When the War Was Over (70 page)

Hanoi's system of justice betrayed some of the same Maoist or Stalinist attitudes as those of the communists in neighboring Cambodia. Political crimes were paramount. Former wartime opponents were not charged with breaking the code of war, with slaughtering civilians, dropping toxic defoliants, or usurping legitimate power. They were labeled, en masse, as people holding improper political views. There were no trials, no judge or jury or sentencing. (In fact, there was no ministry of justice.) The reeducation system
proved to be an insidious procedure which led to the banning of all right to dissent—that is, to show improper political attitudes.

The Hanoi leadership defended reeducation vigorously as the more “humane” alternative to a Nuremberg war-crime tribunal. “We had no bloodbath here,” explained Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. “It's not good to kill as Pol Pot did . . . when you kill you lose the sense of family”

Certainly there was no bloodbath on the scale predicted. But people did die in those awful camps, from diseases, malnutrition, and injuries received as punishment. Moreover, the threat of reeducation propelled many of the nearly one million “boat people” to abandon their homes for a life outside of Vietnam. For indefinite imprisonment in reeducation centers was not restricted to former wartime enemies. It was used to punish dissenters of the new regime, especially those vocal members of the old “third force” who had fought against Thieu or been members of the NLF or PRG without joining the communist party. As early as July 1975, the authorities imprisoned the former dean of the faculty of law at Saigon University; he had taken a critical stance toward the Thieu regime during the war. The North Vietnamese, however, claimed he was guilty of “national treason.” Another famous activist imprisoned in a reeducation camp was the nationalist scholar and writer Ho Huu Tong. At the age of seventy, he had survived imprisonment by the French and Diem, who threw Tong into the notorious Con Son Island prison for five years. But Tong did not survive the “humane” reeducation camp and died in one of the camps because the government refused to give him medical care. The list of third-force figures imprisoned in these camps grew. One such inmate, a writer who was forced to write repeated versions of “confessions” of incorrect political views, said the inmates at his camp often discussed how their opposite numbers were faring in neighboring Cambodia. “We wondered if it wouldn't be better to simply be executed rather than finish life in those camps.”

Tens of thousands of prisoners were left in these camps indefinitely while Hanoi conveniently forgot its specific, written promise that reeducation would impose a maximum sentence of three years.

By the end of 1976 the people realized that war's end was bringing neither peace nor prosperity The communist party was coming to the same conclusion. The problem was considered, however, from entirely different points of view. For the unhappy southerner and the disillusioned northerner, war's end had brought more problems. Food was much more scarce, and the tough discipline imposed by the party often seemed meaningless except to exert control and to police the population. Not only material but spiritual hardships were poisoning the air. As one diplomat posted to Hanoi
during this period said: “Everything I was told about Vietnam was wrong in some spectacular way They are not the brilliant strategists nor subtle diplomats. They are other things—stubborn, arrogant, loyal, resilient. Only the American blunder made them appear to be otherwise. The illusions vanished with the Americans.”

The party, however, saw its problems stemming from too liberal an approach. In November 1976, the regime drastically revised its five-year plan. There was no money for heavy industry, largely because the Soviet bloc refused to support it. Light industry was upgraded in the new plan but without an increase of funding for the industries, most of which were in the south. How southern industry was to improve without sufficient funds was announced the following month, December 1976, at the Fourth Party Congress, where, among other things, the Vietnamese Workers Party officially changed its name to the Communist Party of Vietnam.

The party announced that the south would undergo a more rapid “transformation to socialism” than had been expected. The answer for the economic problems was to be stricter rules, more nationalization, and stiffer penalties. In other words, the south would have to undergo full pacification. Reeducation had not been sufficient. The New Economic Zones had failed. The “mixed economic” approach in the south was not producing the miracles the north required. Hence, the south had to become more like the north. Within one month the boat people started leaving the southern part of Vietnam in significant numbers.

The south's transformation included the apparatus of a police state already in place in the north. There no one moved without state permission. People spied on one another and had become accustomed to state control over all aspects of their lives—education, employment, the amount of food rations, the goods allotted for personal use, the amount of goods to be produced on the job. Vietnamese raised in this northern climate were sent south to ensure that the southerners paid heed to the new order from Hanoi.

When the “rapid transformation” failed, and the boat people flooded the South China Sea, these young northern cadre and bureaucrats were blamed.

The December party congress also announced that “tens of thousands” of “unqualified members” had been expelled from the communist party. This announcement was more than the usual party roll-cleansing that follows victorious communist wars. The Vietnamese were dismissing more than those members whose background was too bourgeois or who had the wrong family connection. The party said many members were expelled in order to “eliminate reactionaries and fifth columnists from the party.”

“Fifth columnists” referred to the ethnic Chinese who had been party members in the north. Shortly the term would be used to indict all ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam—north and south, communist or diehard capitalist. The leaders in Hanoi had reached several crucial decisions. They had been unable to draw the people together to rebuild Vietnam, at least on the severe terms they offered, and it seemed unlikely that the aging leadership would see socialism in Vietnam within their lifetime. A culprit had to be blamed for this overwhelming disappointment, preferably a foreign enemy. Like Cambodia, the Vietnamese had a preferred candidate—China.

China and the Chinese would be blamed for all problems—foreign and domestic. The ethnic Chinese merchants in Ho Chi Minh City were blamed for spoiling the north's strategies in the south. The very different ethnic Chinese communists in the north could be blamed for aiding the souring Vietnamese-Chinese feud. And Beijing could be blamed for Vietnam's inability to bring communist Cambodia into an Indochinese bloc. They became all of a piece in Hanoi's mind, all part of the same dialectic that reduced the series of mistakes made by Vietnam into one question of a threat to “national security.” Foreign powers had always been Vietnam's source of strife, according to the leadership, and China was designated as the threat to the Vietnamese race and nation.

With a new foreign threat Vietnam could return to the more comfortable habits of war. The army had never been demobilized. Now it could be prepared for another war. The Vietnamese were supreme experts at mobilizing the people around the issue of the survival of the Vietnamese people and nation, as Cambodia was not. And Hanoi was better at manipulating all of the unspoken racial connotations of such an appeal.

Unlike the Cambodians, who when faced with the threat of foreign war ended up fighting among themselves and seeking foreign protectors, the Vietnamese sought unity through war, at least in modern times. “During these years of war you can see we [the party leaders] are united. It is not as it is in China, or Kampuchea. Because we always have the threat of war from outside,” said Vietnam's foreign minister, Thach.

The route may be circuitous, even subterranean, but the result was war—and with Cambodia. Domestic disenchantment with Hanoi's peacetime program led to ever-tightening rules and more disenchantment. Hanoi blamed China and the Chinese for these domestic problems and the always difficult relationship it had with the Cambodian communists. The two began to dovetail in 1977 as the Vietnamese undertook their crackdown against the south and the ethnic Chinese and in the process found the larger framework
for pursuing war with and conquest of Cambodia. Thus the beginning of the era of the boat people.

The Chinese of Cholon were ideal villains for the revolutionary authorities of Vietnam. Cholon, which means “big market,” was founded by the Chinese shortly after Vietnam conquered the territory from the Khmers. The northern Vietnamese sent down the Chinese to set up commerce in the new southern territories, and the Chinese succeeded then and through all the wars that followed. They gained control over the sale and distribution of nearly everything—from Mekong Delta rice to small automobile parts. They traded with all sides during the various wars, selling weaponry and secret information in their small Cholon offices over steaming pots of tea and bundles of money

Throughout they remained distant from those wars and, largely, from the Vietnamese themselves. Cholon became a ghetto. The Chinese spoke their own language and practiced their old culture, accepting the isolation and prejudice of the ghetto. Even though they were citizens of the Republic of Vietnam their sons rarely served in its army and their ties were elsewhere—with the Chinese of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, occasionally, the People's Republic of China. To the Vietnamese, the Cholon Chinese were people driven solely by material passions, people with little allegiance beyond their “big market.”

Yet, when the war's end was apparent, the Cholon Chinese stayed in the country; they were not part of the hysterical crowds outside the U.S. embassy Instead, they were bringing out portraits of Ho Chi Minh for immediate sale as well as caches of dong, the northern currency. They were confident of their place, of the need of the new rulers to use the Cholon Chinese to keep the economy working.

During the first year of revolution the Cholon merchants took advantage of the authorities' blunders and bought up the rice. They boarded up their warehouses and waited for prices to rise. They put a stranglehold on currency at will, or so it seemed to Hanoi. The choice was simple when the authorities were looking for a scapegoat. “Bourgeois tradesmen,” the Cholon Chinese merchants, were singled out after the 1976 party congress as the people primarily responsible for Vietnam's skyrocketing inflation, for the scarcity of food, for the imbalance of consumer goods, and for the decline of light industry.

An attack on the Cholon Chinese was relatively straightforward—as had been the attack on the Chinese merchants of Phnom Penh by the new communist authorities in Cambodia. But there was another Chinese community in Vietnam—in the north—and they were more difficult to dislodge. While racism was implicit in the attack against the Cholon Chinese, it became public in the attack on northern Chinese, who were largely sympathetic to the communist revolution.

There were far fewer Chinese in the north than in the south, some one million as compared to roughly six million in the south. The wealthier Chinese of the north left following the 1954 Geneva Accords; those who remained behind were farmers, craftsmen, intellectuals, schoolteachers, and petty shopkeepers. Like the Chinese of the south, they lived in distinct quarters and separate villages and practiced trades traditionally filled by Chinese in the north: fishermen and dockworkers on the coast, coal miners in the mountains, skilled potters, traders, and restaurateurs in the cities. Unlike the southern Chinese, the northerners maintained a high standard of education for themselves and a keen interest in politics. Their children served in the armed forces, and many joined the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Yet the Chinese of the north were held in greater suspicion than those of the south and were attacked earlier. They became the bellwether of trouble between Beijing and Hanoi and eventually within the triangle of Cambodia, Vietnam, and China.

The first problem was citizenship. Neither China nor Vietnam recognizes dual citizenship and both support the diaspora of their communities. Both have overseas citizens' bureaus and offer special rights and relations for their overseas communities. Because of these sensibilities, the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties agreed in 1955 that the Chinese of the new communist state in Vietnam would remain citizens of China pending the resolution of the war or stalemate in Vietnam. The ethnic Chinese would have the same rights and obligations as Vietnamese citizens and could decide voluntarily if they wanted to give up their Chinese citizenship. In South Vietnam, Diem unilaterally declared all Chinese to be citizens of the Republic of Vietnam.