Hanoi offers new formula for revolution

Press, 15 September 1976, Page 20

Hanoi offers new formula for revolution

Denis Warner, an Australian journalist who has been a close observer of Indo-China for more than 20 years, continues the discussion of the new Vietnam. These extracts are taken from an essay, “Inside the New Vietnam,” which appeared in the June issue of “South-East Asian Spectrum.” The first part of Mr Warner’s article was published yesterday.

The Communist economic plan, with its emphasis on defence industries and heavy industries, appears to offer the Vietnamese people blood, sweat and tears and very little else. The reaction of the Southerners to currency changes and controls and the new economic zones that have been established in the countryside do not suggest that the people will willingly accept the new social order.

Radio broadcasts from Hanoi and Saigon confirm the reports brought out from South Vietnam of continuing resistance, economic hardship, mass unemployment and general distress. The South Vietnamese do not like being told what to do; especially they do not like being told by Northerners. The indigenous Southern cadre system never recovered from the losses of the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the Northerners who have been brought in to do the job are alien to the Southern environment. It will be as difficult for the South Vietnamese to accept communism as it would be for the South K reans or the West Germans. The Americai. withdrawal caused unemployment and economic difficulties; it did not cause any noticeable change in the sophistication of South Vietnamese society. Despite the war and the restrictions it imposed, there was a market economy and a healthy respect for free enterprise. In 1975 there were 100,000 students in the universities and a million in the secondary schools. After 1970 i ■■ Land to the Tiller Law distributed 13 million hectares

of rice paddy to 837,000 peasant families with proper ownership titles. Peasants had learned to spread chemical fertilisers and increasingly used tractors and rotary hoes to plough. When the North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon they expected to find a repressed population welcoming them as liberators. Instead they found four million people most of whose unhappiness was generated by the Communist victory. The authorities want to wipe out the armed resistance before coercion begins. That it will begin is inevitable, especially given the haste with which Hanoi is going about reunification. The dangers inherent in allowing a bourgeois, capitalist South to exist under the same roof as the Socialist North aie much too great tu allow the process of change in the South to be evolutionary. Terror is, and always has been, the principal Communist weapon again popular discontent. [Since this article was written earlier this year, reports from refugees who have escaped from South Vietnam indicate that much harsher measures are being introduced against those who refuse to conform to the new ways. A report last month said “People’s Courts” with power to impose the death sentence, had been set up to try “middle class people guilty of speculative hoardii .”]•

One Westerner who stayed in Saigon for several months after the Communist takeover believes that hostility to Northern control and the sense of betrayal felt by

Southern Communists will lead to unified Southern resistance. This seems improbable. No resistance movement (including the Viet Minh) has ever succeeded without external assistance, and there is no-one interested enough in the fate of South Vietnam with the means to help. Moreover, the .. Southern aff-shoots of the Northern army and party are under

Northern control. The forces that might have argued with some authority for some degree of Southern autonomy, or which might conceivably have been a rallying point for Southern resistance, have ceased to exist. The continuing resistance, and the need for large security forces when the transformation of-, society really begins, help to explain the need for so large an army.

According to Maoist theory, the army exists not merely for the sake of fighting, but "to agitate the masses, to organise them, to arm them and to help them establish revolutionary military power.” It is the chief political power of the State.

That Vietnam will become so preoccupied with its own enormous problems of social and economic reconstruction that it will have no time for external interests is, however, unlikely. North Vietnamese sponsorship of the Pathet Lao has its origins in 1945. By 1960 two full divisions of Viet Minh "volunteers” had "liberated” parts of Laos. On and off, North Vietnamese troops have been in Laos ever since.

Although there are grave problems with the Khmer Rouge to be overcome (Hanoi trained some 5000 Cambodian cadres), the concept of an association of Indo-China States, dominated by Vietnam, is far from dead. It may be counted as ranking high on Vietnam’s list of “international obligations”.

The Vietnamese leadership is convinced that it has made a singular contribution to the art of revolutionary warfare. There is precious little deference to be found these days to the teachings of Mao Tse-tung. This is scarcely surprising. The use of regular North Vietnamese forces as a substitute for indigenous Viet Cong in the South is at least a theoretical violation of Mao’s principles. But, more important, the Vietnamese believe they have developed techniques that are proof against counter-measures which may be adopted. When the United States entered the war with ground forces it became necessary to embark on a protracted struggle which would deny an American victory and continue for so long,

and at such cost, that Irresistible pressures would build up in the United States against the war.

The North Vietnamese tactics succeeded. The Americans failed to win control 'f the battlefield, or to shield the South Vietnamese in defence of the pacification programme. They were unable, even, to prevent men and material entering South Vietnam from the North. The Vietnamese formula called both for big battles and small battles, and the maintenance of an offensive position by simultaneous attack. on many battlefields, using not only main force units, regional units, and guerrillas, but also political forces.

By the tactic of hitting the Americans in many places while keeping sufficient forces in reserve to mass heavy fighting power in key areas, concentrating and dispersing quickly, fighting small battles or big battles or combining the two, the North Vietnamese, in spite of their enormous casualties (and partly because of them), denied the United States the victory it had so confidently expected These are the sort of techniques the North Vietnamese have to offer. As the only people in the world who have ever fought the United States and won, they speak with something like evangelical fervour. Implicit in all this is the belief that with the United States no longer the dominant voice in SouthEast Asia, Vietnam, with an entirely different sort of voice, will speak, and act, in its stead.

South-East Asians who share with Lee Kuan Yew the view that the fall of Saigon was an unmitigated disaster, will need no reminder that, living with a unified militant, heavily armed (its army outnumbers all the other armies of the region put together), evangelical Vietnam will be both difficult and dangerous. Concluded