Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0403/04033.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 28KB | 454 lines

$Unique_ID{COW04033}
$Pretitle{232}
$Title{Vietnam
Chapter 2C.   Vietnam after 1975}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Rinn-Sup Shinn}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{family
new
south
children
socialist
party
women
marriage
parents
class}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Country:     Vietnam
Book:        Vietnam, A Country Study
Author:      Rinn-Sup Shinn
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Chapter 2C.   Vietnam after 1975

     The sudden collapse of Saigon in April 1975 set the stage for a new and
uncertain chapter in the evolution of Vietnamese society. The Hanoi government
had to confront directly what communists have long called the struggle between
the two paths of socialism and capitalism. At issue was Hanoi's ability to
translate its wartime success and socialist revolutionary experience into
postwar rehabilitation and reconstruction now that it controlled the South
territorially.

     Foremost among the regime's imperatives was that of restoring order and
stability to the war-torn South. The critical question, however, was whether
or not the northern conquerors could inspire the southern population to
embrace communism. Initially, Hanoi appeared sanguine; the two zones had more
similarities than dissimilarities, and the dissimilarities were expected to be
eliminated as the South caught up with the North in socialist organization.

     The December 1975 Vietnam Courier, an official government publication,
portrayed Vietnam as two distinct, incongruent societies. The South was
reported to continue to suffer from what communists consider the
neo-colonialist influences and feudal ideology of the United States, while the
North was considered to serve as a progressive environment for growing numbers
of a new kind of socialist human being, imbued with patriotism, proletarian
internationalism, and socialist virtues. The class of social exploiter had
been eliminated in the North, leaving the classes of worker, collectivized
peasant, and socialist intellectual, the last consisting of various groups. In
contrast, the South was divided into a working class, peasantry, petit
bourgeois, capitalist--or comprador (see Glossary)--class, and the remnant of
a feudal landlord class.

     In September 1976, Premier Pham Van Dong declared that his compatriots,
North and South, were "translating the revolutionary heroism they [had]
displayed in fighting into creative labor in the acquisition of wealth and
strength." In the South particularly, the old society was undergoing active
changes as the result of "stirring revolutionary movements" by the workers,
peasants, youth, women, intellectuals, and other groups. In agriculture alone,
"millions of people" participated in bringing hundreds of thousands more
hectares under cultivation and in building or dredging thousands of kilometers
of canals and ditches.

     From all indications, however, these changes occurred more through
coercion than volition. In Dong's own words, the party had initiated "various
policies aimed at eliminating the comprador capitalists as a class and doing
away with all vestiges of feudal exploitation." These policies radically
realigned the power elite so that the ruling machine was controlled
collectively by the putative vanguard of the working class--the party--and by
the senior cadres of the party who were mostly from the North.

     In its quest for a new socialist order in the South, Hanoi relied on
other techniques apart from socialist economic transformation and socialist
education. These included thought reform, population resettlement, and
internal exile, as well as surveillance and mass mobilization. Party-sponsored
"study sessions" were obligatory for all adults. For the former elite of the
Saigon regime, a more rigorous form of indoctrination was used; hundreds of
thousands of former military officers, bureaucrats, politicians, religious and
labor leaders, scholars, intellectuals, and lawyers, as well as critics of the
new regime were ordered to "reeducation camps" for varying periods. In
mid-1985, the Hanoi government conceded that it still held about 10,000
inmates in the reeducation camps, but the actual number was believed to be at
least 40,000. In 1982 there were about 120,000 Vietnamese in these camps.
According to a knowledgeable American observer, the inmates faced hard labor,
but only rarely torture or execution.

     Population resettlement or redistribution, although heralded on economic
grounds, turned out to be another instrument of social control in disguise. It
was a means of defusing tensions in congested cities, which were burdened with
unemployed and socially dislocated people even after most of the rural
refugees had been repatriated to their native villages. These refugees had
swelled the urban population to 45 percent of the southern total in 1975 (up
from 33 percent in 1970). The authorities sought to address the problem of
urban congestion by relocating many of the metropolitan jobless in the new
economic zones hastily set up in virgin lands, often malaria-infested jungles,
as part of a broader effort to boost agricultural output. In 1975 and 1976
alone, more than 600,000 people were moved from Ho Chi Minh City to these
zones, in most instances, reportedly, against their will. Because of the
barely tolerable living conditions in the new settlements, a considerable
number of people escaped or bribed their way back to the city. The new
economic zones came to be widely perceived as places of internal exile. In
fact, the authorities were said to have used the threat of exile to such
places against those who refused to obey party instructions or to participate
in the activities of the mass organizations.

     Surveillance was a familiar tool of the regime, which was bent on purging
all class enemies. Counterrevolutionaries, real and suspected, were summarily
interned in reform camps or forced labor camps that were set up separately
from the new economic zones in several border areas and other undeveloped
regions.

     The Hanoi government has claimed that not a single political execution
took place in the South after 1975, even in cases of grave war crimes.
Generally, the foreign press corroborated this claim by reporting in 1975 that
there seemed to be no overt indication of the blood bath that many Western
observers had predicted would occur in the wake of the communist takeover.
Some Western observers, however, have estimated that as many as 65,000 South
Vietnamese may have been executed.

     In March 1982, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) convened its Fifth
National Party Congress to assess its achievements since 1976 and to outline
its major tasks for the 1980s. The congress was revealing if only because of
its somber admission that revolutionary optimism was no substitute for common
sense. Despite rigid social controls and mass mobilization, the party fell far
short of its original expectations for socialist transition. According to the
party's assessment, from 1976 through 1980 shortcomings and errors occurred in
establishing transition goals and in implementing the party line.

     The congress, however, reaffirmed the correctness of the party line
concerning socialist transition, and directed that it be implemented with due
allowances for different regional circumstances. The task was admittedly
formidable. In a realistic appraisal of the regime's difficulties, Nhan Dan,
the party's daily organ, warned in June 1982 that the crux of the problem lay
in the regime itself, the shortcomings of which included lack of party
discipline and corruption of party and state functionaries.

     In 1987 the goal of establishing a new society remained elusive, and
Vietnam languished in the first stage of the party's planned period of
transition to socialism. Mai Chi Tho, mayor of Ho Chi Minh City and deputy
head of its party branch, had told visiting Western reporters as early as
April 1985 that socialist transition, as officially envisioned, would probably
continue until the year 2000.