1946 and All That

Calm attended the re-election of President Ngo Dinh Dicm in South Vietnam this week. 70 per cent of the voters turned out to give Ngo a margin of victory sure to be looked on as one rare and gratifying sign that the West still maintains a position of vigor and strength in Southeast Asia--a balm badly needed after Laos. There is, in fact, so much heartening news from South Vietnam these days that one forgets how precarious the situation there really is. Announcements that the small nation's chronic trade deficit is shrinking, that its agricultural production is growing, and that a new, hard-headed American assistance program has replaced the surrealistic spending of post-Geneva days all tend to smother such easily-missed items as a recent Vietnamese government report complaining of a "lack of security in certain rural areas."

The report monumentally understated its case. In the last few months, Communist guerrilla activity in South Vietnam has mounced; there have been three major clashes between government troops and guerrillas--all within 100 miles of Saigon, and one within forty-five miles of the capital. It is not, however, the intensity of guerrilla activity that makes South Vietnam an even more dangerous area for Communist penetration than Labs. It is the steady deterioration of government authority in the provinces during the last year. A reporter for Le Figaro likened the present chaotic condition of the Vietnamese countryside to that which prevailed there during the eight terrible years of the IndoChinese War; government officials have fled their posts to the security of provincial towns, leaving isolated villages throughout the South prey to the guerrillas.

There are, to be sure, links between the guerrillas of the South and the Northern Communists. It is, though, entirely too easy for Ngo to blame all unrest on a baleful Northern influence; he has adopted the habit of labelling all serious opposition to him as Communist, a device which enables him and his Western allies to forget that Vietnamese officials are corrupt, land reform is slow, and many peasants are reported to feel that their interests are no concern of a government that represents city merchants and a bureaucracy.

Before the Geneva settlement, many rural portions of the South had been under local Communist rule for years. When the Communists withdrew to the North, there were pockets of vacuum left which Ngo's government never really filled. Add to this a picture of collapsing provincial and local authority in areas that were not under the Communists, and one begins to see how Ngo's very strength has been a liability: his presence in the country has prevented any delegation of responsibility to local leadership. Clearly Ngo is needed in South Vietnam, but it is equally clear that his central government is becoming more and more alienated from the rural peasantry. Despite the election's results, South Vietnam resembles nothing so much as a 1946 China writ small.