The Dzu Affair

...onstrated a certain degree of confidence in its policies by acquitting Dzu, whose statements to the foreign press comprised all the evidence against him...

...What are the Saigon government's chances of military and political success against the Communists...

...Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky does not care particularly about corruption, his ambition is to defeat the Communists and possibly, as he has often said, invade North Vietnam...

...Prime Minister Tran Van Huong, eager to get rid of the dead wood and corrupt officials from the district to central level, is demanding economic and political reforms...

...Perhaps the enemy has decided to wait before launching another full-scale military campaign, and to concentrate instead on politics and terrorism...

...While rumors of fresh attacks were spreading in July, the enemy quietly slipped two of its divisions out of the northern two provinces into Laos and the southern part of North Vietnam...

...At Dzu's trial two weeks ago on charges of "undermining the national spirit," a Catholic politician remarked to reporters that the government could not have picked a better way to honor a man generally known before his debut in national politics as a manipulator who had made a small fortune from money changing and other interests...

...The terrorist incidents could conceivably rebound against the Communists...

...The Alliance appears to have the most influence among rebellious students, notably members of the Saigon Students Union, known for their opposition to the government's war policy...

...It is beset by fears real and imagined—of subversion from within and defeat from without, of betrayal by the Americans and abandonment by the world...

...These positions are taboo in Vietnamese political life...

...It was the Students Union that published the paper whose editor was jailed...

...The phenomenon of Dzu was expected to die with the election, but he persisited in calling for negotiations with the Vietcong and telling reporters he thought a coalition with the Communists was inevitable...

...The script had obviously been prepared well in advance: Clifford's lavish praise of the First Division of the South Vietnamese Army, his promise of more arms for South Vietnam, and then the strongly-worded communique from Honolulu agreed on well before the participants ever sat down at the table...

...The feeling among a number of officials is that Communist agents deliberately planted reports of an impending attack on Saigon to lower the morale of the people and their confidence in the government...

...The government might have demDonald Kirk reports from Southeast Asia for the Washington Star...

...While it can tolerate some degree of conventional throw-the-rascals-out dissent, the government is less tolerant of debate on the essential questions of negotiating with the National Liberation Front, recognizing it, or considering a coalition...

...There is a great deal of mileage to be had here...

...One reason for the country-wide pullback, aside from the losses of the first and second waves, was that American and South Vietnamese units, supported by B-52 bombers and the usual assortment of lesser planes and artillery, drove the Communists relentlessly, particularly around Saigon...

...The fighting might never resume on the same scale as before, or could break out again tomorrow...

...Both the South Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese may have entered a race against time, a race to see who is better prepared for the fighting in the year or two as the talks are dragging...

...The photographers got pictures of Dzu's 17-year-old daughter flinging herself into her father's arms, and Dzu himself was able to shout "I am not guilty" in the direction of some microphones before police hustled him into a little black van...

...The trials of Dzu and the student editor seemed calculated to have a combination of two effects...

...They ask for fullest details, names, dates etc...

...With transparent irony, Thieu asked him if he was getting "a feel" for Vietnam in his five days in the country...

...But the Saigon regime has little confidence...

...So in the end lawyer Dzu got five years hard labor, the same sentence handed down by the same military tribunal the day before to a 23-year-old student editor who in the first issue of his paper had called for coalition government...

...For all the flossy statements, the rapport between the Vietnamese and American leaders seemed as strained as it often is between junior American officers and their Vietnamese "counterparts...

...At a palace press conference, he could only point to the written assurances of the official communique as proof of his contention that no future American President, even Senator Eugene McCarthy or Governor Nelson Rockefeller, would forsake his country's commitment...

...If it is to survive in the present curiously delicate interlude of military lull, diplomatic negotiations, and American Presidential campaigning, it cannot brook internal dissension perpetrated by jealous politicians and students eager to prove their political power...

...American officials, at least for the record, seem to think the recent visit of Defense Secretary Clark Clifford to Vietnam, and the subsequent Honolulu conference between Presidents Johnson and Thieu, should have convinced the most doubting Vietnamese of the unlikelihood of American betrayal...

...Meanwhile, to keep up the pretense of power, the Communists are accelerating their campaign of terror...

...It could be that the Communists are saving their real military showdown for a later stage in the Paris talks...

...They are not significant in themselves, but as indices of the near panic in the midst of the longest military lull of the war...

...It is often said that they want to score at least a "propaganda victory" on the battlefield during the talks, and perhaps they do...

...So could the government crackdown on such figures as lawyer Dzu and the student editor...

...National leaders who had assiduously kept all popular "peace candidates" from running were as surprised as anyone else when Dzu, the only really fiery campaign orator, finished second to General Van Thieu with 17 per cent of the votes...

...Officials point out that the Vietcong have already begun a drive to elect their own "liberation councils" in hamlets and villages, including some in the Mekong River Delta region ostensibly under government control...

...The language of the American Secretary, accompanied by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, General Creighton W. Abrams and other senior officials, seemed more suited to a conversation with the potentate of some obscure little kingdom than the President of a country to which we have devoted our largest military-political effort since World War II...

...Mission here...

...It is even all right for political factions and "forces" to unite and stage press conferences redolent with intrigue and high hopes for dumping the Tran Van Huong Cabinet and appointing a new Prime Minister in his place...

...Instead, Johnson unaccountably miffed him by cutting off the two-day visit at the end of one day and flying off to Washington before Thieu had left Honolulu...

...Military sources still cite reams of captured documentary evidence indicating that the Communists plan to carry out their offensive even though they have had to pull back for "refitting and refurbishing...

...This is a period of indecision in which both sides are testing each other's will and endurance and hoping something will happen—politically, militarily or diplomatically—to break the stalemate of the past five years...

...It was partly because Dzu was known principally for his financial conniving, common in wartime Saigon, that the government had no real objections to his candidacy for President last summer...

...In fact, however, both the Clifford visit and the Honolulu conference were so stilted and stereotyped as to strike any Vietnamese who cared as only superficial pro jorma gestures...

...They are kidnapping and killing village officials at twice last year's rate, exploding bombs from time to time in movie theaters and offices, and, in the worst massacre of the war, have killed 88 persons in a raid on a village of Danang...

...What is more, the government is divided...

...But they may think it more expedient to wait until a new, hopefully dovish, American President has pulled back militarily and left the South Vietnamese Armed Forces in a vulnerable position...

...Nevertheless, some sources question whether the Vietcong and North Vietnamese will stick to their original script at all...

...Clifford replied that he was, thank you...

...In the cities, the Communists seem to be counting on the newly formed Alliance of National Democratic and Peace Forces, an organization composed of disenchanted non-Communist professional men who have gone over to the National Liberation Front...

...Predictably, Vietnamese papers and politicians thought it discourteous that the American President did not see his visitor off at a full-scale airport ceremony...

...Two other divisions in the Central Highlands vanished into Cambodia, and units around Saigon also retreated deep into jungle base areas...

...Although the scenario was prewritten, Vietnamese sources said that Thieu had hoped to obtain still firmer private assurances from the American President...

...The same tension apparently surrounded Thieu's conference with Johnson in Honolulu...

...At least three divisions of Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops were within a day or two's march on the capital, according to senior military officers, and North Vietnamese divisions were said to pose a severe threat along the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam...

...One senior Vietnamese has reported that the Vietcong are letting some of their troops in the Delta go home to work on their crops and help win local political support for the cause...

...The Harriman delegation says that the daily briefing summary of VC horror has been most revealing to them," said a memorandum circulated among information officials in the U.S...

...President Thieu, always wary of Ky, seems to favor Huong yet must also remain responsible to the will and whims of hard-lining military leaders...

...The real lesson of Honolulu and the Clifford visit was that the United States, if it might waver on its long-term commitment here, would still give South Vietnam the basic weapons it needs to match the Communists' own modern Russian and Chinese-made materiel...

...One of the underlying themes of all the conferences, as well as the trials of Dzu and the student editor, was that the government faced an immediate threat of a "third wave" attack by the Communists...

...Second, they might for the moment silence the same critics and discourage immediate plans for more public protests...

...It is "for the moment" that the government formulates its plans...

...At his first meeting with President Thieu, Clifford sat stiffly in a chair in a palace anteroom and exchanged banalities...

...agreement to stop all the bombing in exchange for some flimsy indication that North Vietnam will scale down the level of the war...

...Even though student leaders dare not call for coalition or negotiations with the Front, they have loudly charged that the trial of the editor and the suspension of the paper were "unconstitutional...

...It is all right, as the government did recently, to stop censoring newspapers...

...How real are the government's fears...

...But the objective of the Thieu Administration at this juncture is to prove it can outlast the Communists, to build up enough military strength so the Americans cannot sell it out —and thus prevent the Paris talks from ending in a U.S...

...The hope of both the Americans and Vietnamese is that somehow South Vietnam's Army, increased to over a million men by general mobilization and fully equipped with M-16 automatic rifles, machine guns and other basic necessities, will some day stymie the Communist drive on its own...

...One document cited enemy plans to "besiege" the cities and towns with "special action teams," but Communist leaders were apparently unwilling to risk the same heavy casualties they suffered in the first wave of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, and the second wave in May...

...And Thieu, on his return to Saigon, was said to have been so discouraged about the meeting that he was reluctant to talk to reporters...

...But there was also another lesson that was not lost on Vietnamese officials: If the Saigon regime, after reaching its peak fighting strength is still unable to win the war, then it should not count on the United States for the same continuous flow of arms and men...

...The Alliance is so clearly a Communist organ that it has little respectable support in Saigon, but doubtless many sympathizers would join if the government really lost control...

...First, they would anger the sizeable number of Saigon intellectuals, professional men and students who are sure the war can only end in some kind of compromise, if not defeat...

...It is all right to put up with noisy Catholic Senators who go witchhunting for Cabinet ministers suspected of compromising with the Communists, and bowing before the Americans...