Who has sabotaged the Geneva Agreements which guaranteed the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam? Have Vietnamese troops invaded the United States and massacred Americans? Or isn’t it the US government which, on the contrary, has sent US troops to invade Vietnam and massacre the Vietnamese people?”64
Tran Thi Tung, a Viet Minh member, said, “I never felt guilty about the killing I did. It was war. Wouldn’t you shoot
me if you saw me holding a weapon and pointing it at you? I think it was justified. But if I went to America and killed people there, I would feel very sorry and guilty. Since the Americans came to my country, I don’t feel guilty.”65
The best estimate, by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, is that the US war caused 3.8 million deaths, including two million civilians killed.66 In addition, 5.3 million civilians were injured, a quarter of them children under 13 years old. Years later, years too late, US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted that the war was ‘wrong, terribly wrong’.67
The USAF dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all targets in all history. The US assault caused ‘the utter destruction of much of the country of Vietnam and large portions of Laos and Cambodia’.68 Author Arthur Westing reported, “Despite a year of frontline combat experience in Korea, and despite three previous trips to Indochina to study the war zones of Cambodia and South Vietnam, I was unprepared for the utter devastation that confronted us wherever we turned. Our tour took us through much of the lowland region and some of the central hilly region. Never were we out of sight of an endless panorama of crater fields. As far as we could determine not a single permanent building, urban or rural, remained intact: no private dwellings, no schools, no libraries, no churches or pagodas and no hospitals. Moreover, every last bridge and even culvert had been bombed to bits.”69
US forces dropped 19 million gallons of defoliants on the South, destroying 12 million acres of forest. US forces evicted five million peasants from their homes. Valentine observed, “The massive bombing campaign turned much of Laos and Cambodia into a wasteland. The same was true in South Vietnam, where the strategy was to demoralize the Communists by blowing their villages to smithereens. Because of the devastation the bombing wrought, half a million Vietnamese refugees had fled their villages and were living in temporary shelters by the end of 1965, while another half million were wandering around in shock, homeless.”70 As McNamara told Johnson, “the picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”71
The US tried to impose such costs on the Vietnamese people that they would give up their struggle for independence. Yet in 1975, all US forces left Vietnam. The Vietnamese people instead imposed such costs on the invader that it had to leave. They decisively defeated the USA.
After the war, the British and US governments, and the EEC, punished Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by cutting off all food shipments, aid and trade. The $4.75 billion reconstruction aid that Nixon had promised was never given.
Vietnam did its best to rebuild its economy. It put more resources into education and health care, so literacy levels soared and disease rates fell. It also aided Cambodia. It sent 100,000 tons of rice, 20,000 tons of seed rice, three million metres of cloth and 500,000 ploughs to help feed and clothe the Cambodian people and to revive their farms. It sent medical aid, nurses and doctors. It also sent workers to purify the water, build schools and hospitals, generate electricity and repair Kampong Sam, the country’s only deep-water port. Laos and Vietnam signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation in 1977. Cambodia and Vietnam did likewise in 1979 and so did Cambodia and Laos.
But in Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge government killed a fifth of the population and destroyed industry and services. Then, backed by the US government, it attacked Vietnam in 1977-79, killing 30,000 Vietnamese and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
The Vietnamese defeated these attacks and in January 1979 the National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea, supported by Vietnam’s armed forces, overthrew Pol Pot. Vietnam acted in accordance with UN Resolutions on the rights and duties of nations to support national liberation movements. And, as British journalist William Shawcross judged, “For the overwhelming majority of the Cambodian people the invasion meant freedom.”72 The new Cambodian government ended the killing, started to rebuild the country and quickly got food and aid to the people.
But the NATO powers and the EEC, now joined by the Chinese government, did all they could to make it hard for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to rebuild their shattered societies. The EEC withheld UNICEF food aid from Vietnam and Cambodia.73 In 1979, Chinese forces, backed by the US government, invaded Vietnam, laying waste its six northern provinces before Vietnamese forces threw them out.
The UN Legal Bureau ruled that aiding Pol Pot was unjustifiable. But for a decade US and British governments recognised, funded and armed his forces. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent 250 ‘special forces’ personnel to train Pol Pot’s forces in sabotage and laying anti-personnel mines.74 Yet she told Parliament that there was ‘no British Government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or cooperating with the Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them’.75
The US government imposed sanctions on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia until 1995. US ally Thailand waged border wars against Laos in 1984 and 1987-88, and China backed anti-government rebels in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam until 1990.
Sugar-coated bullets
But Vietnam, having defeated first Japanese, then French and then US military aggression, succumbed to the sugar-coated bullets of the NATO powers’ economic aggression. Vietnam had been continuously under attack for some 35 years. Its people faced the huge task of rebuilding their war-torn country. Yet its economy was still largely based on subsistence farming and small-scale local trade. Just five per cent of the relatively advanced part of Vietnam’s economy was under state control.
Were they to rely on their own resources, or on foreign investment? Investing in increasing output per worker was the best way to raise living standards.76 But instead, and unlike Cuba, the Vietnamese government chose to try to compete with other poor countries in a race to the bottom by offering low-wage workers to foreign companies. The government chose to obey IMF/World Bank orders to encourage foreign investment. Vietnam embraced capitalism. The Vietnamese government accepted the usual IMF ‘austerity’ programme, which shifted public funds from serving the public to paying off the South Vietnamese regime’s debts to Western banks. Debt payments rose tenfold between 1986 and 1993. Of the 12,000 state enterprises, 5,000 were driven into bankruptcy. More than a million workers and some 200,000 public employees, including tens of thousands of teachers and health workers, were laid off.77
Public spending cuts forced people to pay for health care and education. Health clinics and hospitals were closed down. More people got infectious diseases. Recorded malaria deaths tripled during the first four years of the reforms. 750,000 children dropped out of the school system. When capitalism returned, so did high levels of petty trading, begging and prostitution.
Food aid, more imports and the dumping of subsidised US grains all helped to destroy local farms. The Asian Development Bank acknowledged, “While trade liberalization in rice has had a substantial positive impact on the economy as a whole, the benefits have largely accrued to wealthier and land-rich households, while the poor have not reaped significant benefits.”78 Food subsidies ended, causing local famines that affected a quarter of the country’s population. By 1995, Vietnam had levels of malnutrition second only to Bangladesh.
The country’s natural resources were sold off for short-term profit. Rare wildlife was sold to be eaten in posh restaurants. Fish stocks were destroyed. Illegal logging destroyed 2.5 million hectares of forest between 1976 and 1990.79 Cities had poor or no sanitation. Untreated industrial waste was dumped. So much ground water was extracted that houses collapsed. The rivers around Ho Chi Minh City were biologically dead and air pollution was dangerously high.80
In 2000, Vietnam’s government opened a stock market in Ho Chi Minh City. This boomed in 2006-07 and crashed in 2008. ‘State’ enterprises operated without state support as virtual private en
terprises and moved into finance, blowing up a huge property bubble. Criminal networks bound the communist party to the new private sector.81 The US government, the IMF and the World Bank approved it all. In 2007, Vietnam was admitted to the World Trade Organization. By 2013, GDP per head was $1,911.
In Cambodia too, capital ruled. It remained one of Asia’s poorest countries. About four million Cambodians lived on less than $1.25 a day and 37 per cent of children suffered from chronic malnutrition. By 2013, GDP per head was $1,007. A government spokesman, Siphan Phay, said, “We are not communists any more, we are not socialists any more. We believe in freedom of choice.”82 This meant high inequality and rampant crony capitalism, where a few robber barons seized vast tracts of forest and land to strip timber and set up sugar and rubber plantations.
Laos remained a centrally planned economy. Its economy grew by 6 per cent a year between 1988 and 2008 and by 7 per cent a year between 2008 and 2013, by 8.3 per cent in 2013. It cut its poverty rate from 46 per cent in 1992 to 22 per cent in 2013. Just 1.9 per cent were unemployed. By 2013, GDP per head was $1,661.