Saigon and Hanoi compared

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33044, 11 October 1972, Page 15

Saigon and Hanoi compared

(By

PETER ARNETT.

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

NEW YORK, Oct. 10.

Time has settled over Hanoi like a plastic wrapper, sealing the past.

An old French tram clanks along main street, bicycles meander by. The few cars honking through the streets are relics from Soviet Union car lots.

Saigon has the tinsel veneer of a desert vacation boom town. Flashy motorcycles, sporty cars, perfume, hair spray, rich, poor. These capitals of the two Vietnams that have been at war with each - other for nearly 20 years, seem at first glance to have only one thing in common — Vietnamese people. But after a few days in each place another shared quality becomes apparent. It is fear.

Fear gnaws at Hanoi with the first squawks of a loudspeaker system hanging from each main interesection. “American planes 70 kilometres out,” says the authoritative female voice. Seven minutes later the voice again: “American planes 50 kilometres out.” Then the sirens wail. The people of Hanoi know that the bombers are within 40 kilometres. Their eyes search out the concrete bunkers built like cisterns into the streets. Air raid wardens push passers-by into large shelters beside Reunification Lake in the heart of the city. A quiet settles over the city, broken by the staccato roar of anti-aircraft guns if the aircraft come over the city, or maybe the all-clear sounds Saigon does not have the benefit of an alert system. The needle-shaped Russianmade 122 mm rockets that can spin in from the countryside give no warning. No rockets have fallen on Saigon lately, but the memories of the Saigonese are filled with the bad days of other years when as many as 30 at a time came crashing in on homes and market places. They know it could happen again. Life goes on amidst the fear, but what a different life it is. Twenty years of warfare and ideological struggle seem to have brought out the extremes in Vietnamese character. Hanoi is drab, a poor relative of other Communist capitals. „ . The grand old French colonial buildings are tidy but faded. Paint peels off the rows of little shops in the denselypopulated quarters. _ Discipline and dialectic is in the air. Other than the evergreens that splash emerald along the boulevards, the only bright colours come from the posters that glorify heroes of the war or illustrate victories in fighting in the South. The people dress in sombre colours—black trousers, white shirts or blouses, khaki gray or blue jackets. The barmaid at the Hoa Binh Hotel in central Hanoi told me she owned only one white blouse and one pair of black trousers. “I wash them each night, she said, proud of her austerity. I thought of the maids I employed in Saigon, arraying themselves in silken ao dai dresses and swinging beaded pocket books. Saigon is drab, too, where the refugees crowd into the slums swelling the population to over three million compared with around one million in Hanoi. But w’hereas the drabness of Hanoi seems deliberate, calculated possibly to keep everyone’s minds on the mission of pursuing the war, in Saigon it is accidental. The

Saigonese pursue the good things in life as avidly as inhabitants of Western capitals. The chrome motor-scooters parked by the hundreds outside the garishly-postered movie theatres, the pavement restaurants busy with customers, the flashy new hotels, suggest a people busily going about their own business. Even the soldiers in Saigon are in fashion. Uniforms are invariably cut to fit tightly at the hips and the ankles. The difference in city life styles is obvious in the shops.

Hanoi’s main Government department store, open from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. each day to beat the mid-morning air alerts, is heavy on hardware items, locally woven mats and baskets and other purely functional products. For light reading Hanoi residents can buy cheap editions of Marx and Engels,

or bone up on engineering and farming from the shelves of the textbooks that seem to dominate bookstores.

Knick-knacks to brighten up a home could come from any of a dozen novelty stores that sell objects made from materials ranging from ox horn to the aluminium from shot-down United States planes.

And for the Communist party functionaries there is a 10-foot plaster statue of Ho Chi Minh for $45.

President Nguyen Van Thieu is not for sale in plaster in Saigon, but almost everything else is. Cheese from France, wine from Germany, blown glass from Switzerland, plus the whole range of commodities from the factories of Japan and Hong Kong. French magazines and “Playboy” compete for space with paperback erotica on the street stalls.

It is easy to draw a superficial conclusion from the contrasts between Hanoi and Saigon. One seems obviously grimly determined, the other wildly abandoned. But Saigon is to the rest of South Vietnam as is New York city to middle America, and so is Hanoi an inaccurate reflection of life in the North. Both the Vietnams are essentially agricultural Societies still living in the nineteenth century. At best, Saigon and Hanoi are the tiny part of the iceberg that visitors see. Plea to Russia Forty-eight medical scientists at an international congress in Vienna have appealed to the Soviet Union to lift the education tax imposed on migrants, including Russian Jews going to Israel.—Vienna, October 10.