Fire in the Lake
Page 9
The north, too, had suffered from the colonial regime. Because the northern delta possessed no new land available for development, the French had simply expropriated the village land to build their own farms. With the addition of a heavy tax burden the economic squeeze on the peasantry became acute. Few Vietnamese in Tonkin profited from French enterprises, as they did in Cochin China. The new wealth of Tonkin lay in her minerals and her cheap labor, and the mines belonged exclusively to the French. In the 1930’s Tonkin possessed the only industrial base in Vietnam — a collection of mines and several factories for the production of textiles and cement. It also possessed the beginnings of an industrial proletariat. The wages paid to the mine and factory workers ought in some measure to have compensated for the agricultural dislocations, but they did not, for while the wages were calculated on the basis of the barter economy of the village, the taxes and the prices of goods were calculated on the moneyed city economy. The French pocketed the difference.27 For the sake of survival many of the industrial workers divided their time between the factories, where they could earn money for taxes, and the villages, where they could raise food. This continual coming and going created a link between the modern city and the traditional countryside that did not exist in the south.
In Annam the French had left the mandarins to themselves, but in Tonkin they created the beginnings of a new class — not a group of wealthy landowners, as in the south, but a middle class composed of administrators and professional men.28 Under the pressure of the First World War they had found it necessary to break into the traditional educational system and train Vietnamese to fill the secondary levels of the colonial and commercial administrations. After that war they abolished the Confucian schools throughout Vietnam and replaced them with a small primary education system, two lycées, and the faculties of law and medicine at the University of Hanoi. In Tonkin, where the loyalties of the mandarins to the old regime remained as strong as they did in the center, the new students grew up on a dangerous blend of modern Western education and Vietnamese tradition. As one historian has contended, the French in this respect made a most impolitic calculation: the Western-educated students were few in number, but by the 1930’s there were still too many of them to fill the available jobs.29 In particular there were too many schoolteachers, for, believing in the unconditional value of French education, the French trained schoolteachers without regard for their own economic priorities. They trained such men as Vo Nguyen Giap to educate his own compatriots to become Frenchmen. The chief difficulty was that while the schoolbooks spoke of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French in Vietnam did not apply those principles to the Vietnamese. Because the French left no opportunities open for the educated class, the effect of modernization in Tonkin was to split the society on different lines than in Cochin China — not city/country, or modern/traditional, but French/Vietnamese.
In the 1920’s a group of political organizations very different from their predecessors began to emerge in Vietnam, and mainly out of the north. Their memberships remained small, but they were composed largely of French-educated civil servants, schoolteachers, and professional men who saw the need for a social program and for the participation of the mass of the people. Their aim was not merely to rid the country of the French but to bring about revolutionary change in the life of the society. Among these parties numbered the Tan Viet and the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, the Vietnam Nationalist Party, or VNQDD, and the Communist Party of Indochina. Of the three the VNQDD was by far the most prominent in the 1920’s. Modeled on the Chinese Kuomintang, it attracted some thousand adherents in the area of Hanoi to undertake a program of anti-French agitation and terrorism. But like the Tan Viet, it suffered from parochialism and from the lack of a well-thought-out political and social strategy.30 The French police arrested most of its leading members in 1930–1932, and the rest went into exile in China to survive through the Second World War only by the grace of the Chinese Kuomintang. In 1925 Ho Chi Minh founded the Revolutionary Youth League which was to be the nucleus of the Indochinese Communist Party. Initially the League undertook a much less adventurous policy of building up committees in the three pays and converting many of the other radicals. In 1930, just as the worldwide depression hit Vietnam, forcing down the price of rice and plunging the small farmers throughout Vietnam into bankruptcy, the Party undertook its first large-scale action with the organization of workers and peasants in the Nghe-Tinh region. The results were spectacular. For a year the people of the region demonstrated against the colonial regime, assassinated local officials, created a government of village soviets, and carried out a land reform. The revolt did not spread to other areas of the country, and from a historical perspective it might be said to have been premature, for the French still possessed the force to put it down in a most brutal manner.31 But the Communist Party survived, gained experience, and waited for a new opportunity to emerge.
The opportunity came as a result of the Second World War. The war marked a caesura in Vietnamese history as it did in that of most countries. After the fall of France in 1940 Japan took over French Indochina by diplomatic fiat. The Vichyite governor sent by Paris to Saigon agreed to continue to administer the territory while the Japanese used its ports for military bases and its raw materials for trade within the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In the spring of 1941 Ho Chi Minh and his comrades founded the Vietnam Independence League or the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, known as the Viet Minh, and with the cooperation of the Tho, one of the montagnard tribes of the north, built up bases in the mountains and assembled a small guerrilla force to combat the Japanese. While Ho’s policy was in line with that of the Chinese Communists, his support came from one of the warlords under the nominal suzerainty of Chiang Kai-shek, who dominated the provinces just across the Vietnamese border.
The Viet Minh’s opportunity arrived with a sudden change in the status of the country in 1945. A few months before the Allied landings in the south, the Japanese overthrew the French administration in a sudden coup de force, and set up an “independent” Vietnamese government over Tonkin and Annam, composed of the local Vietnamese functionaries and under the aegis of the current Nguyen emperor, Bao Dai. In mid-August, 1945, Ho Chi Minh moved into Hanoi with a thousand men and, given no resistance, proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French moved quickly into Cochin China with their British allies. But it was the Chinese Nationalists that under the Potsdam Agreements occupied northern Vietnam for seven months following the allied landings. When the period was up and the French made ready to move back into the north, Ho Chi Minh had already been ensconced in Hanoi and Hue for nine months claiming to represent the sovereign nation of Vietnam.
Since the autumn of 1940 our country has ceased to be a colony and had become a Japanese outpost… we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated, our people have broken the fetters which for over a century have tied us down; our people have at the same time overthrown the monarchic constitution that had reigned supreme for so many centuries and instead have established the present Republican government.32
Ho Chi Minh’s claim for Vietnamese independence was not just the legalistic rationale it seemed to many Frenchmen at the time. Despite its haphazard character, the Japanese coup had made a profound impression on the Vietnamese. In escaping out of Hanoi at that moment in history, Paul Mus, a Free French agent and scholar of Asian religions, had seen its effect on the villages: the day before the coup the French were the respected masters of the country, the day after it they were uninvited guests with the worst of reputations. Later, Mus realized that he had witnessed one of those strange shifts in Vietnamese life where the resentment, so long repressed, turns suddenly to revolt. To the Vietnamese the sight of French surrendering to Asians meant that the French had, as it were, lost their winning streak; in the old language, the will of Heaven had changed and the
French were no longer the rulers of the country.33 This shift was felt by the ministers of the Bao Dai government, the former faithful servants of the French, as much as by the most traditional of the villagers.34 For the Vietnamese it was now merely a question of time before the French disappeared altogether. Incomprehensible as it was to the French, this conviction was to remain with most Vietnamese throughout the war for independence. The issue was merely who now possessed the Mandate of Heaven.
Ho Chi Minh’s revolution in Hanoi succeeded mainly because there was nothing to oppose it. Apart from the Viet Minh, the country had no national leaders ready to assert independence and take control of the government. The Japanese-sponsored government in Hanoi was no more than a group of functionaries with no political experience and no ideas for the future. Presented with a fait accompli by the Viet Minh, many of the officials joined the new movement; the Emperor Bao Dai himself proposed to serve it for a time, and three northern Catholic bishops added their approval. The test of Ho Chi Minh’s government lay not in domestic political confrontation but in a military trial with the French armies — in the war that Ho Chi Minh hoped to avoid. Not long after the French reoccupation of the south the North Vietnamese leader began negotiations with the French authorities in Saigon and Paris.35 For a time there seemed a possibility that the French would grant the Vietnamese their independence: the Free French commanders in the south had little sympathy with the local Vichyites, and the coalition government in Paris included the supposedly anti-imperialist left-wing parties. But gradually the negotiations broke down. The French Communists and socialists defected to the imperialist cause, now a matter of national pride for the newly liberated France, and the French colonial authorities deliberately sabotaged the diplomatic bargaining process. In February 1947 the French army took control of Hanoi, and the Viet Minh, now numbering some one hundred thousand throughout the country,36 retreated to their bases in the countryside and prepared for a war of resistance.
Seven years later, in 1954, no one, and particularly not the French, could deny the existence of an independent nation-state in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic had all the attributes of a nation-state, including the essential one of an army capable of making it too expensive and too dangerous for the French to continue their occupation of the country. What was not so well appreciated by the Americans as by the French who had fought the war was that the new Vietnamese government had a stronger claim to legitimacy than did most governments in Southeast Asia. To win the war, Ho Chi Minh had had to enlist the active support of a great percentage of the population. By themselves the city elites could not decide the struggle for independence. Because the French undertook a large-scale military reoccupation, the Vietnamese elite depended upon the people of the countryside, upon the vast reserves of manpower that had lain untouched since the Tay Son rebellion at the end of the eighteenth century. When the French moved into Hanoi, the Viet Minh went deep into the countryside like divers, and the villages had closed over them. Attaching themselves to the “net ropes” of the peasantry, they built a clandestine political organization large and strong enough to sustain not only the guerrillas but the regular armies that fought the French on their own ground. In mobilizing the Vietnamese population to defeat a modern European army, the Viet Minh proved themselves in a test that few nationalist movements have undergone and fewer still survived.37
The French could not deny the existence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. But they could for the purposes of negotiation question how much territory it controlled. Even at the peace talks after their great victory at Dien Bien Phu, the Viet Minh did not control the cities of Vietnam or the greater proportion of the southern provinces below the 13th parallel (the region of Nha Trang).38 The effort of war had been unevenly distributed between north and south. In the north General Vo Nguyen Giap raised and trained regular divisions in the mountains to fight with the guerrilla forces attached to the villages of the Red River Delta. The French armies could choose either to fight the North Vietnamese regulars in the mountains or to garrison the populous delta, but they could not do both at once — and on that dilemma their war efforts foundered. But the Viet Minh did not so completely mobilize the south. They raised guerrilla forces adequate to harass the French garrisons, to contest their control of the population, and to draw their armies away from the north, but they did not support large units there. In part this was simply because the Mekong Delta was furthest from their supply lines into China and its flat plains offered no secure bases. In part it was because the south did not respond to them as strongly as did the north. In the Mekong Delta the guerrillas controlled only the peninsula of Ca Mau and the region surrounding the Plain of Reeds south and west of Saigon. They contested other parts of the Delta and held most of the thin backbone of central Vietnam, but they made only limited inroads into the territories controlled by the sects. Moreover, the southern Viet Minh often did not measure up in quality to their northern counterparts. Isolated within the vast horizons of the Delta, they would tend to lose contact with the central command and drift off into inaction or the banditry that characterized most of the political groups in the south — a sin known to the Communists as “mountaintopism.” Occasionally the northerners lost patience. In 1951 they executed Nguyen Binh, the chief of all the southern forces, for a series of strategic errors, including the staging of a premature uprising in Saigon.
But in 1954 it did not seem justice or indeed a reality of power that because the Viet Minh had won the war mostly in the north they would therefore have to give up the south. By 1954, after seven years of an expensive and bloody war, the French had renounced their original intention to preserve Vietnam as a part of the French empire. Their main aim at that point was to save the French Expeditionary Corps and extricate themselves from an expensive and ultimately futile conflict. Many French and American officials at the time believed that given the current military situation, any political settlement would have left Ho Chi Minh in control of the entire country.39 The French and their allies, however, persuaded the Viet Minh to negotiate the whole question of Indochina within an international conference including the great powers — France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. At this conference the whole issue of the colonial war was shifted to an entirely different stage and was settled within the context of all the other cold-war conflicts. The agreement there concluded was more favorable to France than many French officials had expected.
Convening in April 1954, the Geneva Conference in three months issued two documents bearing on Vietnam: first, an armistice, signed by the French and DRVN military representatives, that provided for an exchange of prisoners and a regroupment of both combatants to either side of a demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel. The armistice included a provision for the movement of civilian population between the zones within a three-hundred-day period and four articles that prohibited all future foreign military involvement in that country.40 The second document, the Final Declaration of that conference, repeated the strictures of the armistice and elaborated on the political and administrative arrangements to be made in Vietnam. Most significantly in view of the events to follow, it specified that the demilitarized zone should not constitute a political or territorial boundary, but merely a temporary military demarcation line. Following the period of truce, a political settlement should be made on the basis of “respect for the principles of independence, unity, and territorial integrity” of Vietnam and by means of free general elections to be held in July 1956. In neither of the two documents was there any mention of a second state in Vietnam: it was the French who were to administer their regroupment zone in the south during the period of the armistice. The Viet Minh remained somewhat dissatisfied with the postponement of the political settlement, but, exhausted by the war and under some pressure from Moscow, they finally agreed to sign the declaration. In the future they would be wary of any such political compromise.
The Final Declaration of Geneva was n
ever signed by any of the participants to the conference for the reason that the United States refused even to give its oral consent. Before the conference most U.S. officials had hoped that the negotiations would end in failure; they had hope that France would continue to find the strength to carry on the war against the Viet Minh.41 By 1954 American officials and politicians of both parties had come to regard Vietnam as vital to U.S. security. Since the victory of Mao Tse-tung five years earlier, American officials judged that China, in alliance with the Soviet Union, constituted the leading threat to American global interests. Whatever these interests were, and whether or not the official line accurately reflected them, the United States had in the early 1950’s begun to transfer its European policy of the “containment of Communism” to Asia. With the Korean War and the continued support for Chiang Kai-shek, it had begun to build a wall of anti-Communist American dependencies around China. Vietnam, as the officials saw it, constituted the crucial southern element of that wall: if Vietnam “fell” under Communist domination, then the whole of Southeast Asia would follow after it. In 1950 the United States began to subsidize the French war in Vietnam and by 1954 U.S. military aid covered 80 percent of the French war expenditures.42 After the Korean War, President Eisenhower contemplated sending tactical nuclear weapons and/or American troops into the conflict. He finally rejected the proposals in his desire not to engage the United States in yet another land war in Asia. When it became clear that the French could no longer carry on the war by themselves, he looked to the Vietnamese government the French had set up in Saigon as a new vehicle for continuing the struggle. Two months after the Geneva Conference, Secretary of State Dulles set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in a treaty whereby the signatories agreed to assist each other in case of armed aggression from the outside. At the time the organization had only three Asian members, Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines — and not Burma, India, and Indonesia, as Dulles would have liked — but a separate protocol covered “the states of Cambodia and Laos and the free territory under the jurisdiction of the State of Vietnam.”