‘Millions of war victims are adrift in Indo-China'

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32587, 22 April 1971, Page 13

‘Millions of war victims are adrift in Indo-China '

(By

HENRY KAMM.

, of the New York Times News Service,

through N.Z.P.A.)

Uprooted, sometimes by those who are called friends and sometimes by those called enemies, millions of living victims of the war are adrift in Indo-China.

They wash up here or there, sometimes for a brief respite, often for a long stay without a future. Then they move on, mostly to another place where they do not want to stay. In a region where 30 years of war have made a mockery of numbers, it is a fair estimate that of the 27 million people thought to live in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, at least a fourth has been uprooted at least once.

About half of that number remain in places that they cannot consider home.

In all three countries tens of thousands are still being made homeless by a war from Which the United States may be disengaging but to which the people of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos see no end. The United States finances everything done on behalf of the uprooted in South Vietnam and Laos and will presumably do the same in Cambodia. A Senate sub-committee headed by Senator Edward Kennedy has earned the respect of American officials for focusing attention on how the United States exercises its responsibility for displaced persons. The subcommittee will hold hearings on the issue this week, and Mr William Colby, who is in charge of the American side of the pacification effort in South Vietnam, will be the principal witness. “They are not fleeing the enemy and not fleeing the allies,” said Mr Keo Viphakone, the overburdened man in charge of the insoluble refugee problem of Laos. “They are fleeing the soldiers.”

In tropical lands where food grows swiftly, refugees often go hungry because they do not even stay long enough to raise their own or because they are crowded so densely into inhospitable places where not enough can be provided. “We are preventing them from dying,” a missionary in Phnom Penh said, summing up the extent of what is being done for the displaced persons of Cambodia. And, after seven weeks of travel through Indo-China, visits to refugee sites and interviews with scores of displaced persons and officials

charged with their care, it becomes clear that the missionary might have been talking of those in the two other countries as well. 5 million The greatest number of refugees is in South Vietnam, where 5 million displaced persons of a population of 17 million is a conservative estimate. As early as 1954, when Vietnam was partitioned, nearly a million Vietnamese fled southward rather than live under the Communists in the north. Of the 3 million people thought to live in Laos, the number of those displaced at least once is put at 750,000. Cambodia, which lived in relative peace until last year, has not been at war long enough yet to compile even approximate statistics. But 200,000 ethnic Vietnamese have been moved to South Vietnam, the population of Phnom Penh is thought to have risen from 600,000 to more than a million and there are refugees all over the countryside. No figures No figures are available on displaced persons in the Com-munist-controlled regions of the three countries, where regular attacks from the air have turned many inhabitants into cave-dwellers. The bulk of the bombing is conducted by the United States but Laotian and Cambodian air forces are no more sparing of the lives of their countrymen. The air war, with other weapons in the vast arsenal that the United States has brought to Indo-China, is generally accepted as a major cause of the mass displacements. That view is shared bv most American refugee officials interviewed, but because of the touchiness of the subject most ask that their names be withheld. Lives saved The South Vietnamese Minister of Social Welfare (Dr Tran Nguon Phieu), noted in an interview that the United States introduced saturation bombing and shelling to save human lives, expending ammunition rather than men.

Dr Phieu, a man of tact, did not add that the lives being saved were American, perhaps at the expense of those of Vietnamese. “Our kind of war has destroyed all the accommodations that once existed,” an American official said. “The scale and scope of our operations preclude any live-and-left-live."

There is another side to the problem. When the Communists enter a village and impress its men, even temper-

arily, the village has the choice of doing their bidding —and becoming the target of American or South Vietnamese air strikes, artillery barrages or ground attacks—or facing Communist retaliation for refusal. _

In the “revolutionary warfare” the Communist practise, they also spread terror to demoralise civilian populations in contested areas. Not only do they employ threats and propaganda but they also carry out mortar and rocket attacks on civilian targets. Voluntary moves Such tactics have often caused entire villages to move voluntarily to • areas more firmly under Government control, particularly since they are assured of safety frpm allied air attacks that are a constant threat in areas not clearly on the Government side.

As American troops withdraw, there is a decline in the amount of artillery being used, even though the air war continues without let-up. At least until recently the Americans appeared to have abandoned the tactics of large military drives that were termed “refugee-generating” —that is, entailing forcible relocation of the civilian population of an area, often without warning and preparation.

But since last year the practice has been renewed by the South Vietnamese command. Some American civil officials accuse the United States of failure to exercise its responsibility to halt the practice. “The place is called Pleikotu, and there are more than 2000,” said the foreign volunteer nurse who has been driving there daily although the road is sometimes mined by the Viet Cong. “They were brought there in Vietnamese helicopters on December 16 Of the 300- who have died, I think about 80 per cent were children. Malnutrition deaths “But I found only two dead today, when usually there are five or six. They die of malnutrition because all they have to eat is rice, roots and leaves.

“They’re not angry. They are so beaten down they don’t have any reaction. They are all alone oiit there.” Pleikotu is 15 miles from Pleiku, a provincial capital, the regional military headquarters and the seat of a major American civil and military establishment. In the warehouse of the provincial social-welfare authorities there are large quan-

tities of dried fish and powdered milk. The official United States attitude is that the Americans’ role is strictly advisory. “All we can do is keep the province chief’s nose to the grindstone,” a senior official in Pleiku said. This attitude enrages others in C.0.R.D.5., the CivilianMilitary Civil Operations and Rural Development Support organisation. In turn, the critics are termed bleeding hearts by those who accept the official line.

The response to the criticism is that, however much one may sympathise with the tribesmen’s plight, advisers should only advise. Mr Irving Bamberger, refugee adviser for the provinces of Darlac and Quangduc, accused Washington in an interview of so impressing the American advisers with their need for establishing good rapport with their Vietnamese counterparts that their advisers are encouraged to support actions that they believe to be immoral.

Mr Bamberger, an energetic former real-estate developer from Arizona, recalled with anger hearing a colleague say “We must be pragmatic, not moral,” Mr Bamberger is planning to leave Government service next month because of his deep dissatisfaction with the American stand on refugees. Plan awaited About 300 persons, mainly children and women, camp alongside the military airstrip at Banmethuot waiting for a plane. They have waited for a month, and no-one has told thdrn that no-one intends to send a plane. They are mountain tribesmen from Cambodia who left their homes last May and June to cross into Quaduc at a time when South Vietnam offered more peace than Cambodia. There were about 8000 of them, and the Government in Saigon allotted money to feed them. Local indifference has kept all but a fraction of the money from being spent on feeding the refugees. Bungry and neglected, they stowed away on planes that had brought ammunition to a military base near their camp. They thought that they might get to Phnom Penh, but they landed at Banmethuot, where no-one wanted them.

They camp at the side of the airstrip. Some live in a shack, others in big United States Air Force packing crates, others in covered holes in the ground.

iney nave notnmg to ao but wait for a plane and hope for food. What food they get, mainly from American supplies, they divide among the families. Each person accepts what he gets without argument or complaint. They smile. “When is the plane coming, morisieur?” they ask in poor French. Montagnards’ plight The uprooting of Montagnards, as all the members of the many hill tribes of IndoChina are called, has been a particular sore point in the record of forced relocations in Laos and South Vietnam.

In times of peace the hill tribesmen have all the problems of ethnic minorities in countries governed by the people of the plain. The effect of war is the more traumatic. The hill tribesmen have the particular affection of Americans working with them, not only for fighting well despite heavy losses in mercenary units organised by the United States, but also for appearing more open and friendly than the more sophisticated Vietnamese. Even Americans not passionately committed to the Montagnard cause, as well as many Vietnamese, agree that the attitude of most Vietnamese officials toward the relocation of Montagnards is indifference at best. Those more involved accuse the Vietnamese of chasing the tribesmen from their traditional lands to exploit them themselves.

“The Viet Cong attack us, the Americans bomb us and the Vietnamese rob us,” a Montagnard nurse said as she rocked her infant son, whom she had tied to her body. Over strong objection by C.0.R.D.5., relocation of Montagnard hamlets was resumed last summer under orders of Major-General Ngo Dzu, commander of Military Region 11. Fifty-one thousand had been moved by last month; 30,000 more are due to be uprooted. Moves suspended On Amercian insistence that, with mounting Congressional interest., in refugee questions, such moves might endanger American support of other programmes, General Dzu suspended the relocations. “But the relocations will eventually be carried out,” a senior American official said. Buon M’bre is a resettlement site for the people of six hamlets of the Rhade hill tribe near Banmethuot. Close to 900 people live in

temporary shelters in a cleared site off Highway 14. It has not been attacked by daylight.

The Viet Cong visited their old hamlets about twice a month, lectured to the people and forced them several times to turn over a-can of rice a family. Government troops also came now and then, accused them of dealing with the enemy and sometimes took away men for questioning. Last September, just before the rice harvest, troops came to tell them that they would be moved to more secure lands.

They worried about their rice, but the soldiers assured them that security would be provided at harvest time. It was, but the Communists attacked the soldiers and both the soliders and the villagers were afraid to stay.

Most of the rice was lost. The land provided for the villagers will be cleared soon and they will plant. But it is far from sufficient for the people of Buon M’Bre, and it is seven months until the next harvest.

The Government gave them small amounts of food in the early stages to buy their rice. Now the whole village, men and women a boy is a man at the age of 12 work as day labourers for the Vietnamese who own most of the land around the eamp. Digging for roots They supplement their diets with roots and leaves, digging deep for roots they do not like. To show the people of Buon M’Bre that the Government cannot give them security, the village was severely attacked in December, and six soldiers and seven members of their familes were killed. About 70 per cent of the hamlets in which the Montagnards of Vietnam, estimated at close to a million, live have already been uprooted, according to Dr Gerald Hickey, an American anthropologist who is regarded as the leading expert on the hill people of Indo-China. “If these poorly-imple-mented resettlements continue, there is a strong possibility that the Montaghards will be left a poverty-stricken population living on the fringes of Vietnamese society,” Dr Hickey said in an interview.

His views are shared by most of the Americans concerned with civil affairs. The Minister of Social Welfare, Dr Phieu, expressed sympathy with the Montagnards, but said that the generals did not often communicate their plans to him.