BULLETS AND BALLOT-BOXES PEACE HOPES IN VIETNAM MAY HINGE ON VILLAGE ELECTIONS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31344, 14 April 1967, Page 12

BULLETS AND BALLOT-BOXES PEACE HOPES IN VIETNAM MAY HINGE ON VILLAGE ELECTIONS

(By

MICHAEL GARDNER

of the “Economist”)

The focal point for world peace hopes during the next few weeks may be neither Washington nor Moscow, New York nor Peking but Quang Nam. Or, if you prefer it, An Loc or Phuoc Binh, or any one of a score of unlikely-sounding places in war-battered South Vietnam, where, against the background music of artillery and mortar fire, thousands of peasants each week are electing-their “village councils”.

It is all a brave experiment in establishing grass-roots democracy. (One might say, “I’e-establishing.” The Vietnamese had their own primitive system of democracy in the villages and hamlets even before the French occupied their country 100 years ago.) Brave, literally, because any man who comes toward as a candidate is also automatically making himself a candidate for a Viet Cong bullet. (In one village in Quang Nam the Communists kidnapped all nine candidates.)

Little World Attention AU of this will no doubt get little play in the world’s press. Television viewers, in Britain especially, will continue to be shown the war in terms of American bombs rather than Vietnamese ballot-boxes. But what is going on at Quang Nam is essentially what the war is about. If the western world does not see this clearly, the Communists certainly do. Perhaps nothing has shown up the essential weakness of the Communists’ case more glaringly than their intensified propaganda-cum-terrorist campaign to keep the villagers from voting. The Hanoi Government and the National Liberation Front—the political wing of the Viet Cong—know that if the village elections are conducted in orderly democratic fashion, they will create an atmosphere of confidence for the more important presidential and parliamentary elections to be held later this year. Scales Tilted If these are similarly successful, then the whole policy of President Johnson will be very substantially vindicated. The new Saigotr Government —though it may leave a lot to be desired—will have a new look in the eyes of the world. And the scales of the propaganda struggle, which is as important as the military struggle, may be tilted against the Communists for perhaps the first time.

A successful series of demo-cratically-conducted elections will do more than anything else to discredit the myth on which the whole Communist case rests; that the Viet Cong movement is today a great popular uprising. The weakness of this theory, to which so many well-meaning western liberals subscribe, is that it is sadly out of date. The Vietminh may have had the character of a national uprising in the anti-colonial

period. But a lot of water, and a lot of blood—most of it shed by the Viet Cong, not the Americans—has flowed under the bridge since the fifties. Any honest reporter who travels up and down Vietnam, talking to villagers and to politicians, can find plenty of dissatisfaction with the Central Government, plenty of apathy, undercurrents of criticism of the Americans. But positive support for the Viet Cong—no. Signs Encouraging How far this crash programme in democracy will be successful is another matter. It is all rather a twelfth-hour effort, which should have been started long ago. And it may be too concentrated for the Vietnamese, or any Asian

people, to digest. And undoubtedly the Viet Cong’s propaganda-cum-intimi-dation campaign will have some effect. Indeed, if the elections are safely completed in about half of the villages and hamlets, the Americans and the Saigon Government will be highly pleased. But the first signs are encouraging. Vietnam may still be a mess, but things are going better in many ways than the pundits forecast six months ago. And every vote that is cast in odd-ball places like Quang Nam, or An Loc or Phuoc Binh, may do more to resolve the real issues, and so help bring the war to an end, than waves of American bombers, and pious exhortations by well-meaning prelates.