Читать книгу Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 23

Northern and southern Vietnam have always been as different as are their regional counterparts in Britain, the US, Italy and many other nations, even employing slightly different obscenities: the common expletive ‘fuck mother’ translates as du me in Saigon, dit me in Hanoi. In the years that followed the Geneva Accords, both fell into the hands of oppressive authoritarian regimes. That of Ho Chi Minh, however, profited from some notable political advantages. While the North was devastated by the war, subjected to a destitution rapidly worsened by communist economic policies, it became far more efficiently disciplined. Ho had spent less of his own life in Vietnam than had Ngo Dinh Diem. As victor in the independence struggle, however, he commanded immense prestige, and deployed his charisma and charm to formidable effect on the international stage. Moreover, by exercising iron control over information and access, North Vietnam veiled from foreign eyes its uprisings, purges and killings. In the South, by contrast, the follies and cruelties of the Diem regime took place in plain view: many peasants found Vietnamese landlordism no more acceptable than the French variety, and learned nothing of the worse plight of their Northern brethren. Only much later would Southerners come to look back on ‘the six years’ – the period between 1954 and 1960 – as a lost idyll, because relatively few of their countrymen killed each other.

Following the 25 July 1954 ceasefire, a vast exodus from the North took place, as a million people who feared the new rulers – businessmen, servants of the French, landlords, anti-communists and above all Catholics – fled the country by land, sea and air. It was a time of turmoil, sunderings, fears and farewells. Vietminh cadres stopped buses carrying fugitives to the port of Haiphong down Route 1, urging and sometimes compelling passengers to remain. Nguyen Duong’s modestly prosperous family, small businesspeople, suffered a disaster: in the throng at an airfield outside Hanoi, his mother briefly set down the bag containing all their portable wealth in jewellery and gold. Within seconds it vanished, never to be seen again: they started a new life in Saigon almost penniless.

Even as the Northern government-in-waiting issued a Dienbienphu commemoration mug, pathetic scenes took place in Hanoi as its more prosperous citizens stacked possessions in the streets outside their homes, for disposal at firesale prices. Some families split. Nguyen Thi Chinh’s father Cuu, head of a once-rich landlord family, told the sixteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old brother Lan that they would go south – one daughter had already left, after marrying a French doctor. The night before they flew, he gave each teenager a belt containing a little money, some food and essentials. Very early next morning, however, Chinh was shaken awake by Lan, who whispered to her, ‘Come outside.’ On the road they found a friend of her brother’s holding two bicycles. Her brother said, ‘We’re going to join the revolution. Father would understand, but he wouldn’t give permission.’ Chinh was appalled. She pleaded, begged, screamed, dragged at the bikes’ handlebars, all in vain. Lan and his friend pedalled away.

Distraught, she wakened her father. He decided that she must leave as planned, while he stayed behind to search for Lan. A few hours later she found herself among a pushing, shouting, desperate mob at the airport, boarding a cargo plane. Her father at their parting gave her a gold bracelet. On arrival in Saigon she was consigned to a refugee camp, where through the weeks that followed she sobbed relentlessly. At last she encountered a kindly family friend who said, ‘Come and stay with us’; two years later she married his son. She would hear no more of her brother for almost forty years.

Tran Hoi, serving as an apprentice with the French Air Force, had no hesitation about moving to Saigon with his squadron. His mother, however, determined that she must stay behind to sell their house and the family bus company. Hoi flew south aboard a C-47: ‘I cried all the way – Vietnamese never abandon their relations.’ He would have sobbed louder had he known that he would have no further contact with his kin until 1998. He embarked on a life in the South that was always tinged with sorrow, because on holidays and feast days he could never again make the pilgrimage to a family home.

By bus, train, car and on foot, families trekked to Haiphong to board ships, mostly provided by the Americans. It was later claimed that US agents staged a propaganda campaign to frighten Northerners into flight. That there was propaganda is beyond dispute, including atrocity stories fabricated by the American conservative ‘hero’ Dr Tom Dooley, author of a mendacious best-selling memoir Deliver Us From Evil. Equally well-attested, however, are the tragedies that befell many of those who remained, accepting the false assurances of Ho Chi Minh that they had nothing to fear.

Landlord’s son Nguyen Hai Dinh was eighteen when his only sister joined the flight southward. He himself remained. ‘Why? Because I was very stupid … We had thought the French were colonial oppressors until the communists took over, then we started to think of the French as our friends.’ All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order. Dinh found that his class background made him ineligible to attend university, or to occupy any responsible job. His new ideology teacher said: ‘In the past this country was feudal: now it belongs to the peasants and workers. You have no country.’ His father was stripped of citizenship rights for five years as an ‘anti-social element’, and obliged to scratch a living as a cook for Party cadres. Dinh came to hate everything about his own society, above all the impossibility of saying what he thought. He dated a student named Phuong, but through the five years of their dalliance he never dared to discuss any political subject: ‘Everybody was watching everybody else. Anyone could be an informer.’ He was deemed eligible only for manual labour.

In some tribal areas armed resistance persisted, using weapons provided by France’s special forces before the ceasefire. Bernard Fall claimed that several French officers serving with the tribes could not be retrieved from remote districts, and were abandoned until they were progressively rounded up or killed. He describes a Frenchman radioing desperately as late as the summer of 1956: ‘You sons-of-bitches, help us! Help us! Parachute us at least some ammunition so that we can die fighting instead of being slaughtered like animals.’ Fall asserts that nothing was done: ‘There was no “U-2” affair, no fuss: France did not claim the men, and the communists were content to settle the matters by themselves.’ The Hanoi weekly People’s Army reported in September 1957 that in the two years following the ceasefire, their forces in the mountains east of the Red River had killed 183 and captured three hundred ‘enemy soldiers’, while forcing the surrender of 4,336 tribesmen. Probably not more than a handful of these were Frenchmen, but the report confirms the persistence of resistance.

Meanwhile the new government set about implementing land reform. The Party daily Nhan Dan called on cadres to ‘banish selfish and pacifist doctrine’ and ‘resolutely lead the peasantry to crush the whole landlord class’. The Indian representative on the ICC reported that those who supposed the regime mere nationalists and socialists were naïve. Hanoi’s leadership, he said, bore an ‘indisputably communist character’. Northern media poured forth strident anti-American propaganda. Pierre Asselin, noting that all totalitarian governments require enemies, has written: ‘demonization of the United States … created a “useful adversary” that facilitated gaining and maintaining public support … for advancing the Vietnamese revolution’.

The draconian land-reform programme introduced between 1954 and 1956 pleased some peasants, who saw their old landlords dispossessed, but imposed so many hardships that despite the benefits generated by the cessation of armed strife, many Vietnamese found themselves continuing to face chronic hunger, and later near-starvation. Duong Van Mai, daughter of a former colonial official, observed: ‘The state had removed an incentive for hard work by paying peasants according to their labour’. When collectivisation was later superimposed, ‘shortages became a way of life.’

Adults were accorded rations of twenty-eight pounds of rice a month, ten ounces of meat and the same weight of sugar, and a pint of fish sauce. They received four yards of cloth a year, and two sets of underwear. Yet even in the darkest days, Party leaders and their families fared much better. The Northern elite enjoyed nothing like the riches that soon accrued to their Southern counterparts, but they never went hungry. In 1955, only deliveries of Burmese rice averted a famine as grave as that of a decade earlier. Hanoi’s principal sources of cash were $US200 million provided by China, and another $100 million from Russia. These sums were not gifts, however, but mere payments for commodities shipped abroad, desperately missed at home.

Credible statistics have never been published about the cruelties and executions perpetrated by North Vietnam’s rulers in the early years of revolution. Significant admissions were made in a 29 October 1956 speech by Giap, by then deputy prime minister: ‘We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies, which led us to think there were enemies everywhere … In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures … and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions … The outcome was that many innocent people were denounced as reactionaries, arrested, punished, imprisoned.’ Estimates of executions range up to fifteen thousand. While Ho Chi Minh is alleged to have wrung his hands about the excesses, he never deployed his huge prestige to prevent them.

Not only were large portions of landlords’ holdings confiscated, but in many cases the new regime demanded that they should repay to their tenants money collected over years in ‘excessive’ rents. Assets and draught animals were seized at will, so that Duong Van Mai’s elderly uncle found himself attempting to till his residual patch of paddy with a plough strapped to his own shoulder. Space in another uncle’s big house was ‘reallocated’: revisiting forty years later, she found it occupied by forty people. Northerner Doan Phuong Hai’s grandmother seemed to age before his eyes as she suffered indictment as a landlord, followed by interrogation, denunciation, and property confiscation. The old woman refused her son’s offer to take her to Hanoi for medical treatment, merely coughing and wheezing to a premature grave.

The entire landlord class suffered institutionalised humiliation, designed to boost the self-regard of the peasantry as much as to abase owners of property. Even an ardent communist such as Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan admitted later: ‘Many things happened that I thought didn’t make sense.’ For years she herself was denied promotion, despite her devotion to the Party: ‘everything required the right family background’. By this she meant that those of peasant origins were favoured over people such as herself, from educated and allegedly ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Dissent, diversity, freedom of information were alike abolished. North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist approach to truth, which became whatever the politburo decreed that it should be.

Truong Nhu Tang, later a secret cadre, acknowledged that many of the executed ‘enemies of the people … so-called landlords … had simply been poor peasants who happened to own slightly larger plots than their neighbours, all the holdings being minuscule to begin with’. He also notes that the Party has never expressed remorse for its 1956 campaign to suppress ‘intellectuals’: even those who escaped imprisonment were condemned to house arrest, incommunicado. In November 1956 there were violent rebellions, which two army divisions were deployed to suppress. One such episode took place in Nghe An province, which a later communist history attributed to three ‘reactionary Catholic priests’, named as Fathers Can, Don and Cat, who barricaded villages, seized weapons, captured cadres and organised demonstrations against land reform.

A communist narrative acknowledges: ‘We were obliged to use military forces … All leaders and their key lackeys were arrested.’ In addition to hundreds who died in hot blood, up to two thousand executions followed, and many more prison sentences. Between 1956 and 1959 there were further disturbances in Lai Chau province. Hanoi professed to blame these on agitation by Chinese Nationalist agents, but the revolts created ‘many difficult political situations … creating fear and worry among the population about socialism and diminishing the people’s confidence in the Party and Government’.

Lan, brother of Nguyen Thi Chinh who had fled south in 1954, was frustrated in his attempt to join the Vietminh, who instead imprisoned him for six years. Thereafter, denied a ration card, he was reduced to selling his blood to hospitals, and became a street porter. Their father’s fate was worse: even when released from imprisonment he was unable to secure a ration card or access to employment, and eventually succumbed to beggary. One night, cold and starving, he knocked at the door of an old friend and novelist named Ngoc Giao. Giao’s wife, on opening the door, took one look at the visitor and implored him to go away: her husband was himself in bad odour with the regime. But Giao came down from the roof where he had been hiding, in expectation that the night visitor was a policeman. He insisted on admitting Cuu, feeding him and allowing him a shower. They talked all night, until the writer said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay here.’ Before Cuu left, he said to Giao, ‘If you ever hear anything of my daughter, please tell her how much I love her.’ Then he vanished into the street. Giao and his wife thereafter provided the only assistance they dared, placing a bag of rice in the back alley early each morning. This was collected for a fortnight or so, then one night was left untaken. Cuu vanished from their lives and from that of Vietnam, dying at a time and place unknown. Chinh secured this glimpse of her father’s latter days only long after the war ended.

North Vietnam became known in Western intelligence parlance as a ‘denied area’. Yet thanks to the prestige of its leader, a figure of unimpeachable anti-imperialist credentials, embodiment of a triumphant revolutionary struggle, his country stood well in the world. Its status as a closed society invited shrugs from most Westerners, that this was merely the communist norm. A Northern intellectual suggested later that Ho’s career should be seen in three distinguishable phases – first as a simple patriot; then as a communist; finally as an apparent nationalist who was in reality pursuing the interests of the Communist International. In the view of a compatriot, he profited greatly from his cosmopolitan experience and ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.

Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.

A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.

Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.