Cold War Adds Colour To The Ben Hai Bridge

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29250, 7 July 1960, Page 8

Cold War Adds Colour To The Ben Hai Bridge

(Bv

NGUYEN VAN THAI,

I, a Reuter Correspondent)

NEUTRAL ZONE OF THE 17TH Central Vietnam—- . The Bridge over the River Ben Hai is painted half in red' and half in green and the reason for this is the cold war. The Ben Hai runs into the South China Sea at the 17th parallel, dividing line between Communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam. It is a small tropical river, fringed by jungle, with a rich rice-growing valley at its estuary. But odd things have been going on in this quiet little valley since 1954 when the world Powers, meeting at Geneva, decided to split Vietnam in two. Radios boom out in the early evening with propaganda broadcasts, the jungle has been stripped back from the edge of the river and propaganda slogans draped along the banks and the flagpoles on each side have been getting taller and taller. But the' oddest thing of all is the bridge. It is painted green on the northern side, red on the southern ' side- and '■ has a “neutral” unpainted strip of rusty brown in the middle. The region for about three miles each, side of the Ben Hai is a neutral zone policed by the three-nation' ■ International Control Commission. This true.e team consisting of'-Indians, Poles and Canadians was set up by the Geneva conference. To visit the southern part of the neutral zone you have to get special permission from the Governor of the South Vietnamese province of Quang Tri - Recently I got this permission and made the trip by car.' The Ben Hai is about 60 miles north i>f the Central Vietnam capital of Jiue. The rivet at the bridge is about 300; yards Wide, slow flowing and muddy. Further upstream it narrows almost to a creek you can wade across. The bridge is surfaced with Wooden planks and it has tall sides of criss-crossed steel beams i’.” Only -the-Postmen . Once ‘it carried all the traffic of the main national highway running between Hanoi in the north and Saigon in the south, Vietnam’s two main cities. Now the only people who go across it are the postmen bringing their mail on Tuesdays and Fridays, .and members of . the -International Control Team whose most frequent job is to fetch back the buffalo; which have swum over the river. ; A 'bamboo , barricade stops visitors from going on to the bridge at the southern end. It is guarded by a South Vietnam policeman with a pistol in ' his belt. Under the truce agreement no troops are allowed in the neutral zone. I asked him how the small police force I saw there could guard the whole border from infiltration. He said: "We can’t. We just take care of this bit Over towards the Laos border the jungle’is-very thick and the tigers take care of them for us. ’ About 30 yards back from the bridge on each side were enormous flagpoles with huge flags fluttering on them—the red and-gold barred flag of the south and the red and gold single star flag of the north. / ■ I estimated the white painted flagpole on the southern side at 35 yards high. The flag at the top was at least three or four times

bigger than the normal official flag. I learned from the border guard that the two sides had competed in getting' their flagpole higher. The guard said that early in 1958, the North Vietnamese who were having difficulty in increasing the height of their pole, had called in an engineer from Hanoi to build a cement base. Backwards to Freedom “When he finished his work he walked backwards across the bridge to see how the flagpole looked. He kept on walking backwards past the North Vietnamese police guard. Then when he got about a third of the way across the bridge he turned round and ran into the South and asked for asylum.” The truce commission forbids the use of loudspeakers to make propaganda broadcasts. But, according to the guards, the northerners get over this by simply turning the radios up at full force on the Northern bank and Radio Hanoi broadcasts waft across the entire valley.

I read a number of slogans against the United States and the Ngo Dinh Diem government of South Vietnam painted bn bamboo banners on ' the northern bank. I learned from truce commission officials that most of the complaints in the neutral zone are about small matters. The larger part of them concern strayed animals or allegedly unauthorised visitors.

In international law, they say, a bridge over an international waterway is usually regarded as belonging to both sides. But for practical administration purposes the bridge over the Ben Hai is divided by a line on the middle plank and a narrow strip on each side is “neutral territory.” This is how the bridge got its odd colour scheme. Late in 1958 the North Vietnamese began to paint the bridge, according to the guards. The North Vietnamese authorities pointed out the south had painted the whole -bridge in 1955 and it was their turn. The south objected and immediately began painting their half. The north had already got beyond the half way point so the south chipped off this paint and did it over again' their own colour. At this point the international commission, which had taken note of the dispute, saw chances of this “war in a paintpot” getting out of hand and suggested the project be stopped. It was, and the bridge has had the same “two-tone” colour- scheme ever since.