LEGACY OF 20-YEAR WAR U.S. REFUGEE POLICY STACKS UP PROBLEMS FOR VIETNAM

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33819, 16 April 1975, Page 20

LEGACY OF 20-YEAR WAR U.S. REFUGEE POLICY STACKS UP PROBLEMS FOR VIETNAM

(By

T. D. ALLMAN

in the "Guardian" on April 12.)

(Reprinted bp arrangement)

America’s 20-year war in Vietnam is ending as it began — with assive population displacements, encouraged by United States poli< .'hieh would not have occurred without American intervention, and wLii-h are storing up human and political problems which will afflict b<>t Vietnam and the United States for years to come.

The American aircraft] today fly ammunition into Saigon, and fly out babies: the C.l.A.'s Colonel Edward! G. Lansdale was doing the] same thing in Hanoi exactly] 20 years ago. Unwary child-1 ren were hustled on to aero-! planes just before they took; off to ensure that their re-1 latives followed on the next] one. Before evacuating refu-| gees, stampeded into Hai-; phong by United States rumour campaigns, ships of , the American “mercy] flotilla” cached arms in the; (Tonkin Delta.

The American effort to convert South Vietnam from the “temporary regrouping zone” established by the 1954 Geneva accord into “this valiant partner of the free world,” as Mr John Foster Dulles described the Saigon regime the United States established has always rested on the deliberate production of refugees.

Ever since the late Dr Thomas Dooley provided the C.I.A. cover story for the 1954 Operation “Exodus” in his best-selling “Deliver Us From Evil,” it has been? United States policy to deprive the guerrilla fish of their water, by driving popu-| lations into “strategic ham-j lets” which were barely disguised concentration camps. “Refugees make solid citizens,” one United States Aid for International Development manifesto explained. As the firepower war began, General William Westmoreland described the social and political rationale of his search-and-destroy operations: “I expect a tremendous increase in the number of refugees.” The [strategy was defined in I C.I.A. jargon by the United States Ambassador, Mr Robert Komer, who had overall responsibility for the Phoenix Programme of counterterror, which killed 40,000 Vietnamese. “If we can attrit the population base of the Vietcong,” he said, “it’ll accelerate the process of degrading the VC.” Eight million South Vietnamese and half of the three million people of Laos were made refugees, often dozens of times. The NixonKissinger Cambodia invasion created two million refugees in three months. Official United States reports that the firepower war was killing twice as many children under 13 as fully armed United States combat troops and that refugee children were developing dis-j eases, like night blindness, . previously unknown in IndoChina were welcomed by i United States officials as signs of “progress”. Depopulating the countryside, not military progress, provided the United States statistics that, the population of Vietnam was increasingly “friendly” and secure. Forced draft America, according to the Harvard counter-insurgency expert, and long-time colleague of Dr Kissinger, Professor Samuel Huntington, had discovered “the answer to wars of national liberaation.” It consisted of defeating a “rural revolutionary movement” by “forced-draft urbanisation.” Explaining the massive refugee movements produced by his . Vietnamisation programme, the Cambodia invasion, and the bombing of Laos, President Nixon declared: “The enemy will be denied all but the most limited and furtive access to the people.” It was this “refugee policy” that created what Senator Fulbright called “a society of prostitutes and nercenaries” —and the caricature of civilisation produced in South Vietnam by the American way of war is what now accounts for the collapse of a State that never had any economic

| political or social basis except that provided by the! Americans. The South Vietnamese sol-; jdiers fleeing an enemy which! jhas not yet attacked and, | trying to push their motor( ( I bikes on to United States!' I ships sum up the product of (American “nation building"! ] — a militarist society witbjt ! nothing worth fighting for; a ' ; consumer society that pro- i i duces nothing; a nation of; 1 (abandoned women condi-1’ (tioned to flee to the next; 1 : (handout of United States! 1 surplus rice; of dispossessed!

(gangs hitching rides on; i United States planes to the (next jerry-built urban slum. iThe present Communist offensive has nudged the; house of cards that Vietnam-! isation built. Official United States concern with the victims of a] 20-year refugee policy dates] from early this month. President Ford’s “mission of

■(mercy” is merciful princi- ;( pally to Americans. ■ I It camouflages responsiijbility for uprooting 15 mil- ; Ilion people in the satisfaction lof providing spare bedrooms ISOOO miles away for children (who will grow up in an (alien society. It provides the (ideal emotional and bureau- | cratic escape from America’s (real responsibilities. I Instead of planning com- | prehensive aid for redevelopiment, the Washington task force grind out scenarios for airlifting millions to freedom. As thousands claw and bribe their way on to United States aircraft, United States officials, rather than trying to understand the bases of their Vietnam failure, assert yet again that a nation is “voting with its I feet” against Communism. Mass evacuation The validity of such assertions can be judged by imagining the chaos if a United States President suddenly announced that a million] Bangladeshis, Ethiopians, or ( Chileans were to be given ( free rides to America. The (melodrama of Da Nang, in this sense, was instructive. Thousands rushed to board United States transports, but when the city finally fell, no blood-bath occurred. Instead a population, alienated from the roots of) its own civilisation by! decades of dependence on the Americans, was left to make its accommodation, no| doubt very difficult, with an] administration nonetheless independently capable of assuring the basic services, and law and order.

If President Ford’s proposed mass evacuation is permitted to turn Saigon into another Da Nang, America’s last “humanitarian” effort surely will seal the fate of South Vietnam more thoroughly than either the military strength of Hanoi or the corruption of Saigon.

Massive evacuations will not merely destroy the Saigon administration, and strip I away the technical skills that were the Vietnamisation programme’s sole potential contribution to Vietnam’s future; they will ensure automatic Communist control by removing the one group whose usefulness might have moderated a doctrinaire Marxist approach to Vietnamese reconstruction. Americans have consistently refused to accept

their efforts in Vietnam as a case of empire-building. Yet , the gap between the part;! ition of India and the tragedy (of Bangladesh; between the , Bay of Pigs and hiring (Cuban exiles to burgle ! Watergate; between rnpires ( taking their “loyalists" home | with them, and the plight of the Indonesians in the Neth- ; erlands, and of the Uganda Asians here in Britain, sugj gest the long-range problems ! that mass evacuations will create. Chief disaster

11 At least so far as Amerit! cans are concerned, however, the principal disaster President Ford's evacuation will ensure may be psv(chological. America’s 20-\ear ( war has become a striking ■ historical example of a | nation unwilling to admit a (mistake — of the persistent refusal to search for the reasons for the greatest nat-

ional misjudgment in American history. Dr Kissinger is no less locked into the Vietnam illusion than John Kennedy or Dean Acheson were. With his evacuation programme, President Ford, like (all his predecessors, has (made his own Vietnam “commitment” not to the ! people of South Vietnam, (but to self-deception. The | evacuation of Vietnamese orphans, emotionally understandable, can rightly be (described as cradle-snatching. ; But its real significance, so far as Americans are concerned, is that it starkly reveals how many Americans still implicitly believe it is better for Vietnamese to become Americans rather than to remain Vietnamese, as is their birthright, if it means living under a government which America does not like. American power nevertheless has at last reached a situation in which it is impotent: nothing the United States can do now can pre- | vent most Vietnamese at last from being left to work out their own destinies in their own country. But for a nation with a streak of moral pretentiousness running as deep as America’s, the dangers of the airlift are enormous. For if the evacuation achieves its psychological purpose inside America — it can achieve no significant purpose inside Vietnam — it will mean that when the failure of arrogance and arms was most manifest, the United States yet again evaded facing up to the lessons of Vietnam.