Whither Vietnam?

ONE YEAR AGO today, the United States initialed the peace agreement which officially ended over a decade of American war in Vietnam. The agreement called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of American troops and the return of all prisoners of war. The agreement created two special commissions which were to monitor the ceasefire and begin the long, arduous work toward national reconciliation. In a television address, President Nixon pledged to respect the agreement and to assist in the reconstruction of the entire area after the fighting stopped.

The National Liberation Front welcomed the return of peace to Vietnam, for it expected that the end of the war would reverse a trend in South Vietnamese society which had strengthened Nguyen Van Thieu's position at its expense. Ten years of brutal warfare in the Vietnamese countryside, heightened savagely by the continual rain of American bombs, had herded the peasants into the disease-ridden shantytowns which ring Vietnamese cities. There Thieu's enormous police force could keep watch over them and insulate them from NLF influence. But with the end of the war, the NLF hoped the peasants could return home.

Once the peasants started streaming back to their villages, the NLF could begin to implement the policy which had brought it, and its predecessors, the Viet Minh, widespread popular support--radical land reform. In traditional Vietnam, land had been distributed relatively evenly, and the tax rate was low and applied fairly. But when the French invaded in the middle of the 19th century, they expropriated vast tracts of lands, creating a tiny new class of French and Vietnamese landlords, and they hiked the tax rates and added new taxes. The majority of Vietnamese peasants were plunged into a frightful life on the brink of existence; even if they sold everything they owned, including their children, to keep up with rents and taxes, they were still in constant danger of starving to death.

This situation could not last long without prompting resistance. When the Viet Minh began mobilizing in the early 1940s, land reform was at the top of its agenda. And similarly, when the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime refused in the late 1950s to implement a serious land reform program to redress the century-old grievance, peasants in the south began to resist, forming the National Liberation Front in 1960. Today, the Thieu regime has reversed its faltering steps toward land reform and handed back vast tracts to the former owners, while reforms in the NLF-controlled areas of the south continue unhindered. There is little doubt that the vast majority of peasants in southern Vietnam would prefer the NLF program were they permitted to leave the crowded cities and return home.

THE NLF does not view land reform as merely a material benefit, although in a country where people have starved to death because they had no land, the material aspect should not be discounted. But land reform for the NLF is more than a material concept--it is a construction of a new set of social relationships. The Front never entered villages simply to redistribute land by fiat. Instead, the NLF organized village discussions, usually lengthy, at which even the humblest peasant would air his or her views concerning the reforms. When a certain consensus was reached, the reforms would be enacted--and the peasants were ready to fight to protect them.

The NLF intends to use this popular participation in local affairs as a sturdy foundation on which to build a humane, socialist society in the South and eventually reunify with the North. Then, a united Vietnam can begin the long march toward industrialization. Vietnam's socialist principles, forged into a profound sincerity by the white heat of several decades of total war, are not likely to be left by the wayside. No society in the world has ever managed this combination of meaningful socialism with industrial progress. The people of America, although they cannot participate in this process, must respect its daring and hope for its success. It will be a model for other nations in the Third World, a model for an industrializing process without barbarity.

Nguyen Van Thieu, his army and police, stand directly athwart the path of Vietnamese progress. Thieu has no awesome visions; his only desire is to remain in power and to continue rewarding the small group of landlords and government officials who support him. Thieu cannot survive without the massive amounts of American aid which finance his government and equip his army. But the United States is weary of war, weary of pouring money into the bottomless Vietnamese pit. Thieu must insure that the aid continues despite the stiffening American reluctance.

Thieu believes that if the war continues, American aid will continue to flow. So Thieu prolongs the war, directing his army and air force to strike at NLF territory and ignoring the calls for reconciliation contained in the cease fire agreement. Ngo Vinh Long '64, who works at Harvard's Vietnamese Studies Project, has estimated that the South Vietnamese Air Force, using warplanes supplied by the United States, has flown about 15,000 bombing and reconaissance missions since the ceasefire. Obviously, such bombing prevents the peasants from going home--and joining the NLF.

If American aid will continue as long as there is war in Vietnam, it is no paradox to say that war will continue as long as aid is forthcoming. And if there is no peace in Vietnam, the great experiment of socialism with industrialism cannot really begin. The futures of hundreds of millions of people in the Third World may hinge on the success of that experiment. On this, the anniversary of the end of a war which has not ended, the American people must redouble their efforts to pressure their representatives to cut off all aid to Thieu so that Vietnam may begin its journey.