Hanoi’s brand of liberation

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33032, 27 September 1972, Page 13

Hanoi’s brand of liberation

(By

HOLGER JENSEN.

of the Associated Press, through N.Z.P.A.)

SAIGON, Sept. 26. Forty civilians in the province of Quang Ngai are herded into a building by the Communists, and blown up with dynamite because they are considered “unsuitable for indoctrination.”

Wives and children watch their menfolk shot in batches of a dozen after “people’s trials” in the provinces of Binh Dinh and Kontum. Their crime: lack of enthusiasm for Hanoi’s brand of liberation.

These and many other actrocity stories trickling out of Communist-occupied areas have reinforced American expectations of a bloodbath if the Communists take over South Vietnam.

United States officials are particularly concerned about what they call “spite killing.” “Any time you pursue the hard revolutionary line, you’re going to have a bloodbath,” one American who investigates atrocities, said. “You have to knock off the old order to make room for the new. In this respect, the Viet Cong are as nasty as ever.

“Spite enters into it when you get a guerrilla who has lived in the jungle for five years, and suddenly finds himself occupying a town where everyone owns radios and Hondas. “There will be a lot more guilty verdicts in the socalled people’s trials.

“The North Vietnamese are supposed to be better disciplined, better behaved, but they’re becoming downright spiteful, too. “They come south expecting to be greeted as liberators, and find everyone running away. They get mad, and shoot up some rice farmers for sheer spite. “In the Tet offensive of 1968, the Communist command blamed American combat troops for quelling an expected popular uprising. This year the North Vietnamese could not use this excuse, and they lost their cool. “The commanders of Hanoi’s Invasion force which crossed the Demilitarised Zone on March 30 watched three-quarters of the population of the province of Quang Tri flee before they realised that there might be no one left to liberate.

“So they cut Highway No. 1 south of the provincial capital, and slaughtered hundreds of the civilians who were intermingling with fleeing military convoys.

“A North Vietnamese prisoner who participated in the April ambushes said he had been told by his officers, ‘Anyone going south is my enemy? “Since then it has become a standard North Vietnamese tactic to encircle a population centre, and to seal off all avenues of civilian escape before attempting its capture.

“Before the offensive, only six hamlets in the province of Binh Dinh, with a population of 6000, were listed as being under Communist control. Now, 400,000 South Vietnamese civilians are living in Communist-held areas stretching from Quang Tri in the north to the U Minh forest in the Mekong Delta. “Their fate is largely unknown. Refugees are the only source of atrocity stories and of reports of the compulsory mass movement of civilians to North Vietnam. These cannot be corroborated until the areas in question are recaptured by Government troops, and thus do not figure in any officials statistics.”

According to one official, since the offensive began the authorities have been able to confirm 2558 civilian assassinations, 9313 abductions, and 5277 cases of civilians being wounded in terrorist incidents and various types of atrocity. And these figures come from contested areas, or from those only briefly occupied by the Communists, as opposed to those firmly under Communist control. “We know that there will

be many, many more," the official said. “We know that people have been taken to the North. We know that there have been a lot of people’s trials. We know that they’re bumping off hamlet chiefs, village chiefs, policemen, and rural development cadre and other community leaders. “We just don’t know how many.” Ironically, Hanoi's very insistence that this is a “liberation” war explains its callous disregard for civilian casualties.

There is no such thing as a South Vietnamese prisoner-of-war; supporters of the Saigon regime, military or civilian, are considered “traitors” and “enemies of the people." Thus, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops do not feel themselves bound by the Geneva Conventions, and anyone living in a Government-controlled area is a potential target. Ferries hit mines in the Mekong Delta, civilian buses are ambushed on national highways, refugee camps and resettlement centres are attacked by Communist sappers. And Hanoi’s attitude seems

to be: "That’s what happens when you accept Saigon’s protection.” Unlike its treatment of American prisoners-of-war, the Communist Military Command has only three alternatives for captured South Vietnamese: it recruits them for labour battalions: it tries to indoctrinate them; or it kills them.

South Vietnamese troops have been known to shoot prisoners, but there is no evidence of Government soldiers killing civilians in reprisal for real, or imaginary, collaboration with North Vietnamese occupation forces.

“Occasionally, Government troops will get sloppy, and shoot one or two civilians, but on the whole they’ve been very well disciplined,” one United States military source said.

A pacification official commented: “The main thing overlooked by both sides is that the South Vietnamese peasants are tough. When you come in and start killing them, and throwing your weight around, you’ve lost the fight. Hanoi seems to have forgotten this.”