No More Vietnams (30 page)

Living conditions killed hundreds of thousands more. Over 4 million Cambodians who were evacuated from cities and towns were now scattered across the country to implement the government's plan to build New Villages. It was not a carefully considered policy to develop the countryside but a barbaric plan that would lead to a horrendous death toll. It boiled down to simply dumping city dwellers into desolate jungle tracts to carve out their homes and eke out an existence with nothing more than their bare hands.

Cambodia, which had been the rice bowl of Indochina before the Communist victory, now experienced a famine. A manual worker normally needed between 500 and 800 grams of rice a day to survive. The standard ration for civilians exiled in the countryside was 90 grams of rice a day, and their food supplies sometimes ran out completely. Weakened through malnutrition, the population was ravaged by disease. Yet, while the Cambodian people starved, Communist officials and soldiers had all the rice, meat, and fish they wanted. This was corruption on a scale that did not come close to being matched even
by the most grotesquely distorted charges of malfeasance against Lon Nol's government.

Surviving in the New Villages meant foraging for food in the jungle. Soon, all the fish, field crabs, and snails in surrounding areas were depleted. Villagers then became desperate. “We ate whatever we saw the oxen eat, figuring it couldn't harm us,” said one refugee. “Our main diet was a very bitter fruit, which we had to soak in water before we could eat it. We also ate the bark of a tree. We'd first scrape it, then boil it in water before we could eat it.” Algae, leaves, locusts, grasshoppers, lizards, snakes, worms, and termites became the sustenance of those exiled into the New Villages. Villagers in one area saw their skin turn yellow and began to vomit blood after they ingested inedible grasses and vines.

“We weren't allowed to complain about the food,” one survivor explained, “because the Khmer Rouge said, ‘If you're not happy, we'll take you to a place where there is more than enough to eat.' They meant the rice paddy where they executed people who were dissatisfied.”

Complaining about inadequate food was not the only capital offense under the Khmer Rouge. Married couples were prohibited from engaging in prolonged conversations. This was punishable on the second offense with death. Communist officials conducted public executions reminiscent of those held under Ho Chi Minh's land-reform program. Victims were led off to a field prepared in advance to serve as a mass grave. Villagers were gathered around to witness the spectacle. Children were forced to watch as their parents were decapitated or stabbed, bludgeoned, or tortured to death. It was a barbaric ritual repeated thousands of times throughout Cambodia. These killing fields later turned into sunken pits as the hundreds of bodies buried underneath began to decay.

It has been estimated that Khmer Rouge policies killed over 1.2 million Cambodians in 1975 and 1976. Over 100,000 were executed in the first wave of terror. Over 20,000 died while fleeing the country. Over 400,000 were killed in the mass exodus from Cambodia's cities. Over 680,000 were executed or
died of disease or starvation in the New Villages in the countryside. The Communists did not let up their murderous pace. By December 1978, when Phnom Penh fell to Vietnam's invading armies, it is estimated that between 2 million and 3 million Cambodians had died at the hands of those who had called themselves “liberators.”

When the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam in April 1975, their own reign of terror followed quickly. Hanoi conducted widespread executions to take its revenge against Saigon's defeated government and armed forces and to secure its totalitarian rule. This attracted little attention because more killings took place in rural than in urban areas. But Nguyen Cong Hoan, who served as a National Liberation Front agent and then as a member of the National Assembly of the united Communist Vietnam before fleeing the country in 1977, was in a position to know about Hanoi's executions. He said that the death toll reached into the tens of thousands.

South Vietnam's people were worse off by every measure after Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. Antiwar critics charged that under Thieu South Vietnam was governed by a hopelessly corrupt regime. It is true that there was some corruption—but there was also substantial freedom. Under Thieu, elections were held with international observers present, and opposition Buddhists almost won control of the National Assembly. There was freedom of religion for all faiths. There were economic freedoms. South Vietnam became a prosperous small developing country. There was some freedom of the press. South Vietnam had three television stations, twenty radio stations, and twenty-seven daily newspapers, all of which were free to express dissenting views within certain bounds.

Now there are no political, religious, economic, or press freedoms. There are no free elections. There is ruthless repression of religion. More Buddhist monks have committed suicide through self-immolation under the Communists than under Diem and his successors combined. Southern Vietnam has become an economic disaster area. Vietnam now has one television
station, two radio stations, and two dailies—all of which pump out government propaganda.

There are those who held that there was no difference between authoritarian and totalitarian governments. But in the case of Vietnam it was not a question of distinguishing among shades of gray—rather of seeing a difference between night and day.

Hanoi developed three ways of dealing with those it considered enemies.

First, the Communists built a Vietnamese gulag—a string of prisons stretching across the country. After their victory, North Vietnamese forces quickly arrested all individuals who could possibly lead opposition groups. This included not only all former military officers, political figures, and government leaders but also virtually the entire South Vietnamese intelligentsia. Among those jailed were the organizers of the Buddhist peace movement in Saigon, the leader of the anti-Thieu opposition in the National Assembly, the head of the group that had protested against government corruption in 1974 and 1975. Even some members of the National Liberation Front found themselves behind bars when they dared to express views that differed from Hanoi's.

Prison conditions are inhumane. Doan Van Toai, a political dissident who had spent years in South Vietnamese prisons, later described the conditions he found when he was incarcerated in those of the Communist Vietnamese: “I was thrown into a three-by-six-foot cell with my left hand chained to my right foot and my right hand chained to my left foot.” His food consisted of a mixture of rice and sand. “After two months in solitary confinement, I was transferred to a collective cell, a room fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long, where at different times anywhere from forty to one hundred prisoners were crushed together. Here we had to take turns lying down to sleep, and most of the younger, stronger prisoners slept sitting up. In the sweltering heat, we also took turns snatching a few breaths of fresh air in front of the narrow opening that
was the cell's only window. Every day I watched my friends die at my feet.”

Nguyen Van Tang, a Communist who had been jailed for fifteen years by the French, eight years by Diem, six years by Thieu, and who is in Hanoi's jails today, was able to put prison conditions into perspective. He said, “My dream now is not to be released; it is not to see my family. My dream is that I could be back in a French prison thirty years ago.”

It is estimated that Hanoi's prisons today hold between 200,000 and 340,000 Vietnamese. Official Vietnamese statements assert that no more than 50,000 have ever been jailed. But in 1978, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong gave the lie to his own government's assertion when he said that he had “
released
more than 1 million prisoners from the camps.”

Second, Hanoi sends those it considers potentially disloyal to what it calls New Economic Zones. Among these potential opponents are all relatives of those detained in its prison system and all class enemies, such as former capitalists. They are exiled to desolate stretches of terrain where their task is to clear the land and to dig irrigation canals. Living conditions are primitive. Food is scarce. Disease is rampant. Premature death is common. It is estimated that over 1 million Vietnamese have been consigned to the New Economic Zones.

Third, the Communists caused the exodus of over 1.2 million people in the tragic flotillas of the boat people. In the spring of 1978, when Hanoi decided that Vietnam's ethnic Chinese might constitute a threat to its rule because of the conflict with China, it systematically expelled them, driving hundreds of thousands into the treacherous waters of the South China Sea on almost anything that would float. Hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese followed them in a desperate gamble to escape life under communism. Observers estimated that half—600,000 people—drowned at sea.

In order to secure its grip on power, Hanoi has found it necessary to destroy the South Vietnamese nation. Before Hanoi's leaders could rule they had to ruin. It was unprecedented to see deeply nationalistic Vietnamese fleeing their nation.
“Our people have a traditional attachment to their country,” wrote Nguyen Cong Hoan. “No Vietnamese would willingly leave home, homeland, and ancestors' graves. During the most oppressive French colonial rule and Japanese domination, no one escaped by boat at great risk to their lives. Yet you see that my countrymen by the thousands and from all walks of life, including a number of disillusioned Viet Congs, continue to escape from Vietnam.”

As the plight of the Cambodian and Vietnamese peoples became publicized in the late 1970s, many antiwar figures reacted in horror to the consequences of their own policies. In 1974, Senator McGovern had argued that the Cambodian people “should he left to settle their own differences.” His policy prevailed in Congress. In August 1978, to his credit, he called for the State Department to recommend that an international force be assembled to “knock the Cambodian regime out of power.”

A generous view of the antiwar movement's position would be that there was no way they could have known what would happen in the wake of our defeat. But it
was
known—and they should have known.

It was no secret that Ho Chi Minh killed hundreds of nationalists in 1946 and over 50,000 peasants after coming to power in North Vietnam in 1954.

It was no secret that the National Liberation Front assassinated over 35,000 local South Vietnamese leaders and systematically used terror tactics against civilians.

It was no secret that Communist forces killed nearly 5,000 people in their month-long occupation of Hue during the Tet Offensive.

It was no secret that Hanoi's forces
deliberately
killed far more civilians by shelling them as they fled the fighting in Quang Tri during the 1972 offensive than our bombers
accidentally
did during their attacks on North Vietnam in December 1972.

It was no secret that Communist Khmer Rouge forces fired artillery shells into refugee camps in Phnom Penh and were
carrying out brutal atrocities in the areas under their occupation in 1973 and 1974.

Those in the antiwar movement might not have known about these facts. If so, however, it was a kind of willful ignorance. Their vicious brand of self-righteousness had grotesquely twisted their moral sense. It blinded them to a profound but simple truth: It is the essence of moral responsibility to determine beforehand the consequences of our action—or our inaction.

Today, after Communist governments have killed over a half million Vietnamese and over 2 million Cambodians, the conclusive moral judgment has been rendered on our effort to save Cambodia and South Vietnam: We have never fought in a more moral cause. Assertions in the antiwar news media that life in Indochina would be better after our withdrawal served to highlight in a tragic way the abysmally poor level of their reporting throughout the war. But of all their blatantly inaccurate statements over the years, none was more hideously wrong than that one.

• • •

“If wise men give up the use of power,” de Gaulle once said, “what madmen will seize it, what fanatics?”

When we abandoned the use of power in Indochina, we also abandoned its people to a grim fate. When the American ambassador to Cambodia, John Gunther Dean, was about to be evacuated from Phhom Penh, he offered Lon Nol's closest colleague, Sirik Matak, asylum in the United States. The former Premier responded in a letter:

Dear Excellency and Friend,

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me toward freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it.

You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in the country I love, it is too bad, because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake of believing you.

Sisowath Sirik Matak

It was a fittingly noble, if tragically sad, epitaph for his country, his people, and himself. He was among the first whom the Khmer Rouge executed.

After we abandoned the use of power, it was seized by the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge Communists. Our defeat was so great a tragedy because after the peace agreement of January 1973 it was so easily avoidable. Consolidating our gains would not have taken much to accomplish—a credible threat to enforce the peace agreement through retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and a sufficient flow of aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. But Congress legislated an end to our involvement. It also legislated the defeat of our friends in the same stroke.

A lesson that our adversaries should learn from our intervention in Vietnam is that the United States, under resolute and strong leadership, will go to great lengths and endure great sacrifices to defend its allies and interests. We fought in Vietnam because there were important strategic interests involved. But we also fought because our idealism was at stake. If not the United States, what nation would have helped defend South Vietnam? The fact is that no other country would have fought for over a decade in a war half a world away at great cost to itself in order to save the people of a small country from Communist enslavement.