NORTH VIETNAM’S DIKES

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32975, 22 July 1972, Page 9

NORTH VIETNAM’S DIKES

(By

SEYMOUR HERSH

of the "New York Times'" through N.Z.P.A.)

WASHINGTON.

For more than 2000 years the peasants of northern Vietnam have been locked in unending battle against nature, trying to stem and control the annual high water of the Red River with an intricate system of dikes.

The river, spawned in the mountains of Yunnan province in southern China and fed by monsoon rains, races through narrow gorges in its annual summer drive to spill along the vast and fertile plains of the Red River Delta, where more than 15 million Vietnamese live and farm.

The terrain along the 300- i mile route from China to the rich farmlands can most simply be described as a huge drain-board, tilted down from north-west to south-east. To meet the crest of the Red River and its tributaries, which usually peak between July and late September, Vietnamese societies have constructed about 2500 miles of earthen dikes with sluicegates and dams. It is this system that the Hanoi Government charges is under United States aerial attack. The first written mention of the elaborate system is in Chinese chronicles of the early eleventh century. Some Vietnamese scholars also have found archaeological evidence of dikes as far back as the second century. Recent extensions The dikes have been expanded in length perhaps 50 per cent in the last 20 years and have also grown in width and height, vastly complicating the problems of maintenance and control. The growth is constant because the Red River carries along millions of tons of silt that are deposited in the river bed. In other areas, particularly in the rice-growing regions near Hanoi, the river flows on its own progressively rising mud bed that is often sft or 6ft above the level of the fields. A similar situation exists in areas along the Yellow River in China.

Working on the dikes and repairing them is a constant preoccupation- of the North Vietnamese, during a visit by this correspondent to Hanoi in mid-March. Hundreds of workers—often led by military men—seemed to be constantly hauling earth to rein-

force the vast system near Hanoi.

At that point, as in many parts of North Vietnam, there were actually two separate networks of dikes, roughly a quarter of a mile apart. The purpose, obviously, was to provide a back-up system. The pressure on the dikes at the height of the flood season is immense. Specific data on the flow of the Red River near Hanoi was impossible. to obtain, but last month “Le Monde,” the Paris newspaper, published a dispatch predicting that the flow of the Black River, a main tributary, would reach 32,500 cubic metres a second at Sontay, about 25 miles north-west of Hanoi (a cubic metre is about 35 cubic feet). The dispatch also noted that the peak flow of the Seine in Paris during the floods there in 1910 was 2500 cubic metres a second. In addition to the river system, there are a number of sea dikes to prevent the seepage of brackish water from the Gulf of Tonkin into crop-growing areas. Hanoi has also charged that these sea dikes have been bombed by United States aircraft. The river dike system north-east of Hanoi is highly vulnerable to bombing attacks.

Last year flood waters broke through a 30-mile section of the dikes in the delta section and destroyed much of the 1971 autumn rice crop. This flooding, which forced North Vietnam to import food from the Soviet Union was described as the worst since 1944. In that year the dikes along the Red River were breached in 25 areas and thousands of acres of rice were destroyed. Charges supported

The repeated North Vietnamese charges of bombing of dikes have been buttressed in recent weeks by a number of news dispatches from Hanoi filed by Jean Thoraval, the resident correspondent there for Agence FrancePresse. Until recently most Administration spokesmen in Washington generally denied that dikes had been chosen as targets or inadvertently bombed. An Air Force general, asked in mid-June whether some dikes could have been accidentally struck, said, “Anything is possible, but I think it’s highly improbable.” The official United States

position was modified by the Secretary of Defence (Mr Melvin Laird) in a news conference on July 6. “Some of the dikes and dams may be on roadways that are being used or they may be in a position where anti-aircraft weaponry is placed and, of course, our pilots are given the opportunity and they should have this capability to attack North Vietnamese gun emplacements,” he said. Floods blamed Mr Laird went on to say, however, that “the real damage to the dams and dikes of North Vietnam is the damage that was suffered in weakening those dams and dikes last year during the very, very heavy flooding of North Vietnam.

“I believe,” he went on, “that the North Vietnamese are carrying on this campaign in order for them to relieve themselves from the responsibility towards their own people for their failure to adequately repair this system since the major flooding of last year.”

State Department analysts have said that major flooding is expected again this year and characterise the wave of North Vietnamese complaints as a propaganda war. For its part, North Vietnam has repeatedly charged that the United States has been bombing the dike systems for the last three months, "in a very wicked design—-to destroy or weaken dikes and thereby to cause floods.”