Vietnam: Fraud of "The Other War"
Buttinger, Joseph
On March 22 The New York Times declared editorially that at the Guam meeting of U. S. and South Vietnamese leaders, the emphasis was not on military problems but on "that other side of...
...The Saigon government, it said, "has decided to extend the scope of its rural pacification program to include more emphasis on land reform...
...Before the end of the year, the Honolulu program was generally recognized as being dead...
...The Johnson Administration, however, seems to have convinced itself that the Honolulu program was being successfully executed...
...Those who believe that all is not yet lost in South Vietnam must admit that such a radical land reform program could give substance and credibility to the "social revolution...
...There are, according to this authority, only `old life hamlets" in South Vietnam, and "there has been no social revolution, and the Communists...
...The failure of Diem's Agrovilles and strategic hamlets seems to have taught little to the men who now seek to gain popular support by establishing population control with their 59member pacification teams...
...and if they fail, as all proponents of reforms have failed in the past, let them admit that the entire pacification program has no relation whatsoever to "social revolution," and that the much advertised "other war" remains what it has been for the last 13 years: a fraud...
...What we are doing is less than the proverbial drop in the bucket...
...Are they at least still under consideration...
...This was written a year after the Honolulu conference, whose participants, according to Denis Warner, intended "to make sure that the landlords don't charge intolerable rents...
...And these prospects of the "political evolution" lead Washington to believe that the promise of a social revolution will at last be fulfilled...
...He sets an example (in the presence of foreign correspondents) by taking off his cap when he speaks to a peasant woman...
...To be sure, the proper legislation and the issuance of legal title to the land for the peasants would require more will and ability than the present administration possesses...
...What is less known is that the loudly advertised Honolulu program was the fifth of such programs since the fall of Diem, all of them forgotten soon after having been announced...
...Two months later, in his report to the London Times already quoted, Fred Emery is even more specific: "Absentee landlords are still riding with pacifying troops, not merely to grab their lands but to extort back rents for the time they fled the Vietcong...
...Thang bluntly stated: "Although rural institutions go by the name of `new life' hamlets, the truth of the matter is that they have not provided a new life for the people in the hamlets...
...More than two years later, nothing had changed...
...According to R. H. Shackford's report in the Washington News of October 11, 1966, Komer had submitted to the President a report on the "impressive progress" in the "rural development" program conceived at Honolulu...
...But according to Washington—where the fact that reforms did not materialize after Honolulu must finally have sunk in—decisive progress in "the other war" can at last be confidently predicted...
...Fred Emery, the Saigon correspondent of the London Times, reported on March 10, 1967, that high officials of the pacification program can talk "for 90 minutes without once mentioning land...
...I have italicized land reform for two reasons...
...At a time when the Honolulu concept of "social revolution" was still not recognized as just another unfulfilled promise, The New York Times, on September 22, 1966, raised the rather revealing demand for "greater efforts to stamp out local 'tyrants' among civil servants and the wealthy," indi cating that pacification could not succeed without "eradicating tyranny," and explaining "that a hamlet will not be regarded as pacified until 'influential' officials and other persons who oppress the population have been 'wiped out.'" That some "good" Vietnamese exist, nobody can seriously doubt...
...The vast majority of the elected Assembly members are people who had been screened as candidates by the authorities...
...This publication, which contains both the separate and the Joint Declarations of the Saigon and Washington govern...
...But even if such a decree were to be issued, experience does not permit any hope that it would be observed...
...Can it be that this time the promise will be followed by deeds...
...For these people, says Critchfield, the war is not worth winning if they lose their land and all the other privileges derived from their positions of power...
...it was included only at the insistance of the counterinsurgency expert Major Gen...
...As late as September 22, 1966, The New York Times, in a special report from Saigon, said that this program was "generally regarded as the best conceived and most promising to be initiated in South Vietnam...
...Nguyen Duc Thang, who honestly admitted last fall that the Honolulu program was a flop...
...and parceling out the large landholdings of the Catholic Church...
...Many live on small plots of rented land and pay 50-75 per cent of their crops to the landlords...
...We must bring about a true social revolution and construct a modern society etc...
...The men in charge of this program, ever since the sorry times of Diem, have searched for security largely with police methods...
...Part 3 of the Honolulu Declaration also declares: "The United States will give its full support to measures of social revolution including land reform...
...a distribution to needy peasants of the land which the government acquired from the French landowners (whom the French government paid off...
...But were these "fresh steps" taken...
...IV All of this shows why land distribution, no longer mentioned by the propagandists of "the other war," remains the crucial issue it has been for decades, both under the colonial regime, and since its demise in 1954...
...Representative Reid of New York, in the Additional Views quoted above, gives a similar reason for Saigon's failure to promote genuine social reforms...
...20, 1966...
...Why is nothing meaningful being done about it...
...Under the present circumstances, their position is so solidified that even after the cessation of military hostilities, they may be able to perpetrate their control...
...But even if there were true energy behind good will, the allocation of resources between the requirements of the real war and the so-called war without guns, as pacification is now called, leaves them without the means for this tremendous task...
...One of its instruments, the only one seriously applied, was the 59-member team charged with pacifying villages unfriendly to Saigon—through persuasion, help for the peasants such as social services, and security maneuvers...
...A few days later, an even harsher judgment was made by Marvin L. Stone, in a long article in the December 5, 1966, issue of the U. S. News & World Report: "The pacification program, despite its booming send-off last February at the Honolulu 'summit' meeting, all but fell on its face in 1966...
...These measures would take care of all the land needs of all poor peasants and tenants in South Vietnam...
...What is the basis of this new optimism of Washington officials...
...In his "Letter from Saigon" in The New Yorker of March 11, Shaplen concluded that if all went well with the new teams, it would take them 10 years to accomplish their task...
...He also found evidence of venality and nepot ism wherever he went...
...No payments should be requested from the peasants: they have paid for the land they till more than ten times over since they were made landless by the colonial regime...
...Could it be that the program had failed to "wipe out" the Communists because it had not wiped out some of the causes of Communist strength...
...But what most forcefully underlines the failure of the Honolulu program is the need, recognized at the Guam meeting, for a new start in "the other war...
...All that is needed is a single sheet of paper containing one short sweeping decree: Beginning July 11, no peasant living in government-controlled areas shall henceforth pay any land rent whatsoever to any landlord...
...In the Mekong Delta ". .. there is hardly a district or province chief who has not bought his job in return for a crack at the available riches...
...A report in the Wall Street Journal of June 15, 1964, stated: "Lang Anh province just Southwest of Saigon is a potentially rich area...
...The hero of the new pacification efforts, consequently, has become Gen...
...If elections were held in the other two thirds of the country, where "the threat of Vietcong interference is too great," such elections would produce Vietcong-controlled village and hamlet councils...
...and the hope that they will be "wiped out" would be justified only if there were prospects for "wiping out" the present regime which, for the sake of our war aims, Washington ardently supports...
...II During all of 1966 no report whatsoever came out of Saigon on measures that would bear any relation to the promised "social revolution...
...Representatives of the merchant and landowning families are entrenched in various strata of the bureaucracy...
...As long as only people who support the war policies of the present regime are allowed to compete in elections, it is a swindle to speak of free elections in South Vietnam...
...South Vietnam, as no one can have forgotten, has had a whole series of "revolutionary" pacification programs under Diem, each of them a disastrous failure...
...on our side, they shall henceforth be unmolested by the people who have plagued them for so long...
...The contrary is true...
...Marvin L. Stone writes in the article quoted above: "In the secure areas, tenant farmers—that means 70 per cent of the farmers in the Delta—still are forced to pay up to 50 per cent and more of their rice crops to absentee landlords who have absolutely no obligation in return...
...As Denis Warner put it in the article quoted above: "For the past six years, a succession of administrations has flattered the Vietcong by copying their methods and tactics...
...Are we supposed to believe that this threat was so much smaller last year when the government claimed that over 80 per cent of the population went to the polls...
...In this article Stone reported that all the promises (not only that of a "social revolution"), whether concerning education, medical assistance or other social services, remained as unfulfilled as they were before Johnson and Ky swore to give a "better life" to the people...
...Washington listens to people who have "confidence" in the success of anything endorsed by the United States...
...South Vietnam," it said, "is increasingly coming to grips with the need to modernize society, bolster its civil economy, develop its representative institutions and provide a better life for the people...
...Most of the military officers," wrote Critchfield, "civil servants and community leaders come from the landowning gentry...
...But is this not proof that the claim of a progovernment turnout of 80 per cent of the people, which we have heard last year and will hear again next September, is as brazen a lie as was Diem's claim that his brother Nhu received 99.9 per cent of the votes in a district under total Communist control...
...Only through a government "responsive to the needs of the people," the Times warned, can "the kind of victory be achieved that could never be won by military means...
...For most Americans, ignorant of the true need for drastic social reforms, it is now more important to be "nice" to the peasants than to give them land—a corollary to the urge of many of our soldiers to comfort a child with candy whose father has been accidentally killed by our bombs...
...The President seems to allow himself to be brainwashed by second-rate aides, (if it fits his tactical needs...
...He even gave one peasant, whose bamboos the team had cut down to build a fence around the village, a present of 500 piasters (about $4...
...The indefatigable Dr...
...It also was, as the Times put it, "viewed as the key to ultimate success in the guerrilla war against the Vietcong...
...And instead of a promise of land reform such as was made at Honolulu, the communique of the Guam conference merely makes reference to "reform of land policies and tenure provisions," carefully avoiding the heart of the problem, which is land distribution...
...Marvin L. Stone, in his article quoted above, concurs by saying that "Saigon's land reform program, so vital for the aspirations of the peasants, has never been really put in motion...
...On land reform the GVN [Government of Vietnam] is proceeding with distribution of 1.2 million acres...
...But there is at this juncture no need either for complex legislation or long drawnout administrative procedure...
...Komer was either unaware of or had decided to dismiss what the most prominent Vietnamese leaders themselves had to say about pacification...
...V A new Assembly, elected under the control of the present regime, will hardly be very different, even if its members should voice criticisms of the regime, in the struggle between the civilian aspirants and the military holders of power...
...One, I have been informed that in the original State Department draft of this declaration, land reform was not mentioned...
...About another fundamental defect in the entire program of "Revolutionary Development" or "Rural Reconstruction" only a few words have to be said...
...The new Assembly, and the new President, will therefore be elected by a minority of the people, under conditions that are the opposite of a fair democratic process...
...Only three weeks after Honolulu, Robert Shaplen, a veteran American observer who knew something about previous pacification failures, gave a sober appraisal of what could be expected from these teams...
...Why do they, like their deglamorized hero Humphrey, avoid raising the question of land distribution, since there is little else for them to demand that might improve the rotten political conditions in the state of South Vietnam...
...for without it, "all the military might in the world will be of no avail...
...The argument that as long as the war lasts, the complex task of land distribution is impossible to execute must be rejected as a feeble excuse...
...He made the mistake of publishing this report on September 13, 1966...
...The new Constitution, as far as it is concerned with the vital question of land, reflects the fact that the Assembly was elected as a parliament of the rich...
...I tend to believe that our leaders, the President included, believe "social revolution" to be the sum of good deeds, social services, and pseudo-democratic reforms they honestly intend, but have so far failed, to bestow on the wretched people of South Vietnam...
...This is not to say that the Americans in charge of pacification lack good intentions...
...Dan's proposal] sounded too much like Communism...
...Ky "conceded that pacification now was little more than a paper program...
...The New York Times, Oct...
...Let Washington compensate...
...Shackford, in the same article, quoted Premier Ky as saying that he was "under no illusion" about the pacification program...
...Thang now insists that the members of his pacification team be polite to the peasants...
...A brief look at the composition and the work of the Constituent Assembly can supply us with an answer...
...It would cost no more than 150 million dollars to compensate landlords— less than 10 per cent of what we spend on the war each month...
...Instead, the Assembly adopted an article guaranteeing the private property of those who own the lands that are being tilled by the tenants...
...What is meant by this is simply that there have been elections, that the elected Assembly produced a Constitution which the military Junta accepted, that there will be more elections and that these will eventually lead to a civilian government "responsive to the needs of the people...
...The second reason for my stress on land reform is no less important: neither Part 2 of the Honolulu Declaration ("The Purposes of the Government of Vietnam") nor Part 4 ("The Common Commitment") contain any reference to land reform...
...In their so-called Additional Views on the report of October 12, 1966, by the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee on waste and pilferage in the United States Assistance Program, two Republican Representatives, Donald Rumsfield of Illinois and Robert Dole of Kansas, state categorically: "Land reform is virtually nonexistent...
...Land rents are illegal, and the attempt to collect them (by local "tyrants" or the "wealthy") shall be punished with five years in prison (now reserved for people suspected of favoring "neutralism...
...Nguyen Duc Thang, the Minister of Revolutionary Development...
...On the contrary, as The New York Times of March 22 said, "the necessary lines of authority to give effect to the new machinery already set up by the Americans to carry out this program were left in a state of confusion...
...ments, lists no less than nine firm promises of "democracy," three assurances that "corruption and social injustice" will be eradicated, and four references to the "work of social revolution...
...The peasant owns the land he tills, and will get legal title once peace has been restored...
...Ky's reference to "social revolution" brings to mind a promise we are obviously supposed to have forgotten: that the need for a vigorous prosecution of "the other war" was precisely what Premier Ky and President John son proclaimed at their Honolulu gathering, just over a year ago...
...Building a new society and dedication to "social revolution" are also the slogans of the report on the Honolulu conference issued by the Saigon Ministry of Information...
...This became perfectly clear in another report by R. W. Apple Jr...
...No land has in fact been distributed since Diem's abortive program, and all indications are that no land will be distributed in the future either...
...Speaking of the coming village and hamlet elections to be held beginning April 2, Apple says that they will take place in only a third of the country's villages and in a fourth of its hamlets, "because the threat of Vietcong interference is too great elsewhere...
...in The New York Times of March 25, "is the political evolution that has been under way in South Vietnam for 10 months...
...And in any new Assembly, only a minority of the people will be represented...
...To be sure, Washington, with its instinctive tendency to side with the rich, would want to compensate the landlords...
...This is the need to renew the promises of a better life, of a government "responsive to the needs of the people—of a new effort, as Vice President Humphrey put it shortly before the Guam conference, to get the exploiters "off the peasants' back...
...But even as regards "tenure provisions," the record so far is one of scandalous tenant exploitation in violation of a law on the books since 1955 which limits land rents to 25 per cent of the crop...
...Last week Premier Nguyen Cao Ky spoke of a new emphasis on land reform, so fresh steps in this field are under consideration...
...There are 20 landlords among its 117 members, but there is not a single peasant...
...The Guam communique, the Times concluded, "seems implicitly to recognize this fact, by its stress on the so-called Revolutionary Development program, on the importance of the coming village and hamlet elections, on the necessity of financial stability and reform of land policies, on the creation of a `free modern society' in South Vietnam...
...it is a drop into a river, instantly carried away by the rising flood of misery which the steady intensification of the war creates...
...Even more outspoken was the head of the program, Major Gen...
...in The New York Times of March 25...
...Critchfield reported that "many deputies said [Dr...
...But the Honolulu program, solemnly cosigned by the United States, was to be the turning point in "the other war...
...Stone also pointed to the continued prevalence of corruption, which, as he demonstrates with examples, "starts at the top...
...As another veteran reporter on Saigon failures, Denis Warner, put it in his article "The Ordeal of Pacification" in The Reporter of December 1, 1966: "The question is not what new fields there are to conquer, but what may be salvaged from the fiasco of the past...
...What has transpired so far in "the other war" hardly justifies this expectation...
...Dan, whom the Junta, unlike Diem, did not dare keep out of the Assembly, proposed a special article in the Constitution guaranteeing to every peasant the right to own the land he tilled...
...There is more that should be asked, but let our liberal friends restrict themselves to the land question and see how their demands will be dealt with...
...Apart from a number of intellectuals largely associated with the groups that form the social basis of the present regime, the Assembly members belong mostly to the wealthy and the military...
...The last time we heard anything about land reform was in The New Rork Times report of September 22, 1966...
...A policeman's salary in Saigon is $24 a month...
...Edward C. Lansdale, now stationed in Vietnam, whose experience has apparently taught him that without land reform, the promised "social revolution" would turn out to remain empty talk...
...It had to succeed...
...But why, I ask myself every day, have the many liberals whose antiCommunism makes them supporters of these war aims, why have they failed to raise the demand that "the other war"—the war that will in the end decide what will become of Vietnam— be conducted with measures that conform, at least to some degree, with the need for a "social revolution" in South Vietnam...
...A regime that speaks for these people cannot really wage "the other war...
...Has it been decided at last seriously to proceed with land reform, without which the promise of "social revolution" remains empty talk...
...or, as R. W. Apple Jr...
...Even the modest promise that a government decree would abolish back rents has yet to be fulfilled...
...there was no freedom of party organization...
...If there should be a need for expropriation or requisition "for the common good" (mind you, not for the landless peasants), the landlords must receive 382 "speedy and just compensation" (not merely payments in government bonds, as was the method under Diem...
...Such a man was Robert Komer, who was then a White House Assistant...
...put it in the same issue of the Times: the participants at the Guam conference "never really came to grips with the vital problems of the pacification program for South Vietnam...
...Their new hope," writes R. W. Apple Jr...
...In discussing the "new life" promised the peasants at Honolulu, Gen...
...What reasons do the Vietnamese peasants have to believe that this new hopeful "political evolution" will lead to something better than a return to what they had under Diem...
...What, then, is the basis for the new optimism displayed in Washington and Saigon...
...Italics added...
...there was neither freedom of nomination nor freedom of the press during the campaign...
...Guam, unlike HonoIuIu, produced no formal program, no specific plans or solemn statements...
...Even taking into account the American inclination for using radical words to describe basically conservative attitudes, the question remains whether the talk of "social revolution" is conscious political deception or results from an inability to understand what the term implies...
...The real point, however, is that even a volume of assistance ten times greater than what we are now able to render would still not constitute a "social revolution," and would therefore leave the unsatisfactory conditions of most Vietnamese peasants basically untouched...
...Another reporter critical of Saigon's land policies, Richard Critchfield, in a series of articles in the Washington Evening Star of January 24-27, 1966, tried to answer the question why the military, the high civil servants, and the various governments since 1954 failed to execute the land reform which they could not help promising again and again...
...And it certainly cannot promote the "social revolution" without which, as The New York Times said again on March 22, 1967, the Saigon regime will fail...
...So much for the claim of the Komer report to the President of September, 1966, that 1.2 million acres are being distributed...
...And he invited the peasants to complain to him if they feel abused by members of the pacification teams (as they were under Diem, when, according to David Halbestam and Neil Sheehan, some team members were distributing govern ment leafilets while others stole ducks), This is now the road to the "better life" for the peasants...
...And they "still extort rents as high as 60 per cent of the Product of a rice field...
...This means that elections, whether for local or national officials, can take place, at best, in the one third of the country controlled by the Saigon regime...
...If the task is thus conceived, local "tyrants" will remain more suitable instruments of Saigon than "good" Vietnamese...
...The Times also quotes premier Ky as saying that the only way to eliminate Communism in South Vietnam is through a "social revolution...
...Let us for the moment forget that South Vietnam, under Diem, already had both a civilian government and a "democratic" constitution, and that during the nine years of Diem's civi lian rule, no less than five elections were held, each one applauded by Washington as having been "free...
...As an extra bonus, the government will also decree a total moratorium on all peasant taxes for the duration of hostilities: let the Vietcong tax and otherwise exploit the villagers...
...What one can doubt, however, is that a regime based on force has any use for them, since "tyrants" have been precisely what all Saigon governments, beginning with Diem, have retained in the villages...
...Villages are townships comprising several hamlets...
...Of these demands, the simplest and most practical would be a radical program of land distribution through a reduction of landholdings to ten hectars (the limit imposed in Japan...
...According to a report by Charles Mohr in The New York Times of April 1, Gen...
...The proposal received 3 votes out of 117...
...Furthermore, there are more than a dozen promises of better education, better medical care, and more "human dignity"—promises which have deluded the American people (unlike the Vietnamese themselves) into believing that something other than death and destruction is being showered on the people of Vietnam...
...He goes on to say that there are now about 3,000 rich Saigon families who, even if they were "victims" of Diem's land reform still make profits as high as $40,000 a year from the 220 acres of rice land they were able to retain...
...In their Declaration of Honolulu dated February 6, 1966, the South Vietnamese leaders stated: "We are dedicated to the eradication of social injustice among our people...
...But prosperity hasn't touched most of the province's 300,000 inhabitants...
...between 4-5000 Buddhist activists were thrown into jail before the elections were held...
...On March 22 The New York Times declared editorially that at the Guam meeting of U. S. and South Vietnamese leaders, the emphasis was not on military problems but on "that other side of the war—the progress toward economic and social development and constitutional and representative government in South Vietnam...
...have not been wiped out...
...Although I hardly believe that even drastic measures of reform could any longer remedy a situation made hopeless by the constant empty promises, I would still, if only for the sake of revealing the mendacity of the Saigon rulers and their Washington supporters, propose that certain demands be raised and thrown into the face of any official who claims that in "the other war" something meaningful is being done...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
