South-East Asia
Indochina the end of the road, and beyond
Bill Manson
What a relief! It's nearly over. In the ghastly sufferings of a million refugees in Vietnam, in the horrifying stranglehold on Phnom Penh You can see it, you can feel the wind. You Shudder, but you realise that now, at last, thirty years' struggling by the West will have only delayed the inevitable. The east wind is Prevailing in the East. The Vietnamese in Particular have been seeing off uninvited guests for a long time: the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Mingh Chinese in the fifteenth, the Western colonialists in the twentieth.
The resurgent powers of countries like Vietnam clashed with the failing strength of the colonial Europeans. And it was the British who set off this thirty years' pointless conflict causing millions of casualties in the name of one thing which we all hold dear, independence. Or shall we say an Englishman? Come back to 1945 when the British army was busying itself accepting Japanese surrenders throughout the Far East. Admiral Louis Mountbatten as he was then, told General Douglas Davis Gracey to spend five weeks in Saigon disarming the Japanese troops and looking after liberated allied prisoners of war. lie arrived to a grand welcome of British and American flags, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in the streets, thinking he was the first of the foreign delegations to recognise their new indigenous national government of unity. The first since Louis XVI took over a Portion of Vietnam in 1787. Gracey, who can't have heard one of Roosevelt's speeches on Indochina's right to Independence, snubbed them all, spoke only to the Vichy French, rearmed 5,000 of them and handed out guns to the Japanese troops and told them to empty the government buildings of Vietnamese. The hapless Viets had not just stumbled on power. They had planned for twenty years, had fought with American help like the Lao and the Khmers, against the Japanese and Vichy French, and had come to leadership of their own country by conquest.
Small difference it made. The Americans did a volte-face and gave the French 160 million dollars worth of arms. The only possible reason Must have been an early fear of the communist ougbear. Soon the expeditionary forces were sailing out with their new secondhand equipment to put down the insolent natives who were now at least a million less — starved to death by the Vichy collectors of food for Japanese troops. ,,.So ten years were lost: Ho Chi Minh and „ulaP, who had started with an army of thirtyfour men in 1944, took on the slow job of °, rganising against a mechanical army of hardened Westerners. The climax of Dien Bien ,Phu should have been the end. But now the hurt pride of dying colonialism became inter ingled with the tensions of the Cold War. Even China and Russia at Geneva didn't feel Strong enough to force an greement on the Viet Minh's right to rule a united Vietnam. The disappointed Ho accepted a weak promise by the French to supervise elections in 1956, which they duly forgot about. Communism became the Thing. Now that America had taken over as world policeman, the Crusaders were out to support anything anywhere that wasn't Communist. Based on if) is negative qualification, the Diem regime ecame in the American press the most powerful weapon" for -rolling back Communism in Asia". His publicity described him as the
Miracle Man of Vietnam. The excesses of Diem, his brother and his brother's wife were ignored while the myth of freedom was erected — fooling everybody except the Vietnamese who rejoiced when he was assassinated.
By the 'sixties when America's involvement with Vietnam was at its peak, when America's aid to South Vietnam made it unnecessary for Diem even to bother collecting taxes from the peasants, the reasons for 'putting our boys in' had multiplied: helping that part which was now a complete state, the South, a democracy in need; containing Red China; preventing the toppling dominoes right through South-East Asia; preventing the tide of the 'Yellow Peril' spreading beyond Asia — "better", as the singer, Burl Ives, said in '65, "to fight 'em there than here in the US, where it'd be messy."
All the time the suffering and the deaths of the people over whom this global battle was being fought, were increasing. The South Vietnamese were taught the techniques of massive firepower; the successes of the Viet Cong, and in Laos of the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese laid open vast areas which became free-fire zones: three quarters of the towns in Northern Laos were wiped out.
Lastly it became a question of pride. The anguish of the French, who for a different reason had fallen into the same trap, was repeating itself in the bastion of democracies: "Peace with honour."
And now the Americans have gone home, because their cause was too ephemeral and expensive to sustain for any long period of time; and with the absence of the vast firepower and the backbone supplied by the South's benefactor, the way has been open for the erosion process to begin in earnest. Why did Thieu back down so suddenly? Is it the hope of survival on a smaller scale? Or is it the beginning of his exit, by face-saving stages? The fact that the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of refugees began, at least, relatively peacefully indicates at the least some communication with the other side. And yet it seems iilogical that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese should be so willing to let so many people go. If the writing is on the wall, why are so many fleeing the Communist advance? Out of fear of the bombing of areas taken over by Saigon's enemies, landowners and landlords fearing confiscation and being labelled 'exploiters of the people'? Above all, perhaps, there are the memories of the Catholics of Hue who remember the mass executions when the Viet Cong entered the city in 1968. One thing is certain: Thieu's belated eut and run will have not only axed half his country, but will have seriously affected the fighting morale of an army being deserted at a rate of 24,000 men a month. How can he make them believe there is any point in fighting for him? The moves to meet the oncoming challenges to their rule have made somewhat similar animals of Thieu and Lon Nol. Both have become increasingly isolated from their people and their supporters. Both are sitting on rumbling volcanoes of discontent. Last Week's attempted coup in Saigon brought constant rumours of Lon Nol's withdrawal, sanctioned publicly by the man himself, "if it will remove an obstacle to peace." Their departure is inevitable, and probably sooner than later. The basic reason is that they have bent to the West wind. The regular procession of Western powers retreating back to their legitimate spheres of influence, might have been sufficient warning to an astute man. Bloodbath? It is probably the small-scale reprisals which are most to be feared, the private settlement of scores. But what the leaders of Hanoi desire most of all is not a military take-over but a prior political settlement, providing for a coalition which the PRG could dominate and so achieve an assured and smooth transition of power. The continued presence of Mr Thieu is the main obstacle.
Let us assume the take-over. Ten years hence, we are standing in the Imperial Palace of Hue, the new capital of a united Vietnam. The rule of the Vietnamese will not be democratic. It wilL have a strong centralised body. Democracy will rise to village level: cadres and committees, reminiscent of the traditional village set-up, including common land for cultivation. The one massive benefit that the system can give, is stability. It was a Frenchman, Devillers, who said, "For eighty years [under the French] the Vietnamese have been in search of a new system of social values in which everyone can find his place without any discussion. They need a secure place in a secure system. Marxism at least in the 'Vietnamese context is one of the systems in which a given place can easily be found. It is not as difficult as a democratic system in which every individual has to struggle to find out what his place is." 1985-style stability will probably imply a Vietnam dominant in its region, with Cambodia and Laos both left-dominated. Thailand, the oft-quoted bastion against such fallen dominoes, will probably have continued its lean leftward, returning to its historic adaptability, secret of its millennium of independence. While neighbourly relations will be necessary, the traditional Lao, Thai and Khymer wariness ot the Vietnamese will act as a natural barrier uncomplicated by ideological pretensions. A Communist Vietnam can be expected to display the same polite independence towards the big neighbour, China, whose awakening so changed the development of the area. The competition for loyalty from the USSR will continue for as long as the Soviets fear the combined power of the East; relations with the West may take longer to thaw. But the sooner the West seeks to ally itself with the factors that unite, rather than divide the Indochinese states of Asia, the sooner this sorry post-colonial phase can slip permanently into the past. The pity of the conflict burning so destructively around Vietnam and its neighbours has been the lack of necessity of it, the waste of men, waste of time. "If you ... had known even a little bit about my nation, you could have solved the Vietnamese problem in 1945. Just a little history. Just a little culture . . " So said Professor Vo Van Kim. If the lesson is learned, the first rubbing together of East and West may not be all negative.
Bill Manson, formerly the New Zealand Broadcasting Company's correspondent in South-East Asia, is currently writing a book about the area and its wars.
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