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Since the Fall of Saigon
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11790 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
6,454 Words |
| Author
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Nguyen Van Canh
Nguyen Van Canh is a visiting scholar at the Hoover
Institution. |
From the moment the United States signed the Paris Peace Agreement on January 27, 1973, South Vietnam's fate was sealed. Although the agreement marked the end of American involvement in Indochina, it failed to stop North Vietnamese aggression against the South. Most important, this agreement didn't require the North to withdraw its troops or stop its infiltration.
By January 1975, with more than 200,000 troops in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese launched a final offensive to conquer South Vietnam. On Wednesday morning, April 30, 1975, as the last eleven marines were airlifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, North Vietnamese troops entered the city. Two hours later, Gen. Duong Van Minh announced Saigon's unconditional surrender, thus ending thirty years of bitter war. After defeating the South Vietnamese military forces in April 1975, the North Vietnamese communists immediately began to dismantle South Vietnamese society and implement programs to convert it to socialism.
For most, the story about Vietnam stops here. To evaluate the lessons of Vietnam it is important to tell what happened in Vietnam after the communists came to power.
Socialist Transformation
The socialists began their transformation of the South by liquidating the so-called oppressive class of the previous society and by constructing a new ruling elite. The South Vietnamese that had to be purged included people in the government - soldiers, police civil servants, judges - and outside the government - nationalist party members, wealthy persons, landlords, intellectuals, and so forth. Anybody who opposed communism was included.
Through its propaganda machinery, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) had succeeded in misleading Western opinion about its true intentions. The VCP had long supported a policy of "national reconciliation and accord." This supposedly meant that there would be no reprisals against the South Vietnamese once the VCP came to power. Ranking VCP officials said that there would be "no bloodbath" and indicated that the new regime would be moderately democratic. In fact, Sen. George McGovern, after visiting the region, declared that any notion of a bloodbath was one of the great false alarms of all time.
However, physical liquidation of opponents was common during the first days of the new regime. In early April 1975,
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