How Vietnam’s rulers lost Mr Dinh’s loyalty

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 14

How Vietnam’s rulers lost Mr Dinh’s loyalty

By

MARK FRANKLAND

in Bangkok

The Communists have lost Mr Dinh;

Not physically, that is, for they know that he is living in a village south of Ho Chi Minh City, which I suspect Mr Dinh still thinks of as Saigon. But they have lost what, in the bad old days of the American war, would have been called Mr Dinh’s heart and mind. Of all the Vietnamese I knew in Saigon before the Communist victory in April, 1975, he was perhaps the most willing, apart from those who were actually Communist supporters, to give the new regime a sympathetic hearing. Although he had worked for several years for a French company, he had very little to lose.

With his wife and six children he lived in a tiny house on the outskirts of the city. He had a Honda motorbike. “What reason has a poor man like me to fear the Corhmunists?” he used to say. What is more, he knew the Communists a great deal better than most other Saigonese. His work took him all over the country. Several times he visited areas that were more or less controlled by the Viet Cong. He even spent one Tet, the Vietnamese New Year’s holiday, in a Viet Cong village on a Frenchowned rubber plantation.

He often spoke to me of the Communists, usually with respect, sometimes with awe. Like many South Vietnamese, even those who were scared of the Communists in a way Mr Dinh never was, he was impressed by their guts, their discipline and their tenacity. He felt that they stood for

the Vietnamese spirit as the Thieu Government, so dependent on the Americans, never could. In a way he was even proud of them. But what impressed him that Tet was the apparent humility of the Viet Cong. They had organised a party for the villagers. They sat them down at tables and, while the troops sang songs, the squad leader and the political officer waited on them, pouring tea and handing round biscuits and bits of candied coconut. The two men didn’t sit down once. Mr Dinh never forgot that. Many of the Vietnamese who are now taking such risks to flee their country

would never have understood Mr Dinh. Take Mr Due who is now in a refugee camp in Thailand. You might say his flight was predestined from the moment the Communist soldiers entered Saigon. Mr Due’s family had fled from North Vietnam in 1954 at the end of the French war. In 1975 he was headmaster of a Government high school and a leading light in his local Vietnamese-American Association. He is a Roman Catholic.

The Communists “reeducated him” for more than two years. He tried to escape from the re-education centre once and was punished by being put in an old United States Army metal freight

container and left in the sun for three days. He kept his spirits up by singing “We Shall Overcome.”

I watched him filling in a form for a newly arrived refugee, a girl who was the sole survivor of a boatload of 100. When it came to the question, “Reason for leaving country of origin,” he put, “looking for freedom,” which he wrote with a large capital “F.”

In the old days Mr Dinh would have been suspicious of a man like Mr Due. “Too hard” was how he described the anti-Communist Roman Catholic northerners. And he thought they toadied to the Americans,.

But a few weeks ago Mr Dinh’s son-in-law said he wanted to escape and to take

his wife, Mr Dinh’s eldest daughter, with him. Mr Dinh gave his permission. What happened in the four years since the fall of Saigon to change Mr Dinh’s mind? At first things went not too badly for him. He had to do only a few days re-education. Then, anticipating the Communists’ decision to move people out of Saigon, he took his family and settled in a village where some relations had a little land and became a farmer. Life was hard because he had little money. One of his sons was blinded by an unexploded bomb while working in the fields. But, to judge by what his daughter says — for she and her husband have ended up safely in the same refugee

camp as Mr Due —physical hardship alone was not the reason.

Her father, she said, did not talk much about the Communists. At first he had told them they had no reason to fear them. Then, later, he would sometimes just say that the way the Communists were doing things was not right. Mr Dinh is an inquisitive, argumentative, and rather arrogant man. He is, in other words, like many Vietnamese, a bit of a know-all. He must have found the Communist controls intolerable. He could not move out of the village without police permission. He had to report any visitors. Then last year the police put him in jail for a few weeks and questioned him about the foreigners he had known.

Mr Dinh was ready to be won over by the Communists. They have failed, perhaps because, instead of treating him like the complicated person he is, they wanted him to be like “the people,” those mythical meek beings whom the commissars at that Tet party were ready to wait on provided they did what they were told. The daughter says that Mr Dinh now admits he wants to leave too, even though he is an elderly man with no great love for foreign parts. (He once visited Europe and would speak rather disapprovingly of what he had seen there.) The Communists have lost him all right. The sadness is they didn’t have to. —O.F.N.S., Copyright.