Vietnam-the Postwar Plight of a People

For 49 million people, a thirty years war is now over. But as one Vietnamese official has stated, “Peace is harder to organize for than war.”

In effect, two wars have ravaged Vietnam, leaving a vastly different aftermath in the North and the South of a country now politically reunited.

The last decade of war for the North saw American bombs attempt to destroy the infrastructure of society. Walt Rostow and Henry A. Kissinger plotted a savage campaign, historically unprecedented in its fury, designed to obliterate both the material strength and the spirit of the Vietnamese, who were persevering in the revolutions begun by Ho Chi Minh.

The toll of the war in the South has more graphic human dimensions. The fighting there, particularly the U.S. bombing and “free-fire zones,” drove people from the countryside into the cities, swelling their population and creating urban destitution. Saigon grew in this manner from about 2 million people to almost 4 million by the end of the war. Da Nang expanded from 250,000 to 600,000, and this pattern repeated in cities throughout the region.

The influx of $700 million of U.S. assistance each year created an artificial, externally-dependent economy. American money provided the primary hope of livelihood for the urban immigrants. But now most find themselves among the ranks of the 3 to 3.5 million unemployed. This figure does not include their families, former members of Thieu’s army, and other displaced people and refugees. Altogether, there are an estimated 8 million people -- one fourth of the South’s population -- who are either displaced or unemployed.

The war caused about 2.5 million acres of cultivated land to be abandoned -- between 20 and 25% of all the arable land throughout Vietnam.

Reclaiming agricultural land, the Vietnamese face the additional obstacle of unexploded mines and bombs still in the fields. Several million tons of explosives lie unexploded, including thousands of land mines. Injuries and deaths from them occur regularly.

But what was left in the veins and flesh of the Vietnamese by the U.S. presence may be even more deadly. Heroin and other drug addicts now in Vietnam are estimated at between 500,000 and 1 million people. When the government changed in Saigon, there were 300,000 prostitutes in South Vietnam. An estimated 1 million people have been infected by venereal or para-venereal diseases, including 80% of Thieu’s army.

The overall health situation in the South has always been vastly inferior to that in the North, except in areas in the South that were under PRG control. With the war’s conclusion, the immediate priority for most Vietnamese was to be reunited with their families. As people moved freely between the North and the South for the first time in many years, diseases were transmitted throughout the country, becoming a major problem.

Malaria, according to the U.N. World Health Organization, is one of the most serious problems of public health, spreading from regions where it was previously contained. The rate of tuberculosis in South Vietnam is the worst of any country in the western Pacific. Leprosy is widespread, with between 80,000 and 160,000 lepers in the South (compared to about 20,000 lepers in the North).

The war also gave South Vietnam one of the world’s highest birth rates, so that 50% of the South’s population are now children below the age of 15.

When one considers that the total population of South Vietnam is about 23 million, it becomes possible to grasp how devastating the human toll of the war there is.

Enumerating the effects of the bombing on the North yields a statistical barrage of damage and destruction which numbs one’s capacity for grief. During Nixon’s barbaric 1972 “Christmas bombing” alone, more tonnage fell on North Vietnam than fell on Britain during all of World War II. The material effects of the prolonged U.S. bombing have left deep scars on the North’s cities, transportation systems, industry, and countryside. Recovery will take many years.

Bombs destroyed nearly every railroad bridge in North Vietnam, 217 miles of railroad track, 90% of all stations, and nearly all the repair shops. Significant progress has been made to restore the wrecked rail system, yet today it operates only haltingly. Moreover, the railway between Hanoi and Saigon, which has not operated fully since the 30 years of war began in Vietnam, has yet to be restored.

Similar devastation was inflicted upon the North’s roads and harbors; most bridges were bombed to ruins and all dredges were destroyed. Here again, recovery has been arduous and partial.

29 out of the 30 provincial capitols in the North were damaged by the bombing; nine were completely destroyed. Likewise, thousands of villages were damaged or completely devastated. District hospitals, provincial hospitals, and research institutes were bombed.

Faced with the magnitude of the reconstruction effort, the new Vietnamese government has been forced to choose the most urgent among these social, economic, and material needs. For them, the decision has been clear-cut. Before all else the people must have adequate food, and the unemployed and displaced must be given productive and stable work. Both of these goals can only be met through the rehabilitation and development of the country’s agriculture. That is the government’s first priority.

Agriculture has always been basic to the economy of Vietnam. It has been the major economic activity for the vast majority of the population -- 75% of the people in the South. Before the renewal of the war on a large scale in 1965, South Vietnam still had a rice surplus, having traditionally been one of the richest rice-producing areas in Southeast Asia. But the war turned the South into a food-deficit country, which it remains to this day. Especially in the central highlands, the weather has been extremely poor this year, further limiting rice production to an amount slightly short of the country’s total requirements.

Far more important than immediate relief are the measures necessary to establish agricultural self-sufficiency once again in Vietnam. And through the restoration of Vietnam’s agriculture, the vast number of unemployed and displaced people can be given productive work.

The key to Vietnam’s reconstruction, then, is to make it possible for nearly 8 million people to return to agricultural life. Yet that promises to be a slow and painstaking task, involving the reclaiming of old agricultural lands as well as the cultivation of new areas. More difficult, it involves reorienting the lives of many people who have come to prefer even the squalor of unemployment in the cities to embarking like pioneers out to virgin country.

The process of resettlement has already begun, with the first stages happening somewhat naturally. Many of those driven out of villages to the cities have returned to their homes, and large portions of the abandoned land have been reclaimed. Through reclaiming these farmlands, about 2.5 million people will have places, frequently their original homes, to resume their agricultural life.

Saigon has already reduced its population by some 500,000, a pattern copied in other cities throughout the South.

However, another 5 million people will remain in urban areas -- jobless and without any prospects. To assist them, the government has begun establishing what are called “New Economic Areas” throughout the country. Essentially, these are new frontier farms and villages. Plans call for them to eventually cover about 2.5 million acres of new farm land. Such areas will produce mostly rice, but also some cash crops: rubber, sugar-cane, and coconut. The production of these cash crops has fallen 30 to 60 percent because of the war. As one of Vietnam’s few sources for generating foreign exchange, these crops are important to rebuilding its economy.

To establish these new farming areas, the Vietnamese army corps of engineers first has to de-mine the land. Then it is cleared, and temporary housing is set up on plots of 1,000 square meters per family, including vegetable gardens. Wells are then drilled -- usually one for every four houses. Then the plots are ready for people to resettle with a six-month provision of rice assured them until their first harvest, as well as health and education services.

Yet the most difficult task is getting the displaced and jobless to come. The Vietnamese government has relied primarily on simple persuasion to encourage this resettlement, believing that the economic realities of urban life for the unemployed will encourage the transition naturally.

But city life continues to hold its spell over hundreds of thousands. The unemployed and under-employed struggle to maintain themselves, selling household goods and trying to make money from the continuing black market. What little familiarity and security they have seems preferable to the rigors of frontier living.

Furthermore, the New Economic Areas take time to prepare, and the new government is careful to avoid adopting coercive tactics toward people; achieving an atmosphere of concord, stabilization, and increasing productivity is paramount. Their actions stand in stark contrast to those of their Cambodian neighbors, who (according to refugee reports) forced at gunpoint population movement to the countryside.

Frequently one family member in Vietnam will go out to a new frontier settlement to live for a while and see what things are like, returning with his impressions. Bus transport between the areas and cities is often readily available. Furthermore, the development of such areas immediately adjacent to Saigon has now begun. These will constitute a “green belt” around the city on land which had been used for farming until the city overflowed with refugees.

That even the unemployed in the cities should be reluctant to leave is not surprising. Unemployment among minorities in U.S. cities is frequently 20%, 30%, or even 40%, especially among the young. Yet, imagine how Detroit and Chicago street youths would react to proposals that they resettle on farms in the Appalachian Mountains.

But for Vietnam there is no alternative. Resettlement is the only affordable way to reconstruct which offers hope to the jobless and dispossessed, and enables agricultural self-sufficiency to be the basis for further development of the economy. The United Nations experts who conducted a study mission to Vietnam, issuing the most extensive and authoritative source of current information on the country in their report, underscored these conclusions.

500,000 more people should be able to move from the cities to the homesteads by the end of the year. Vietnam’s leaders hope that, in time, necessity combined with continual government encouragement will fully accomplish this population transfer.

Other social problems that are the legacy of the war are being approached in various ways. There are “Schools for the Redignification of Women,” where prostitutes are taught new skills. (Observers report, however, that the extent of syphilis among some is probably beyond cure.) The withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts are reportedly being treated with acupuncture.

While the goal of socialism for the economy remains clear, the transition to it is being approached with the evolutionary pragmatism which seems to characterize the new government. Private and capitalist business is recognized as part of the South’s present economy. Even the rebuilding of the Hanoi-Saigon railway is being done by a mixture of state agencies, army units, and 30 different private enterprises with the needed technology and resources. The immediate necessities of resettlement and rehabilitation seem to be determining government policies, eclipsing the need to maintain ideological purity.

For the people, the most immediate personal effect of peace has been the reunification of families long separated by war and the political barrier which isolated the North from the South. Fidelity in marriage seems to be a frequent Vietnamese trait: reports of joyous reunions between wives and husbands separated for up to 30 years are not uncommon, as attested to by the U.N. mission’s report. Even hardcore guerrillas separated for many years from their families rejoin them.

More crucial than all these issues, however, is the question of human rights in the new Vietnam. That is, of course, the first question raised by those who saw the U.S. leading a righteous crusade against communism. But even though it was the hawks who previously sounded dramatic warnings against the supposedly inevitable tide of blood under the communists, there is no reason for doves to now dismiss those questions out of hand.

The general lack of executions has been conspicuous to observers. When the grim bloodbath warnings so often used to defend U.S. policy are contrasted with reality in Vietnam, one is forced to agree with Senator George McGovern, who wrote after his January trip to Vietnam, “The bloodbath theory was one of the great false alarms of all time.” Reviewing the history of revolutions and remembering the intensity and duration of the Vietnamese war, one is hard pressed to cite another struggle in which the aftermath has been so bloodless.

Yet the new government is well aware that its former enemies, still in its midst, have not been suddenly converted into Vietnamese marxists. The government’s approach has been to “re-educate” its former foes. Normally this consists of spending time at a “re-education camp,” where work and learning crafts are combined with ideological lessons. But the difference between Vietnamese “re-education camps” and Western “correctional institutions” is probably not great. After all, those there are being unwillingly “re-educated.”

Cora Weiss is one of the handful of Westerners to have visited one of these camps. The conditions she described, while stark, were humane. In addition, the population of these camps has substantially decreased as the detained have either learned the wrongs of their old ways or served time sufficient for their crimes. The government has announced that three years will be the maximum sentence.

While re-education is carried out throughout society, those sent to the special camps seem to be primarily former army officers and government officials. The pattern has been for those who served at lower echelons to be released more quickly and returned to society. The camp visited by Cora Weiss, for instance, had 300 people remaining out of an original 2,000. She states that about 100,000 still remain at such camps (out of 1.2 million soldiers and others “eligible” for re-education), differing with some Western journalists who have put that figure at 300,000.

Whatever the number, it is remarkable that the prisoners are not only alive, but have hopes of re-entering society as it attempts to reshape itself. On the other hand, it is fair to say that they are being kept as prisoners for political reasons.

Will Vietnam unveil a “socialism with a human face?” Perhaps. But those who believe so need to consider other events that have occurred there.

Most worrisome are the reported instances of repression undertaken against elements of the Buddhist church. There are reasonably well-authenticated reports of Buddhist social services and other activities being curtailed -- 80% of them, according to one monk. Last year at a particular pagoda, the new government asked the monks to participate in re-education, forbade them from observing their rule of silence, prohibited them from flying the Buddhist flag, and restricted them from accepting any new members. As a result of such intrusions, on November 2, 1975, twelve Buddhist monks and nuns in Can Tho province burned themselves to death in that means of Vietnamese Buddhist protest traditional since the time of Diem’s repression.

Jim Forest, editor of Fellowship magazine (published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation) and a pacifist who spent time in a U.S. jail for his antiwar activities, is spearheading a campaign of concern over the present human rights situation in Vietnam. “The peaceable kingdom has not happened yet anywhere, and not in Vietnam,” says Forest, “and it’s not going to happen if we look the other way.”

Other antiwar leaders sympathetic to the new government have questioned the cases which concern Forest. Cora Weiss reported being told by “Third Force” people in Vietnam that any religious people arrested have been “right-wing types” involved in activities against the government.

But if, as Dan Berrigan suggests, faith calls us to be the “loving adversaries” of any system, then we should not be surprised if those faithful to various religious commitments find themselves in less than total harmony with the new regime.

The report of the U.N. study mission concludes that “the work of national rehabilitation far exceeds the human material capacity of the Vietnamese people ... It is therefore necessary, indeed essential, that the international community should provide assistance to Vietnam, in order that the country may carry out the heavy task that it has set itself: repairing the damage caused by a long and devastating war.”

The U.N. report then recommended a detailed program of international assistance for Vietnam, concentrating on the rehabilitation of its agriculture and the reconstruction of its railroads.

Carefully documenting the costs involved in beginning to establish the New Economic Areas for agriculture, the report recommended that $142 million be given by other nations to establish these new farming areas in 275,000 acres in the central highlands and 325,000 acres in the Mekong Delta during 1976-1977.

For the railways, the U.N. report itemized the need for engines, cars, and steel girders costing $290 million. The total amount of international assistance recommended by the report came to $432 million -- a sum less than the amount of merely monetary aid given each year by the U.S. to the Thieu government -- to say nothing of the billions spent in arms.

These sums do not include the projects already being carried on in Vietnam by UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and other U.N. agencies. Though modest, they are providing desperately needed help in areas such as education, health care, and nutrition.

Vietnam is receiving bilateral assistance from individual nations, beginning with the Soviet Union, China, and all the countries of Eastern Europe. Algeria, Iraq, and Libya are sending oil, while the Scandinavian countries (especially Sweden) are providing other forms of aid, as are France, Japan, and Switzerland.

The response of the United States government to Vietnam’s overwhelming need has been callous hostility. The indifference to human suffering which lay at the foundation of U.S. war policy has persisted unchanged in its postwar actions.

The United States has barred all trade with Vietnam, despite the fact that the Vietnamese would prefer their off-shore oil to be developed by American companies. The United States has opposed Vietnam’s membership in such international institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. When the World Health Organization met last March to consider its assistance program to Vietnam, the United States refused to send a delegate, stating that it would not contribute to any WHO program in Vietnam.

The same attitude prevails toward other U.N. relief agencies, and legislation has been passed by Congress and signed by the president designed to block the channeling of U.S. funds through international agencies to Vietnam. Yet a portion of UNICEF’s program in Vietnam this year -- about $8 million -- is being funded out of the United Nation’s general funds, to which the U.S. is a major contributor, raising the question whether the U.S. is at least indirectly supporting that program.

Since the time of Lyndon Johnson, the United States has held forth the promise of reconstruction aid to Vietnam. Such aid was one of the provisions of the Paris Agreements of 1973, and President Nixon privately assured the Vietnamese of $3.25 billion in various forms of assistance, over a period of years, to “heal the wounds of war.”

Secretary of State Kissinger has claimed that the Paris Agreements are dead and invalid, although he continues to insist that the Vietnamese account for all Americans missing in action -- a stipulation of the same agreements. The Vietnamese have consistently maintained that those issues -- reconstruction aid, the normalization of relations, and the accounting for the missing in action -- must be resolved together. They stress that it is the principle of responsibility for such aid which matters, not the amount. Some reports are that the Vietnamese may insist on such aid being given directly rather than being channeled through international agencies. Given the attitude of the American electorate, that seems politically improbable, regardless of how willing the Vietnamese may be to use their MIA information as leverage.

Only aid defined as strictly “humanitarian” has been allowed to be sent to Vietnam by private U.S. citizens. About $2,000,000 in such assistance has been provided, generated primarily by Friendshipment (see Seeds).

Rarely in the history of war and peace have the victors remained so vanquished and the defeated remained so haughty. The seeds of future violence or genuine reconciliation are often sown in the aftermath of wars. It was, for instance, the injurious diplomatic actions following World War I which paved the way for World War II.

To have spent $150 billion on death and destruction was an act of unmitigated immorality by the United States. To then coldly turn our backs on the postwar plight of the Vietnamese people only escalates our ignominy. To conceal that callousness with a droning insistence on an account of all those who died dropping bombs on Vietnam reveals the depth of our egocentricity.

Surely it is not only the wounds of the Vietnamese which remain open. And it is not generosity which should compel a response, so much as the need for healing deep within the psyche of the American people.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.

For further reading: Aftermath of War: Humanitarian Problems of Southeast Asia. Staff Report to the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976); Report of the United Nations Mission to North and South Vietnam (United Nations, 1976). This report is also reprinted in Aftermath of War, cited above; Vietnam: 1976. A Report to the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate by Senator George McGovern (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976)