Three Pages from Vietnamese History
Buttinger, Joseph
We print below three brief sections from the forthcoming twovolume history of colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, entitled VIETNAM: A DRAGON EMBATTLED, copyright © by Joseph Buttinger, to be...
...The physical removal of as many as possible had another advantage...
...But it would be a great mistake to believe that Diem's regard for the interest of the landlord was the main reason for the inadequacy of his agrarian reform...
...Hanoi, although quickly reacting with measures that virtually ended the land reform, nevertheless also proceeded immediately to suppress the movement by force...
...Under the circumstances, the Bidault government, (which had assumed power at the end of June because the MRP, Bidault's party, held the balance in the coalition with the leftist wing), was in no position to carry on until January, when the Constitution of the Fourth Republic was slated to go into effect...
...But the warnings it began to issue in August, and the measures began to take at the end of October, came too late...
...There is only one alternative to the assumption that he consciously betrayed the cause for which he had earlier, often effectively, fought: He had entered a trap which, after it had closed on him, he could not help but regard as a freely chosen place...
...The Communists immediately put up their own candidate, Maurice Thorez, but although he was supported by part of the Socialists (e.g., Leon Blum, Guy Mollet, and Felix Gouin) he was rejected by the Assembly on December 4. In the ensuing stalemate, in which the Communists refused to participate in an MRP government, Bidault's renewed bid for power was defeated, but Bidault remained at his post until December 12, when Blum was called upon to resolve the impasse between the Communists and the MRP...
...There was an embarrassing dearth of landlords...
...This task, which turned out to be a bloody one, was entrusted to the 325th Division, whose members, long accustomed to fighting only the French, undoubtedly disliked shooting at Vietnamese peasants...
...At the end of October, the head of the campaign, Truong Chinh, was dismissed as Party Secretary, and his post taken by Ho Chi Minh himself...
...The particular issue that trapped Blum and his party in December, 1946, was the seemingly plausible demand that the necessary condition for peace negotiations was the return of public order...
...Even after 1960, when insurrection made the struggle for peasant loyalty the overriding political issue, abusive treatment of peasants remained widespread...
...5 However, for obvious " political reasons, such prominent landowners as Vice-President Nguyen Ngoc Tho and the Ambassador to the United States, Tran Van Chuong, eventually relinquished their holdings above the legally permitted maximum...
...1. The Betrayal of the French Left The Indochina War was, no doubt, one of the great errors of French policy in this century...
...All figures, no matter how impressive at first sight, underline the disheartening inadequacy of the land-transfer program...
...To be sure, cases of rents amounting to 50 per cent of the tenant's crop became rare...
...A maximum of 6,300 persons (most of them absentee landlords) owned 45 per cent of all rice land in the South...
...In January, 1947, a coalition cabinet under Paul Ramadier, also a Socialist, came into power...
...His nationalism aimed at removing foreign rule, at reestablishing a genuine Vietnamese regime, not at changing the social structure that colonialism had created in Vietnam...
...The only change that Diem's land-distribution program produced for most of its socalled beneficiaries was that they now had to pay for land of which they had long considered themselves the rightful owners...
...The first steps of this radical approach to the land problem, which were decided upon in March, 1953, seemed not at all designed to promote the Party's real goal...
...Government officials, beginning with the Minister of Agrarian Reform, have divided loyalties, being themselves landholders...
...only after order was re-established could the good intentions of France, which Blum undoubtedly nourished, become effective...
...Lack of serious interested administrators" was given as the cause for the slow progress of the reform by American advisers...
...another was to create a mass basis for the regime by gaining the gratitude and support of the landless and the poor peasants, who together formed the great majority of the rural population...
...In many regions, therefore, the cadres could deliver the necessary quota of victims to the Agricultural Reform Tribunals only by promoting owners of as little as 2-4 acres to the status of "landlords...
...And once he had allowed this to happen, he could act, and defend his actions, only as an accomplice of this party...
...That this restraint was a tactical one Truong Chinh, the Secretary of the Lao Dong party, put beyond all doubt in 1950, in a report which quite openly stated the ultimate goal of Communist land policy in North Vietnam: the socialization of agriculture...
...The only lands confiscated were those of "traitors," and the only reforms undertaken concerned land-rent reductions and lower interest rates for loans...
...Throughout his career as Minister of Overseas Affairs, he did so with diminishing restraint...
...Blum spoke movingly, and no doubt with a heavy heart, reiterating that in the end Vietnam must be given her freedom...
...Nor could it be said that landlord opposition was too strong for Diem to overcome...
...Whether or not there was hesitation in their ranks is not known, but the task of suppressing the peasant rebels was in the end accomplished with customary Communist ruthlessness...
...She accuses the Socialist party of being more interested in "retaining nominal political power as a member of the governing coalition, which it did not leave until February, than in any program of principle or of action...
...More than 60 per cent of all land was in the hands of peasants owning around 1 acre, and the number of "rich peasants" was bound to be small, unless those with 2-3 acres were classified as "rich...
...Of this total, "only about one-fourth had reached the landless farmer" after seven years of transfer operations...
...But the Communists foresaw that when all land was divided into more or less equal holdings, most families would still not own enough land...
...Many regained their freedom, though perhaps not their former rights and possessions, but the campaign of Rectification of Errors had its limitations, since, as Ho Chi Minh grimly remarked: "One cannot wake the dead...
...Something about the campaign had been causing concern among the leaders in Hanoi for some time...
...angry Vietnamese accused them of being accomplices...
...it was under their leadership that the fateful decisions that made this war inevitable were taken...
...This, however, was only 20 per cent of the total cultivated rice area...
...The land-reform program was inadequate in several respects...
...Yet the Socialist Cabinet members, as long as they codetermined, and even directed, French policy toward Indochina, consistently acted contrary to these enlightened views...
...In November, 1955, Truong Chinh initiated what he called "the fifth crucial wave of mass mobilization," freely admitting that the purpose of the reform was, as in Communist China, to gain mass support among the poor...
...They called for a redistribution of all land in favor of landless agricultural laborers and poor peasants, which was, to say the least, a very indirect move toward collectivization...
...The campaign was conducted "with utmost ferocity" in several more "waves," lasting until the fall of 1956, when it was called off on orders from above, apparently before the murderous momentum of the special cadres had exhausted itself...
...Such public repentance, however, did not diminish the leaders' secret satisfaction over the social changes brought about by their agrarian reform...
...On November 8, the government abolished the People's Agricultural Reform Tribunals...
...The Cold War had begun, and, as Fall stated, "in less than three years the party line of the PCF had gone full circle, from all-out support of a French Union in its narrowest colonial interpretation to outright sabotage of French governmental actions aimed at maintaining the integrity of the French Union, even in the diluted version of a loose association with the IndoChina states...
...In order to eliminate landlords and rich peasants as a social class, it was not enough to reduce them, through partial expropriation, to the status of middle or poor peasants...
...No measures whatever were taken during 1954...
...In 1955, however, when the war had ended and the regime's power was unchallenged, land reform through mass mobilization was resumed...
...Of these 20 per cent marked for distribution, less than two-thirds (1.062 million acres) had actually "changed hands," according to government statistics, by 1962—six years after the start of the program...
...Once the French were out and the Communists kept at bay, South Vietnam was, as far as Diem was concerned, "free" by definition...
...Party members who were personally hit spoke up loudly, and in many instances became the most effective leaders of peasant opposition...
...When the slightness of Diem's plans were revealed, he was not blamed for the inadequacy of his program, but rather was praised for the careful manner in which he tackled the delicate task of agrarian reform...
...Colonialism, therefore, would not end for them until landlordism was abolished...
...Had Diem understood that mass support for his regime was indispensable in his struggle against Communism, he would probably have done away with landlordism completely and turned all tenants into landowners at no cost to them at all...
...Radio Hanoi explained that all persons unjustly condemned, "whatever their class," would not only be freed but also compensated...
...Those members of the Party, the cadres, and the population who have been the subject of erroneous judgment will be re-established in their rights and prerogatives and their honorable character will be recognized...
...If they had made independence for Vietnam a condition for maintaining the coalition with the Radicals and the MRP, these parties would have formed governments supported by rightist parties two years before they actually did...
...Those imprisoned or killed were of course totally dispossessed...
...2. Land Reform and Terror in North Vietnam This is the story of the land reform in Communist North Vietnam, a story not only of economic failure, but also of unbelievable terror, of disastrous mismanagement on all Party levels, and of a crisis brought on by widespread popular discontent, which the regime was able to overcome only by a combination of brutal force and hasty political retreat...
...It has been said again and again that during the period when a solution without war was still possible, France had no Indochinese policy at all...
...Together with the Socialists, who had suffered a slight setback at the polls (as had the MRP), the leftist parties held no less than 46 per cent of the votes, enough to forecast a domination of the government...
...But the lack of impartial enforcement agencies greatly reduced the benefits that the peasants might have derived from these reforms: government officials, even if not corrupt, rarely stood up for the peasants against the landlords...
...Far from improving the regime's position among the rural population, the land reform, and above all the injustices and atrocities committed in its execution, produced widespread popular resentment, growing unrest, and eventually open rebellion...
...But even of the 2,500 who owned 40 per cent of the Southern rice land, only 1,584 had been partly expropriated by late 1962...
...Diem's concept of a "free" Vietnam was not concerned with the social aspirations of the masses, and, as it turned out, also hostile to the political aspirations of the elite...
...The government boasted that it had made available for transfer 1.725 million acres of cultivated and abandoned land...
...But this was an illusion, and the most outstanding leader of French Socialism, Leon Blum, a true proponent of freedom for Vietnam, also fell victim to it...
...During 1946, the Socialists consistently opposed d'Argenlieu's policy of sabotage of the March agreement...
...and he could have mobilized the forces he needed to break landlord opposition...
...Nevertheless, the French Party thereafter was to oppose the Indo-China War on the grounds that it was an "imperialist" war...
...Gradually, the party began to embrace the concept of total independence for Vietnam, and its press became more and more outspoken in its criticism of the policy France was pursuing...
...The first acts of active peasant resistance occurred in only one village, on November 2, but within a few days more clashes between local militia and peasants broke out, spreading over an entire district and taking on the form of a broadening spontaneous insurrection...
...1 Bernard Fall wrote: "The varying positions taken by the French Communist Party towards the war in Indo-China have provided a striking example of the difficulties and contradictions which a party encounters when it tries to conciliate its local political objectives with the over-all grand design of the Soviet Union" ("Tribulations of a Party Line: The French Communists and Indo-China," in Foreign Affairs, April, 1955, p. 499...
...The vast majority of them were not at all affected by the land-transfer program, since they owned less than the approximately 300 acres the law permitted them to retain...
...When he spoke thus, he did not know that Saigon was withholding from the Premier of France the peace proposals that Ho Chin Minh had addressed to him on December 15...
...Interestingly enough, the Socialist Marius Moutet remained Minister for Overseas Affairs throughout these various cabinet changes, serving under the MRP as well as under the Socialists...
...Putting an end to the entire land reform campaign undoubtedly helped to prevent further outbreaks, but not until late February, 1957, did the regime feel safe enough to withdraw the regular army units from the affected areas and to hand over the task of maintaining order to the local militias...
...4 The narrow scope and the fragmentary execution of the agrarian reform, so fateful for the country's political evolution, reveal a great deal about Diem's political philosophy and the hollowness of his claim that his was a revolutionary regime...
...The total land gained through the reform enabled the regime to give 1.5 million families of landless agricultural laborers and poor peasants slightly more than 1 acre each...
...Most of Moutet's colleagues supported his policy with grave misgivings— like a woman who accepts an unwelcome pregnancy hoping for a miscarriage...
...Diem was radical only as a nationalist and anti-Communist...
...Yet the answer to the question of why he failed as a social reformer could hardly be more simple: Measured against the needs of his country and the spirit of his time, Diem simply was too much of a conservative to discharge his historical mission...
...To this end, they were accused of all sorts of crimes, tried, sentenced to prison or forced labor, and the more unfortunate ones to death...
...Wherever the Vietminh had been in control, the land of the large absentee owners was given to the peasants...
...On August 24, the Party organ Nhan Dan reported that among the people wrongly classified, convicted, and executed were many former Vietminh fighters and even Party members...
...According to Bernard Fall, the total of the land expropriated from Vietnamese owners or purchased from the French, and therefore available for distribution, was about 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres...
...As to land rents and security of tenancy through contracts, Diem's agrarian reform no doubt provided a measure of relief for the more than 1 million remaining tenants, most of whom, prior to the reform, had been completely at the mercy of the landlords...
...Blum had the misfortune of heading the French government when hostilities broke out in Hanoi—an all-Socialist caretaker government that, as intended, lasted only a few weeks...
...as long as their coalition partners preferred them to cooperation with parties of the Right, the Socialists looked at participation in the government as an obligation toward their electorate which they could not disregard...
...This was true even of land which the refugees, largely through their own efforts, had opened for cultivation...
...Titles were provisional...
...Moutet's prominence derived entirely from the role he played as one of the personalities who shaped and defended French colonial policy after World War II...
...Only after being prodded for months by American advisers, including Ambassador Collins, did Diem take the first cautious steps early in 1955, aimed at a reduction of land rents, at safeguarding the rights of tenants through tenancy contracts, and at providing land for the resettlement of refugees from the North...
...Why did he neglect a task which even moderate "bourgeois" reformers in the nineteenth century recognized as a necessary condition for the development of democracy...
...But the absence of any kind of democratic representation of the peasants meant that the rural masses continued to be victimized by landlords and government officials...
...As to the much more important problemm of land transfers from large owners to tenants, nothing at all was done until October, 1956...
...We have anderstood only too well that our departure from the Far East would result in the arrival of certain other elements of a not-too-democratic character...
...Those among the unjustly punished who had held military or administrative posts would regain their civil rights and be reinstated in their former positions...
...The landlords were of course compensated, with 10 per cent of the price for expropriated land in cash and the rest in twelve-year govern ment bonds at 3 per cent annual interest...
...We print below three brief sections from the forthcoming twovolume history of colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, entitled VIETNAM: A DRAGON EMBATTLED, copyright © by Joseph Buttinger, to be published by Frederick A. Praeger in January, 1967...
...But the trouble was that the North had always had few real landlords, and most of these had long been expropriated as "traitors...
...they themselves regarded their attitude as a necessary sacrifice but did not feel that it was a betrayal of Vietnam...
...They also received 1 buffalo for every 13 families...
...Moreover, he certainly possessed the moral courage required had he decided that the interests of its small upper class had to be sacrificed to save the country...
...It is even conceivable that Blum might have alerted his country and shortened the senseless Indochina War...
...Still worse than this delay was the manner in which the government embarked on this crucial task, revealing a complete lack of understanding for the disastrous political consequences that the failure to act forcefully was bound to produce...
...The regime and its defenders in the United States pointed proudly at the figure of 109,438 peasants (mostly tenants) who, as of July, 1961, had benefited from the land transfer program, neglecting, however, to draw attention to the fact that more than 1 million tenants had received no land at all, or, as another observer puts it, "of an estimated I to 1.2 million tenant households existing in 1955, about 10 per cent obtained land under the government's land-transfer program...
...The parties of the Left, with all the power they needed to oppose the imperialist aspirations of the Right, embraced these aspirations and turned the government of the Fourth Republic into a tool of France's reactionary colonial party...
...But the Party knew that the road toward "socialized agriculture" would be long, and that a number of political problems would have to be solved before more direct steps toward its goal could be taken...
...cit., p. 186...
...His nationalism, therefore, had little social content, and his anti-Communism none at all...
...But Diem, the conservative, rejected revolutionary social change as a means of reducing the attraction of Communism, and it was this which gradually led him to rely more and more on antidemocratic measures and naked force...
...He expressed his view that only negotiations could produce lasting and friendly relations between France and Vietnam...
...On November 1, the government announced that 12,000 persons would be released from prisons and labor camps...
...Why did the French lack the insight, possessed by the British and acquired slowly also by the Dutch, that the age of Western domination of Asia was coming to an end...
...Nothing was done by the leftist governments of France to strengthen the forces of non-Communist nationalism in Vietnam...
...It was obviously political, and although the role he played was hardly creditable, nothing is to be gained by doubting his integrity...
...The private property of the million or so tenants, being nonexistent, could not have been the subject of his concern...
...For the peasant masses, exploitation under a feudal land regime had been the dominant reality of colonialism...
...cit., p. 297...
...This defense cannot be made of the Socialist Marius Moutet, who, during the most critical period before and after the outbreak of the war, was Minister of Overseas Affairs...
...The Minister of Agriculture was dismissed also...
...But the many predictions of approaching doom for his regime, made by his enemies at home and abroad after the revolts of November, 1956, failed to come true...
...And finally she states: "If the Socialists never found it easy to reconcile the war with their Marxist anticolonialism, they found it even less easy to translate their anticolonialism into effec tive practice" (ibid., p. 298...
...Since this was possible only with the help or acquiescence of the Saigonappointed local officials, the peasants more often than not regretted having been returned to government control...
...cit., p. 123...
...However, the intention to take from the rich and give to the poor was only half of the scheme...
...Both production and the war effort might have suffered from a radical program of agrarian reform...
...At the end of 1956, it had become clear to Ho Chi Minh that the hold he had gained over the Vietnamese people would not be threatened by developments in the other half of divided Vietnam...
...There were of course many landowners who had cruelly exploited and mistreated the poor, but the Party was not interested in justice...
...Well-disposed critics, therefore, called the Socialists prisoners of the colonial party...
...On December 13, an official announcement said that over 100,000 persons had taken part in the trials and convictions of landlords in villages near Hanoi...
...Trial and punishment were not left to existing qualified courts but to People's Agricultural Reform Tribunals created for this purpose...
...For Ho Chi Minh, the beloved leader, having to use force against his own people, and predominantly in the province where he was born, must have been a distressing experience...
...Politically no less disastrous were the provisions for payment by the tenants for land that had largely been in their effective possession for years...
...4 Scigliano, op...
...At the Cai San development in southwestern Vietnam, for example, there was so much resistance to tenancy contracts by the 43,000 resettled refugees that the government cut off daily subsistence payments in order to bring the refugees around...
...His failure to see that these aims called for the methods that were applied to him, too, a prisoner of the forces that determined French policy in Indochina after World War II...
...Far from being eliminated by a thorough agrarian reform, the landlords, for decades the associates of the colonial regime, were in fact the group that, more than any other, succeeded in asserting its interests under Diem...
...Since they were rightly regarded as enemies of Communism, and in particular of collectivized agriculture, they had to be eliminated from village life, if necessary physically...
...In a speech delivered at Hanoi on November 28, Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu, defended the land-reform program but confirmed the "errors" committed and tried to regain the confidence of the many Party members and sympathizers who had been deprived of their possessions, jobs, and freedom, or, as he put it, had been "arrested, condemned, detained, isolated"—he did not mention those killed...
...As Giap proclaimed in his speech defending the reform, all vestiges of "feudalism" had been eradicated, which in reality meant that a large peasant class likely to oppose the regime's plan to collectivize agriculture had ceased to exist...
...Nothing in the history of Communist persecutions can equal the scheme contrived in North Vietnam to get rid of as many peasants as possible who owned more than 2 or 3 acres of land...
...The truth is that there was a definite policy, the rightist policy of colonial reconquest, and that the Left, in control of the government but lacking a policy of its own, adopted the catastrophic course advocated by the Right...
...and its provisions for payment by the peasants who received land created an unnecessary hardship and were a serious political blunder...
...The demand for order could mean for them only that they must surrender or be militarily defeated before negotiations could be resumed...
...A study of the statements made by men like Leon Blum and Guy Mollet, and of congress resolutions adopted by the party between 1945 and 1953, proves that from 1945 on, of the major political groups, the Socialists alone had an adequate answer to the problems created for France by the Vietnamese national revolution...
...It is a fallacy to believe that the evils of a policy one knows to be wrong can be reduced by taking its execution into one's own hands, a fallacy based on the assumption that motives in politics are in the end more important than behavior...
...Why did Diem fail to carry through what was so clearly the one social change called for if his anticolonial "revolution" was ever to be completed...
...One argument has always been offered to explain why the Socialists, in principle opposed to French policy in Vietnam, cooperated effectively in its execution: For compelling inner-political reasons, the Socialists clung to the strong position they had gained in the governments of liberated France...
...But was landlord opposition alone responsible for Diem's totally inadequate agrarian-reform decrees...
...This at least was the hope of those Diem supporters who regarded a radical land reform as the most urgent measure in the struggle against the Vietminh, and therefore regretted that he had acted so late, set his goal so low, and worked toward it with such exasperating slowness...
...they tolerated d'Argenlieu's sabotage of the March agreement, condoned General Valluy's provocative actions, and with their pettiness at the conference table destroyed the chance for a more lasting agreement at Fontainebleau...
...On August 17, 1956, Ho Chi Minh, in a letter to his "Compatriots in the country," admitted "errors" in the execution of the land reform and promised "corrections...
...Fall makes it quite clear that the French CP sought to retain Vietnam within the French Union because of "Communist hopes of being able to get control of France and her overseas possessions in one swift sweep...
...Was the power of these few thousand people great enough to make Diem reject the advice of his American counselor Wolf Ladejinsky that the land-transfer program be broadened by reducing the upper limit per holding from 100 to 50 hectares...
...Thus Moutet became a prisoner of the colonial party...
...Many felt that if the Socialists in the government could not persuade their coalition partners to abandon the policy of colonial reconquest, they could at least slow down the ongoing campaign of aggression and, if an opportunity arose, seize it and impose their own solution...
...However, he thought that he was free to do what he liked only because he had come to accept as right what his position as spokesman of France's colonial policy forced him to say and do...
...Landlords, returning with the army to former guerrilla-held regions, extracted rents far above the legal limit...
...3 Robert Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation in Distress...
...As a substitute, the government offered decent graves and public funerals for the many whom its eager servants had deprived of their lives...
...It is generally believed that the number killed was between 10,000 and 15,000, and that between 50,000 and 100,000 were deported and imprisoned...
...Had he done so, his government would probably have lasted only four days instead of four weeks, but his party would not have become an accomplice of the many hypocrites in France who insisted that Vietnam could be given freedom only after French armies had again deprived her of it...
...The greater their numbers, the more larid became available for distribution to those whom the Communists wished to win over...
...This was true in the early postwar years, and Jacques Dudos, "the Number 2 man of the PCF after Thorez," stated in 1947, "we are for the presence of France in the Far East, contrary to what is asserted by the newspaper Le Monde...
...What the agrarian reform had failed to accomplish was to satisfy the land needs of those for whose benefit it allegedly was undertaken...
...It was they who ruled France during the first crucial postwar years...
...And with arguments entirely borrowed from the Right, the leftist governments of France rejected all Vietminh offers for reestablishing peace after the war had spread over the entire country...
...Diem was a highly complex political man: His modern authoritarian ideas, his almost medieval principles of monarchism, and his professed adherence to some form of democracy, which together made up his politics, resist definition...
...Smaller outbreaks occurred in other parts of the country, in some instances openly supported by embittered local Party leaders...
...Apart from the "errors" committed through the land reform, there was discontent also with the high taxes and the increasing pressure for ever bigger food deliveries to the state at prices so low that the peasant could not possibly have bought consumer goods even had they been available...
...The rural population was divided into five categories: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and landless agricultural laborers...
...it did not go far enough, particularly in regard to land distribution...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963, p. I04...
...It was then that the peasant would have to be convinced of the necessity to collectivize agriculture...
...By and large, Diem's land transfer consisted in nothing but the legalization of these conditions...
...But not all these acres that had "changed hands" had gone to the needy peasants...
...Theirs was a position of painful com promise...
...2 After the November elections in 1946, the Communist party emerged with increased strength...
...He ended by believing that the aims of France in Vietnam could be achieved only by making war...
...Anti-Communist nationalism, it seemed, would continue to remain politically ineffective...
...The excessive self-criticism in Giap's speech of November 29 should have disabused all peddlers of such vain hopes: Communists openly admit the existence of a crisis only after they have made sure that it no longer constitutes a threat to their power...
...But the Vietnamese knew that France had given no evidence of such intentions before the outbreak of the war...
...This entailed classifying as many landowners as possible as landlords and rich peasants, and finding as many as possible guilty of crimes against the people and the state...
...With his request for order Blum, therefore, stood in the forefront of the forces of aggression which he had so often denounced...
...It was started too late and was carried out too slowly...
...The land policy of the Vietminh before 1953 had cautiously avoided frightening "rich peasants" or even "landlords" by raising the issue of land distribution...
...Its aim was the eradication of a social class, and to this end it mobilized hate and greed, and the desire for personal vengeance...
...5 John D. Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid...
...There is, of course, no need to question Moutet's motivation...
...And in order to obtain enough sentences, either to prison or forced labor or death, crimes had to be invented and charges leveled, even against people who had always supported the Vietminh...
...Open rebellion broke out early in November in the province of Nghe An, the more shocking as the population of this region had long been known to be strongly proVietminh...
...Miss Hammer commented: "And certainly there is good reason to regard the professedly anticolonialist Socialists and Communists as seriously culpable in regard to Indochina ever since 1945" (op...
...The limited scope and the lagging execution, however, were not the only negative aspects of the land-transfer program...
...3 Furthermore, the plight of hundreds of thousands of peasants " was eased by the National Agrarian Credit Office, which was created in April, 1957, to supply peasants in temporary need of funds with loans previously obtainable only at usurious rates...
...The entire procedure was designed not only to gain enough land to make distribution worthwhile, but also to make the poor peasants and the landless accomplices of the regime in the crimes committed against the "rich...
...They did not consider this satisfactory, and that is why they sabotaged the entire reform after they succeeded in severely limiting the scope of the transfer program...
...After the war had become general, Leon Blum, as temporary Premier, recognized the right of the Vietnamese to national freedom, and openly proclaimed the old colonial system as finished...
...Most revealing of the political motivation underlying the agrarian reform was the manner in which the actual distribution of land was organized...
...It seemed that Diem felt less urgency about the need for agrarian reform than had his predecessors during the last years of the Bao Dai regime...
...Since they were strongly entrenched in the administration, they were in a good position for this sabotage...
...Welcome as these gifts were to the poor, they were not bountiful enough to turn them into enthusiastic supporters of the regime...
...Party and government suddenly began to indulge in an orgy of self-criticism, and conducted what was officially called a "Campaign of Rectification of Errors," whose purpose had already been spelled out in Ho Chi Minh's letter of August 17...
...They consisted of all the poor and landless of a village, and the trials became mass meetings dominated by people whose chances of obtaining land increased with every new Conviction...
...Moutet no doubt believed that French policy in Indochina, although steadily evolving toward the necessity of conducting a colonial war, would be a less disastrous and less reprehensible policy if presided over by a known friend of the colonial peoples instead of by an aggressive colonialist...
...on the contrary, it was with French help that the Vietminh succeeded in almost wiping out these forces...
...All during the years 1947 and 1948, when the government declined to enter into peace negotiations with Ho Chi Minh, Socialist party congresses kept demanding such negotiations...
...The peasants also resented not getting the ownership of formerly unoccupied land, but instead being settled on it as tenants...
...New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962, p. 126...
...Of the Minister of Agrarian Reform it was reported that he had not "signed leases with his tenants as provided by the land reform decrees, and he is most certainly not interested in land distribution which would divest him of much of his property...
...Those who have been wrongly classified as landlords and rich peasants," he wrote, "will be correctly reclassified...
...But Moutet's thinking, like that of many of his colleagues, suffered from the main defect of all moderately successful Socialist leaders of our time: their belief that the cause of their parties can be served through participation in governments even if this obliges them to act contrary to their professed principles and specific programs...
...They adopted the interpretation, advanced by the parties of the Right and by colonial society, of the Vietminh as a solidly Communist movement...
...The banality of this explanation makes it difficult to realize that here lies the key to Diem's failure...
...Western observers claim that about 1,000 peasants were killed or wounded between November 101 and 20, and several thousand arrested and deported...
...The political gains of such a land reform would have been worth an even higher price...
...Not only as a Socialist, but as a French statesman of integrity and foresight, he should have denounced these forces again, and he should have rejected the aims of France, whose pursuit was the chief cause of the existing disorder...
...Most of the footnotes are here omitted...
...In Japan, where the Americans had been in a better position to impose their ideas, landholdings were limited to 10 hectares...
...The legal rent of 25 per cent of the crop was widely disregarded— tenants considered themselves lucky if their rent was no more than 30 per cent...
...That is why the question of responsibility for this costly and futile venture will agitate all students of contemporary history for a long time to come...
...What he proposed was widely considered as only a beginning...
...He formed his government on December 16...
...Peasant dissatisfaction with the land reform consequently became the main theme of Communist propaganda in the South...
...from a manuscript by J. Price Gittinger, entitled "Agrarian Reform Status Report...
...Those who received land were consequently as dissatisfied with Diem's land reform as was the majority who remained tenants...
...Fall quotes this statement by Dudos in his article but does not make clear that these "certain other elements" were undoubtedly the United States, and that France feared being displaced by the American presence in Vietnam as much as being displaced by the Vietminh...
...The first "wave" of land reform—a dress rehearsal in land distribu tion through "mass mobilization"—rolled over a few provinces in 1953, but fear that the action might get out of control and harm the wai effort made the Vietminh leaders decide to call a halt...
...Diem was unable to see that Vietnam's national revolution could be completed and all remnants of colonialism wiped out only through radical economic and social reforms...
...This holds true for most leading Socialists—men like Felix Gouin, Paul Ramadier, and Jules Moch—for the simple reason that France was closer to them than was Vietnam...
...Only rice land was subject to transfer...
...No doubt, in demanding that the agrarian reform be carried out with respect for private property, Diem could only have had in mind the interests of the rich landlords whose private property would be affected by a land-transfer program...
...No truly progressive regime able to win over the entire Vietnamese people had arisen from the postwar political chaos in Saigon, and Ngo Dinh Diem showed no signs of ever becoming a serious rival to Ho Chi Minh...
...The regime, long deaf to the voices of dissatisfaction over its agrarian policy, began at last to listen to them in the summer of 1956, suddenly aware of the dangers that threatened if it failed to curb the relentless zeal of the agents charged with reshaping village life...
...In the South, no progress was being made toward freedom or social justice...
...Most significant for the failure of the Left to impose the liberal intentions it frequently voiced toward Vietnam was the role played during these years by the Socialist party of France...
...The brutalities of the landreform cadres embittered not only their helpless victims, but also many peasants who were lucky enough to escape prison or execution by owning half an acre less than an unfortunate neighbor...
...3. The Deceit of Land Reform in South Vietnam [During the early years—out of the hope for progressive action in Vietnam—people in the West tended to overlook Diem's shortcomings and were reluctant] to admit that the regime's approach to the problem of agrarian reform was politically disastrous...
...Much of the land acquired from French owners through purchase financed by the French government was sold to the highest bidder...
...As a prelude to the ugly spectacle of publicly trying and punishing these people, a hatecampaign was organized among the poor against the "rich," under the direction of specially trained Party cadres...
...And they had to pay for it in six yearly installments, which was too short a period for most...
...The Socialists, she continues, were no less opportunistic in prac tice than the Communists...
...If it was indeed as Jacques Raphael-Leygues, a Radical So cialist, was to state in October, 1952, namely that "since 1946 the war in Indochina has been a series of lost opportunities" (ibid., p. 297), the blame for losing these oppor tunities can certainly be placed on the Socialists as a party and on Marius Moutet as the man most intimately in charge of Vietnamese affairs in Paris...
...Although none of the major political parties, including the Communists, i is free from blame for the failure to prevent the Indochina War, the forces chiefly responsible for its outbreak, and even more for its duration, are the parties of the non-Communist Left...
...They would own the land distributed by the regime...
...But he failed to see what had produced the war: not primarily the unfortunate methods practiced by the exponents of reconquest in Saigon and Paris, but the official aims of France as proclaimed in 1945, and firmly pursued during 1946...
...One of these problems was how to abolish not only "landlordism," but also the basically antiCommunist class of the so-called rich peasants...
...But the Communist regime in North Vietnam could afford to admit its own troubles and yet look with more confidence than ever before into the future for yet another reason...
...But, as Ellen Hammer puts it, Blum's government was only a "stop-gap regime appointed to serve out the few remaining days of the Provisional Government until the constitution of the Fourth Republic would go into effect" (op...
...Many sons of so-called landlords had fought for years in the Vietminh armies, and even if they themselves were spared persecution, the fate of their families drove most of them into opposition...
...Land held by the Roman Catholic Church, estimated at about 370,000 acres, was not subject to transfer...
...If Diem had been convinced that a more radical reform was necessary, respect for the property of the landlord would not have prevented him from pursuing it...
...Also, the tenants realized the advantages of secure tenancy through contracts for three or five years, and "threefourths of tenant farmers entered into these contracts by the middle of 1959...
...On November 28, the Bidault Cabinet resigned, remaining in a caretaker position until a new premier and cabinet were agred upon by all parties...
...2 Obliged to speak as Premier of France, which, according to all reports from Saigon and Hanoi, had been attacked, Blum in a speech on December 23, 1946, based his justification of the policy of force on the dubious assertion that responsibility for the outbreak of the war lay entirely with the Vietminh...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
