When the War Was Over (73 page)

The Lao communists—the Pathet Lao—won control over their country in a series of small victories: a cease-fire signed in 1973, a coalition government in April 1974, the collapse of the rightists in May 1975, and the declaration of the People's Democratic Republic of Laos on December 2, 1975. There was no dramatic final siege of the capital as in Vietnam and Cambodia—no final flight of the Americans. The Lao army marched into Vientiane in a small parade that featured soldiers whose rifles were adorned with flowers. Looking on in the crowds were American diplomats, who kept their embassy open.

The transformation of Laos into a satellite of Vietnam was done quietly. Eventually some 40,000 Vietnamese soldiers were stationed in the country—a foreign armed force larger than the native Lao army Vietnamese cadre advised all important Lao government departments. Vietnamese models became Lao policy.

The Lao had little choice or inclination to do otherwise. Their small nation of less than three million people is a sliver of mountainous territory surrounded by China, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Under French colonial rule, Laos was delegated to the lowest position in the Indochinese union. It was the least developed, least modernized, and certainly the poorest of the three countries. Not surprisingly, during the first stirrings of their independence movement, the Lao followed their old national tradition and looked to a larger power for help.

The Vietnamese gave birth to the Lao communist movement through the Indochinese Communist Party and nurtured it to victory. After 1975
there were some rewards for staying within Vietnam's shadow. Laos was a threat to no one and was able to take wide latitude in foreign relations and in maintaining Lao culture, particularly the Buddhist faith. The Pathet Lao imposed a Vietnamese communist system on the country, including reeducation camps, but it was a softer and more flexible version. Despite a rough beginning, the Lao economy was able to develop a mixed blend of free trade and nationalization that eventually improved the standard of living for a good proportion of its society—a claim neither Vietnam nor Cambodia could make.

Laos also maintained relations with a wide range of communist and noncommunist countries, including the United States. The rustic capital of Vientiane became a window for the outside world on the revolutionary changes of Indochina.

But the price of these rewards was steep—Lao independence. The Lao government has had to accept all the twists and turns ordered by Vietnam in both foreign and domestic policy On many occasions the Lao have acted independently of Hanoi only to have their policies countermanded by the Vietnamese. However, since Laos accepted Vietnamese dominance it avoided the bloodshed of the Third Indochina War.

When the Lao signed the 1977 friendship treaty with Vietnam, the Cambodians felt trapped. The Vietnamese held up their relation with Laos as a model of what Hanoi hoped to achieve with Phnom Penh. Thereafter, the Cambodians held the Lao suspect, and for good reason. Vietnam coordinated its subsequent invasion of Cambodia with the Lao: Vietnamese troops in Laos attacked from their Lao base, and Khmer refugees who fled Cambodia for Laos were armed to join the Vietnamese battle against the Khmer Rouge.

Vietnam's image changed in other, more subtle ways. The Vietnamese who had the greatest impact on Americans and Europeans against the American war had been the southern dissidents, members of the non-communist groups who supported the National Liberation Front and later the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government. These Vietnamese were excluded from meaningful roles in the postwar government, and the effect was immediate. Vietnamese communists in Hanoi spoke for themselves and they barely resembled the southerners who had so eloquently worked for their cause.

But Hanoi failed to realize how effectively the dissident southerners had changed American public opinion; how the American conscience was provoked by southern Buddhist monks burning themselves in protest against the dictatorial regime in Saigon in 1963 and not by Hanoi's press releases invoking the honor of Ho Chi Minh. Nor did Hanoi understand the propaganda
coups pulled off by southern Vietnamese who worked in Paris or Washington on their behalf alongside French and American anti-war activists.

These southern dissidents understood their adversary well; their understanding of the American political system was often superior to that of the average American. One anti-war activist remembers visiting the apartment of an NLF member in Paris in the late sixties. He was startled on entering to see a map taking up an entire wall of the tiny parlor. It was a congressional map of the United States covered with red and blue pins distinguishing Democrat from Republican districts. Pinned to the map was a long scroll analyzing the economic resources of each of the districts.

These were the Vietnamese who took news from the home front and translated it into riveting arguments against further American involvement. And these were the Vietnamese whom Hanoi cut off in their power grab immediately after the war. As a result, Vietnam looked less and less like a heroic nation and more and more like a tough, heavy-handed police state.

The Vietnamese who could have softened Hanoi's image were either stranded abroad (their services rejected), idle in Saigon, interned in reeducation camps, or, later, among the hopeless thousands who fled the country as boat people.

But this was of little concern in Hanoi. The mood there was of near invincibility following the war. The leaders had won a war that had been front-page news around the globe for years. They expected to hold the limelight indefinitely as heroes of the third world and a symbol of the downtrodden people's ability to thwart foreign intervention. Instead, in record time they squandered the goodwill they had achieved.

“The Vietnamese had pat speeches they recited over and over again about how they had suffered. . . . They felt they were above reproach and would listen to no criticism, particularly about the forced reunification of their country,” said one European communist diplomat. “They lost their friends quickly.”

When the Third Indochina War broke out, Vietnam could not count on world opinion to side with Hanoi against Phnom Penh. This proved to be a fatal flaw in Vietnam's calculations, particularly as it affected the United States.

The American left which blossomed during the anti-war movement faded quickly after 1975 and the war's end—one of the reasons the United States could retreat into silence about Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The
mass movement that had opposed American intervention in Indochina had disappeared after the American troop withdrawal in 1973. Most of the antiwar activists who continued agitating until war's end in 1975 then dropped out of politics, explaining they had worked themselves to exhaustion. Most of those few who wanted to continue affecting national politics ended up absorbed by the Democratic Party that had propagated the war; Tom Hayden and Sam Brown are two well-known examples. Leaders of separate causes that had fed the anti-war movement—feminism, civil rights, and gay rights, in particular—steered their followers toward more traditional interest-group activities within the established political system.

A few radical activists took the opposite course and created a small, unheralded phenomenon: Within two years they founded at least four new communist parties and two communist organizations. These were very small sectarian groups advocating total revolutionary change in the United States, variously along the lines of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic China, and Albania. These new parties heralded the isolation of radical leftists rather than the development of a new leftist movement in the United States. Most of them disbanded. Only two parties survived—the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Workers Party—and they remained small. But they had the distinction of being the only new political parties born out of the old anti-war movement.

When Vietnam and Cambodia needed supporters in the United States at the start of their war, few were to be found. Only a small “Vietnam lobby” had retained interest in postwar Indochina. The term lobby, however, implies more structure than this band of former activists possessed after 1975. The lobby was composed not of the flamboyant activists who symbolized the movement, but of the Quakers and Mennonites, academics and ministers who had been among the most dedicated and quiet activists. Many had lived in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos and found they could not forget those countries. They worked for small wages at nonprofit organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, the Indochina Resource Center in Washington, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and the Southeast Asia Resource Center. Their audience was no longer the American public but the few experts, academics, and reporters who followed Indochina and those U.S. government officials and international bureaucrats who made policy affecting Indochina. They used the tactics of other small pressure groups, supplying information to further their cause.

But these people were equally ill prepared for the tragedies and war that developed so quickly in postwar Indochina. They tried to keep up with the
news from those countries, but their focus was limited to a few issues: promoting normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States and prompting the United States to aid the reconstruction of all three countries. To reach these goals they had to alter the image of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge as the enemy and frame the debate about the countries as one that pitted rich, destructive America against poor, ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia. To that end they avoided or minimized the horrible stories from Cambodian refugees and the question of human rights in postwar Vietnam.

This posture proved to be the undoing of the Vietnam lobby and its attempts to underwrite a rapprochement between Washington and Hanoi, or Washington and Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge continued their policies, and stories about the building tragedies grew more frequent, not less, causing a division within the ranks of those still concerned about Indochina and leaving conservative opinion makers the opportunity to undercut the message of the Vietnam lobby.

The conservatives used the stories from Cambodian refugees to promote their thesis that the postwar horrors proved that the U.S. involvement in the Second Indochina War had been noble. It was a strained leap in logic not supported by fact, especially in the case of Cambodia, but it gained credence as long as the left denied there was any truth to the refugee tales.

Both sides were acting out of self-interest. How postwar Indochina was perceived in the United States became far more important than understanding the dramatic changes in the region. Too many people in and out of government had staked their reputations, their careers, and their own self-esteem on the positions they took during the war. Each side wanted the postwar era to shore up those old positions and prove them correct. News was not seen as facts about a new Indochina run by Vietnamese and Cambodians but as potential ammunition against old American opponents, as proof of America's guilt or honor.

A few opponents of the American involvement in the Vietnamese and Cambodian wars became the earliest critics of the new communist regimes there and among the few to predict even worse tragedies in the months and years ahead. They were savaged by their former allies in the left, again to the detriment of the left's own goal to patch up differences between Vietnam and the United States.

Stories from Cambodia broke the silence first. As early as June 1975 the
Washington Post
carried an article quoting a teenage Cambodian boy who said: “Except for old people and young children, everyone is working in the fields and the only time we stop is to eat and sleep.” He said there was insufficient
food and practically no medicine and he predicted “many people would die” as a result. In the same article another Cambodian refugee said there were no tools and people were plowing the rice fields “like oxen.”

The world was caught by surprise when stories were published about the swift evacuation of Phnom Penh, the forcible relocation of people to often harsh terrain in the countryside, the inhuman work hours, the loss of freedom and privacy, and the fear of innumerable bloody executions. A small group of leftist writers ridiculed these stories, largely by saying the evidence was insufficient and that those journalists who wrote the articles were part of a “mythmaking” process aimed at justifying the failed American war effort. In other words, the mere act of reporting the new, cruel situation in Cambodia was conspiratorial.

Not to be outdone, the extreme right mounted a similar attack against the media and claimed the press was not reporting enough about the Cambodian tragedy and was part of a conspiracy by the liberal establishment to suppress news that reflected unfavorably on the communist regime.

A similar dispute emerged about human rights in Vietnam. It began first as an argument between two activists who had opposed the American war and ended by breaking up the old anti-war consensus. One was Cora Weiss, a cosmetics fortune heiress, who emerged as what she called the “logical” contact person in the United States for the victorious Vietnamese after 1975. During the war she had been controversial as a liaison between Hanoi and the United States, heading a small organization that was the only one authorized by Hanoi to distribute mail between U.S. prisoners held captive in the north and their families. Weiss traveled back and forth to Hanoi to carry mail and to bring messages to the American public from North Vietnam.