INSIDE NORTH VIETNAM HOW LIFE HAS CHANGED SINCE THE BOMBING PAUSE

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31871, 26 December 1968, Page 8

INSIDE NORTH VIETNAM HOW LIFE HAS CHANGED SINCE THE BOMBING PAUSE

‘By

EDWARD BEHR,

I. writing from Parts)

("Newsweek" Feature Service)

In the brief weeks since the total halt of American bombing raids, North Vietnam has become a country that is trying very hard not to let its sense of triumph blur the great difficulties that still lie ahead.

That, at least, is the consensus of Hanoi-watchers in Paris, which has become a kind of Western clearing-house for information, rumours and speculation about current conditions in North Vietnam.

The mood of the country “is one of quiet triumph and ill • concealed jubilation,” according to one diplomatic source recently returned from Hanoi. Like Londoners after the blitz, the North Vietnamese feel that they have taken the worst the enemy could throw at them, and by refusing to buckle have won a victory almost as important as the clear military decision at Dien-Bien-Phu in 1954. At the same time, Hanoi is leaning hard on the official line that “the war is not over yet” There are signs of war weariness among the Vietnamese that did not exist during the three years of bombing, and popular pressure for almost any kind of peace is building. "It will certainly become increasingly difficult,” says one returnee, “to get the North Vietnamese to accept the policy of fighting while negotiating.” For what it is worth—and that may not be much—the experts believe that the Hanoi politburo is also willing to take a compromise peace. According to this analysis, the influence of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Dien-Bien-Phu and the leading exponent of all-out military victory, has waned. His I colleagues, pre - eminently (including President Ho Chi (Minh, are now willing to pin [Their hopes on diplomatic and [political manoeuvres over the [course of the next decade. I Meanwhile, what sort of I shape is the heavily bombed [country in? Returning visitors are unanimous in their reports that the North Vietnamese economy is functioning adequately, and that the nation as a whole has been dented rather than demolished. Enough rice is growing in the paddies to meet the basic demand for food. Equally

important, the cratered roads an ' rickety bridges have been patched up and trucks are moving the produce to the cities—often at a top speed of 10 miles an hour, but moving nonetheless.

: The principal harbour of ! Haiphong is glutted with ' ships, so much so that )it takes two weeks to ' off-load high-priority food, ! textiles and medicines and at t least five weeks to off-load military supplies and other s hardware. “But it’s uncanny 1 how they know how to put r their finger on anything they r need,” says one recent visitor, - “and there just isn’t any j pilferage.” , The North Vietnamese r citizenry is basking in the s bombing halt, and evidently t regards it as permanent. Pro • fessor Laurent Schwartz, the > eminent French mathemati- ) cian, recently toured the ; country as an official guest and reports “a considerable 1 psychological change.” > Many children have been ! returned to the cities after • having been evacuated to the ! countryside, Schwartz says. “One sure sign of the new ■ relaxed attitude,” he adds, “is 1 that the individual road-hole ’ (bomb) shelters are full of ' water from the seasonal rains. ;They should be emptied out ’every day, but people no ! longer bother.” A Safety Valve 1 For the time being, the '■ Government is diverting its eyes from such neo-capitalis-i tic enterprises as curbside markets and a certain amount !of black marketeering. “1 talked about this to Prime ( Minister Pham Van Dong,” ) Schwartz reports. “He said ! that they are a valuable | safety valve, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t leave i them alone. They help over- . come the present shortcom- ■ ings of the nationalised indus- - tries.” A large part of North VietInam's manpower and produc-! | tion is still devoted to the [military. Its 300,000-man [ army is just about intact, and supply trucks rumble ceaselessly toward the border —the Laotian border—where the deadly hide-and-seek game with American aircraft begins all over again. These trucks, more than anything immediately apparent in the cities, reinforce Hanoi's constant warnings that the war is not yet over. Ho Chi Minh still speaks of the necessity of “liberating” the South, and he has never relaxed his ambition to reassemble the old French Indo-Chinese empire of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. | The unavoidable result is|

that North Vietnam—for all the mood of relaxation in the cities—is still operating under wartime austerity. The sloganeering and the cries for increased production go on as before. Party Discipline Party discipline also seems to decline the farther one gets from Hanoi. Party newspapers are full of reports of workers refusing to put in overtime and of suspicious epidemics of headaches on the night shift. Still, the party is very much in control, and it would be a mistake to think that war weariness among the populace would drive Hanoi to capitulate In fact, if anyone's war weariness can be said to be an important factor, it would be the Russians’. Moscow’s influence in Hanoi has grown steadily during the last three years, and most of the preliminary negotiations prior to Paris were conducted by the Secretary of State, Mr Dean Rusk, and Mr Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Hanoi is not now and never has been under the dominance of either Moscow or Peking, but until about three years ago the influence of the !two Communist giants was ’about equal in North Vietnam. Since then. China's i power to persuade has steadily diminished and is ;now at an all-time low. I Mao’s Revolution There are several reasons for this fade-out, not the least of them Vietnam’s millenniaold distrust of the Chinese Th- more immediate cause, however, was the enormous discombobulation caused by Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” In the course of their rampages, the Red Guards frequently slowed production of war goods destined for [Hanoi or fouled up the transportation system. I Peking, moreover, has stuck [to its shrill hawk-cries even as it began to seem to Hanoi that an outright military victory was unlikely. The Russians soon found themselves in the cat-bird seat—smoothly supplying war material while urging the case for negotiations now and political annexation later. Still, no Hanoi-watchcr expects that the Vietnamese will ever surrender any of their sovereignty to Moscow or Peking. Ho Chi Minh does not believe that either foreign capital has found the ideal road to Marxism. And over riding even this is the central matter of Vietnamese nationalism, which is what the war was all about in the first place.