Download Many of the problems faced by the South Vietnamese regime related

THE DIEM REGIME AND THE ORIGINS OF THE
SECOND INDOCHINA WAR
Throughout the 1950s, the Government of South Vietnam was plagued by instability. Apart
from its dubious legal foundations and its corrupt and repressive nature, it had a president whose
background, personality and leadership style were utterly unsuited to the circumstances he faced.
The government also faced an enemy who was committed to its destruction and to the
reunification of Vietnam.
The problem of legitimacy
The Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was an artificial creation – established as a compromise to
allow the French to withdraw from Vietnam with dignity and to prevent an immediate takeover by
Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN). According to the agreement reached at
the Geneva Conference in 1954, the southern regime was meant to last for only two years, at
which time a national election would be held to determine the future status of a reunified
Vietnam. However, the United States believed (with considerable justification) that Ho Chi Minh
would be the overwhelming victor in such an election, even if it was entirely without fraud. Given
that the US and the government of South Vietnam had never signed the Geneva Agreement, both
felt justified in breaking the accord and postponing the election indefinitely.
The problem was that many people in southern Vietnam still favoured reunification, and were
unwilling to accept the US-imposed regime. In particular, Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of the
North were unwilling to accept a breach of the Geneva Agreement. The stage was set for a
resumption of hostilities.
The nature of the South Vietnamese regime
One of the principal reasons for the Vietminh’s appeal among the peasantry was that the
revolutionaries promised an end to the system of land ownership that had kept the peasants in
poverty for centuries. Most of peasants were tenant farmers, who paid exorbitant rents to the
landowners. The French had maintained this system, garnering support among the elite in return
for protecting them against the peasants. However, by collaborating with the French, the
Vietnamese ruling class had lost much of its credibility. The Vietminh, on the other hand, had
actually redistributed land during the war with the French, and had garnered much support by
doing so. Peasants feared the new regime in the south would repudiate the Vietminh’s land
reforms. This fear turned out to be well justified.
In seeking to establish a non-communist government in the south of Vietnam, the United States
was forced to look to the traditional Vietnamese elite for support: the landowners, the
bureaucracy, the officer corps of the army (set up by the French, under Bao Dai’s supposed
command). As a result, the South Vietnamese regime was built upon a very narrow base of
support. It was also plagued by corruption and instability, with half a dozen political groupings all
vying for power.
Ngo Dinh Diem
Ngo Dinh Diem was appointed prime minister by Bao Dai, at America’s instigation. This
reduced his credibility in the eyes of many Vietnamese. However, in the eyes of the United States,
it gave him an air of legitimacy – something that was seen as necessary if America were were to
establish a stable, non-communist regime in the south. The US also favoured Diem because it
perceived him to be a moderate nationalist and a strident anti-communist. Diem had opposed the
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French, and the US hoped that this might enable him to gain support from those nationalists
opposed to Ho Chi Minh. However, Diem’s background made him highly unsuitable as leader of
South Vietnam.
In the first place, Diem had been one of Bao Dai’s ministers in 1933, and although he held that
post for only a relatively short time, his association with the emperor’s puppet regime tainted him
in the eyes of many nationalists.
Secondly, Diem had spent most of the war against France in the United States, studying in a
monastery. This also compromised his image as a nationalist and a patriot.
Thirdly, Diem’s Catholicism made him unpopular with South Vietnam’s majority Buddhist
population. The US had encouraged Catholics from the north to move south in 1954-55, hoping
they might bolster Diem’s regime. However, their presence only generated resentment among the
Buddhists, who believed the Catholics were receiving favoured treatment – which, in fact, they
were. Catholics were already regarded with suspicion by Vietnamese nationalists, due to their
association with the French; the influx from the north only fanned this view.
Finally, Diem was a poor choice as president because of his erratic and dictatorial nature. Rather
than being an inclusive leader who would seek compromise with potential allies, Diem was an old
style Vietnamese mandarin, who accepted no opposition to his rule. Nor would he accept the
advice of his American allies. In fact, the only people Diem fully trusted were his brother Nhu
(who became head of the secret police) and Nhu’s wife.
The consolidation of Diem’s power
In 1954, the situation in South Vietnam looked dire. Diem had opponents literally everywhere,
and seemed incapable of consolidating his power. The US government sent Colonel Ed Lansdale
to help him achieve the impossible. Lansdale was an experienced CIA operative, who had helped
the government of the Philippines defeat a communist insurgency a few years earlier. He believed
he could apply the same lessons he had learned there to Vietnam. (In actual fact, the
circumstances in Vietnam were completely different to those in the Philippines. Many of
Lansdale’s initiatives in Vietnam turned out to be counter-productive in the long term.)
Lansdale started by urging Diem to eliminate his political rivals, and Diem obliged with
spectacular success. His first target was the Binh Xuyen, a 40,000 strong criminal gang which
controlled the nation’s gambling, drugs and prostitution. When the Binh Xuyen’s leader, Bay
Vien, refused to withdraw his military forces from Saigon, Diem ordered the South Vietnamese
army to attack. A fierce battle ensued, and Diem emerged victorious. The following year, Diem
attacked the Cao Dai and Hoa Hau religious sects, each of which had thousands of armed men at
their command. Once again, he was victorious. (The Hoa Hau military leader, Ba Cut, was
publicly guillotined.) This turned out to be a major error, for the religious cults had large
followings, and their military forces maintained order in the regions under their control. Both cults
might have been prepared to cooperate with Diem, bringing much needed support to his regime.
However, when they were smashed, forces loyal to Ho Chi Minh were able to fill the political
void created in the areas they controlled (crucial areas to the south and west of the capital,
Saigon). In addition, many of the soldiers who had served in the Cao Dai and Hoa Hau armies
wound up joining the Vietminh when hostilities recommenced in the late 1950s.
With the Binh Xuyen and the cults smashed, Diem’s American advisers now suggested he
undertake a series of political rallies, to garner support among the South Vietnamese people.
These affairs appeared to be a great success, with huge crowds flocking to see their new leader.
However, the US officials – and Diem himself – were fooled by their own propaganda. The
meetings were fully stage-managed, the people’s cheers often in response to payments made by
Diem’s secret police or to simply being given the day off work. Some even believed Diem was Ho
Chi Minh.
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By early 1956, Diem had consolidated his hold on power, and was in a position to renege on the
election promised under the Geneva Agreement – a ballot the US’s own agents were convinced he
could not win. The situation in South Vietnam finally appeared to have stabilised and, for the first
time, the United States looked to the future with some confidence.
Diem’s ‘reforms’
Once he had consolidated his power, Diem introduced a series of ‘reforms’ in South Vietnam,
most of which succeeded only in alienating large segments of the population. His brother Nhu was
an admirer of Hitler, and used fascist techniques to gain control over the population and generate
loyalty to the new regime. The first organisation he established was a clandestine society, the Can
Lo, to infiltrate the army officer corps and keep him abreast of any threats to his brother’s
security. He also set up a mass organisation called the Republican Youth, which was based on
Hitler’s storm troopers (the Brown Shirts). Its aim was to spy on the population and to intimidate
Diem’s enemies. Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu, established a similar mass organisation for women.
The Ngo Dinhs then introduced laws banning divorce, contraception, spiritualism and occultism
– all practices which were acceptable to the nation’s Buddhist majority. They also filled the army
and the civil service with Catholics, and abolished the councils which had controlled the villages
up until then – replacing them with officials loyal to Diem and his cronies. Teams of Northern
Catholics began touring the villages, lecturing the people about the evils of the Vietminh and the
communists. The locals regarded these people as interlopers. Their efforts were entirely counterproductive.
Next, Diem introduced a land reform package aimed at bolstering his support among the
country’s traditional elite. All land that had been given to peasants by the Vietminh was returned
to its original owners – a policy which infuriated large segments of the rural population. As Neil
Sheehan has put it, “With 85 percent of the population living in the countryside and drawing a
livelihood from agriculture, it was difficult to find a single issue of more profound social,
economic and political sensitivity than land.” (Sheehan: 182) What land Diem did hand out to
peasants went mostly to Catholics who had fled North Vietnam, a move that only fueled
resentment among the south’s Buddhist majority. By 1958, the situation in the Mekong Delta (the
South’s main rice growing area) had returned to its prewar pattern, with 2 percent of the
population owning 45 percent of the land, and 50 percent of the population owning no land at all.
To make matters worse, Diem ordered that the graves of Vietminh fighters who had died
fighting the French be desecrated – something which Vietnamese Buddhists found abhorrent. To
them, these men were heroes and deserved to be revered. Diem’s actions further tainted him in
their view.
The result was widespread rural unrest. To deal with this, Diem unleashed the Civil Guards and
SDC militia. These groups were often little more than uniformed bandits, “constantly robbing and
raping and beating up farmers who dared to protest. Many of the peasants remembered that the
last time they had known any security and decent government had been under the Viet Minh….”
(Sheehan: 184)
The establishment of Communism in North Vietnam
For the first four years after the Geneva Agreement, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were
preoccupied with problems unique to North Vietnam. In the first place, they needed to rebuild the
country after the devastation of the war with France. They also needed to find food for the
nation’s 14 million people, since most had been imported from the south in the period before
1954. Another problem the North faced was a lack of industry and technicians, both of which
were essential to the creation of a viable nation state. Finally, Ho Chi Minh was transforming
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North Vietnam into a Marxist state, in which industry and land were socially owned and
controlled.
These difficulties were compounded by a series of mistakes made by the new regime. In
particular, the government encouraged the execution of thousands of landlords during the land
reform program. Many innocent people were also killed during this campaign, including Party
members convicted of crimes they had not committed. The result of this repression was a revolt
by Catholic peasants, which had to be put down by the army. In 1956, Ho Chi Minh apologised
for these crimes and put a stop to any further instances. The man responsible, Truong Chinh, was
dismissed from his post as Party general secretary.
Over the next few years, Ho’s regime was able to restore its popularity, and concentrate on the
task of developing northern Vietnam.
Diem’s suppression of the Vietminh
In South Vietnam, Diem set about attacking his principal adversaries – the Vietminh and those
loyal to Ho Chi Minh. However, this was a crucial mistake. As Neil Sheehan put it, “Diem did not
understand that if he persecuted the Vietminh he would be persecuting the great mass of nonCommunist Vietnamese who looked back on what they had done with the emotions of patriotism.
Nor did he realise that he would be arousing revulsion in still other Vietnamese who had come to
regard the Vietminh as patriots. He had sat out the war in hiding or in exile, and he and his family
did not share these emotions. In his loathing of Communism, Diem regarded all Vietminh as evil.”
(Sheehan: 186)
The reign of terror Diem unleashed was on the Vietminh and their supporters. In Neil Sheehan’s
words, Diem’s CIA advisers “did not have to teach the men of the regular police…and the
security agencies Nhu was starting to form how to repress. They had been well schooled by the
French. They might repress the wrong people and let genuine Communists escape with their
bungling and enthusiastic brutality…but they did know how to repress. Women arrested were
normally raped and tortured. The torturers considered rape a prerequisite of their job. Torture
produced names. Those named were quickly arrested and tortured. They named others whose
arrest and torture led to still others in geometric progression…. Anyone arrested could be certain
of receiving a bullet (Diem authorised the province chiefs to execute on suspicion alone, even
without a hearing) or a sentence to a concentration camp. Release was rare. Arrest was
presumption of guilt.” (Sheehan: 187) No one knows how many people were killed during the
repression of 1955-57, but it must have been many thousands. Another 100,000 were sentenced to
concentration camps.
Diem’s brother Nhu, who had control of the repression, also staged a series of show trials, based
on those initiated by Stalin in the 1930s. Suspected communists were made to recant their beliefs
and loyalties in public ceremonies intended to demonstrate the regime’s willingness to show
mercy to those who deserved it. Nhu also desecrated Vietminh war memorials and cemeteries – a
move which infuriated almost everyone in the south. The CIA also attempted to denigrate the
Vietminh by referring to them as ‘Viet Cong’ (which meant ‘Vietnamese Communists’). The
campaign had almost no effect, since the word ‘communism’ was not synonymous with evil in the
minds of most Vietnamese.
The resumption of hostilities
By 1957, the number of Vietminh cadres in the south had been reduced from a maximum of
10,000 to about 2,500. Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were preoccupied with the rebuilding of
the north and did not want a resumption of hostilities at that stage, so were in no position to
prevent the slaughter. The ordered their comrades in the south to keep up their political agitation
but to take no military action. However, such a situation was untenable in the south, and the
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Vietminh cadres chose to disobey Ho’s instructions and instigate a rebellion against the Ngo
Dinhs and the Americans. As one secret Viet Cong history captured by the Americans in 1966
stated, “In opposing such an enemy, simple political struggle was not possible. It was necessary to
use armed struggle…. The enemy would not allow us any peace.” (Karnow: 191)
By the late 1950s, South Vietnam was ripe for revolution. Diem’s repression and his decision to
hand back land given to poor peasants had alienated large segments of the population. Many
reacted by joining the newly formed guerrilla force. The dissident southern cadres were also
joined by many non-communist nationalists, who had suffered at Diem’s hands, as well as
members of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects. These people saw Diem as a puppet of the
Americans – not because he did everything the Americans wanted (which he patently did not,
much to the Americans’ chagrin) but because he was entirely dependent upon them for the
survival of his regime.
In early 1957, the resistance forces began striking back at the Ngo Dinhs, assassinating hated
members of the police or village chiefs appointed by Diem’s officials. The following year, they
began forming guerrilla units to attack the army itself. By 1959, over 2,000 village-level officials
had been killed. The South was now in a state of civil war, and the Communist leaders in the
North could no longer remain aloof from that conflict.
Fortunately for the North, it had recovered sufficiently from the devastation of the war with
France and the mistakes of the land reform campaign, to shoulder the burden of a resumption of
hostilities in the South. In late 1958, Ho Chi Minh sent Le Duan (soon to become the Communist
Party’s general secretary) on a secret trip to South Vietnam to determine whether the country was
ready for rebellion, and he quickly concluded that it was. Ho and his colleagues decided to resume
the unfinished revolution. The Second Indochina War began.
The war against Diem
In the second half of 1959, Ho Chi Minh dispatched a few hundred ex-Vietminh fighters to
South Vietnam, to help in the rebellion. These were South Vietnamese cadres who had fled north
in 1954, following the Geneva Agreement, and they quickly reactivated the old structures of the
Vietminh in southern Vietnam. Volunteers flocked to join the guerrilla army, and the number of
fighters grew from 2,000 in 1957 to 10,000 in 1960. By the following year, their number had
reached 16,000, with 11,000 weapons. The new force was named the National Liberation Front of
South Vietnam (NLF) in 1960, and was ostensibly a coalition of forces opposed to the Diem
regime. In reality, however, the NLF was run by members of the Communist Party, who in turn
took orders from Ho Chi Minh. Ho chose to establish a front organisation because he wanted the
participation of people who might not have been prepared to join a Communist-run organisation.
He also wanted to be able to deny that he was running a clandestine war in South Vietnam,
thereby reducing the chances of the United States directly intervening. He also hoped that the
struggle might gain the support of ordinary people in Europe and the United States - something
that might not have occurred had the North’s control of the NLF been openly acknowledged.
By 1961, the United States found itself facing a crisis in South Vietnam. As Neil Sheehan has
put it, “The fear the US intelligence officers had expressed back in the mid-1950s had come true,
but as another of those prophecies about Vietnam that Americans made self-fulfilling. The United
States had sought to destroy the old Viet Minh and had renamed it the Viet Cong. In the process,
the United States had created a new Viet Minh, far more formidable than the old Viet Minh the
French had faced in the South.” (Sheehan: 196)
The strategic hamlet program
The NLF’s great strength lay in its link with the rural population. As Mao’s guerrillas had done
in China, the Viet Cong lived among the peasants, using them as a cover for their activities. This
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was what General Giap called “people’s war”, and it was extremely effective as a means of
resisting the better equipped ARVN.
To bolster the Viet Cong’s forces, the North began sending reinforcements down the Ho Chi
Minh trail. In 1954, 80,000 South Vietnamese cadres had fled north, and increasing numbers of
them now began returning to their homeland. The Viet Cong soon grew into a powerful force
capable of defeating Diem’s army. By 1961, the guerrillas were assassinating 4,000 village
officials a year, and controlled more than half the countryside (and virtually all of it by night).
There were large areas where Diem’s forces dared not go, and they became increasingly restricted
to the cities and large towns.
Diem reacted to this by forcing the peasants into strategic hamlets – fortified villages under the
control of the army. During the day, they could farm their rice paddies as normal, but they had to
retreat to the hamlets at night, where the could be prevented from helping the Viet Cong.
Unfortunately for Diem, the hamlets only succeeded in further alienating the peasants, who had to
travel long distances between their lands and the new settlements. Even many farmers who had
resisted getting involved in the conflict until now threw in their lot with the guerrillas.
The worsening military situation in South Vietnam
As the military situation worsened, Diem became increasingly concerned about the loyalty of
his own troops. In 1960, some of his officers had attempted a military coup, forcing Diem to
protect his regime by appointing Catholics to senior ARVN positions. He also gave orders that the
best ARVN units were to remain as close to Saigon as possible, so they could be used to crush any
further attempts at rebellion. This meant that the army was led by men whose principal virtue was
their loyalty to Diem, not their competence in the field.
All this only helped the Viet Cong, whose forces inflicted a series of devastating defeats on the
ARVN in 1961. President Kennedy had to decide whether to escalate America’s involvement in
Vietnam, by sending more advisers and military equipment. Although his instincts told him to
avoid this Asian quagmire, he also felt America needed to draw a line in the sand against
communist advances. His dilemma was exacerbated by his own need to prove himself to Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had humiliated him earlier that year.
In November 1961, Kennedy authorised further military aid to South Vietnam, hoping it might
be sufficient to stave off defeat. By 1963, the number of US personnel in the country reached
16,000. Most were there to train the ARVN, but some began to take on combat roles, such as
flying planes and helicopters, and carrying out special forces operations. The US also provided the
Diem regime with more effective weapons, like napalm and armoured personnel carriers (APCs).
But the impact of these measures was short-lived. In January 1963, the Viet Cong inflicted a
devastating defeat on the ARVN at the battle of Ap Bak. Despite being outnumbered more than
ten to one, the Viet Cong killed and wounded 400 ARVN soldiers and five Americans, at a loss of
only 9 of their own men. They also disabled 3 helicopters and several APCs. This victory gave the
Viet Cong enormous confidence, and brought many new volunteers to their cause. Victory over
the Diem regime now seemed inevitable.
Rather than risk his soldiers further, Diem ordered his airforce and artillery to bomb the villages
which were believed to be supporting the Viet Cong, in the hope that this might intimidate the
peasants into turning against the guerrillas. If anything, it had the opposite effect. The more their
villages burned, the more the peasants hated Diem and his regime. It was a downward spiral to
oblivion for South Vietnam.
The Buddhist Revolt
As if the Diem regime’s problems were not serious enough, the unrest in the countryside spread
to South Vietnam’s cities in 1963. The country’s Buddhist majority were fed up with Diem’s pro6
Catholic policies, and began a series of public demonstrations. The regime reacted by unleashing
a new wave of repression, arresting the Buddhist leaders and closing some of their temples.
In May 1963, Diem refused to permit any display of Buddhist flags on the anniversary of
Buddha’s birthday, and the monks reacted by stepping up their demonstrations. Soldiers fired on
the crowds, killing nine people, and this set off a wave of protest. To draw international attention
to their plight, a 66 year old monk named Thich Quan Duc soaked himself in petrol and set
himself alight in a Saigon street. Six more monks did likewise over the next few weeks. The
American people was shocked by these deaths, which were all captured on film. They were also
shocked by Madame Nhu’s callous reaction - referring to the self-immolations as “barbeques”.
The arrests had no effect on Diem and Nhu, however. They merely stepped up the repression,
raiding Buddhist pagodas across the country and arresting hundreds of monks.
The overthrow of Diem
By the autumn of 1963, the situation in South Vietnam had become so bad that the many in the
Kennedy Administration were convinced the country could not be saved unless Diem was
removed. Kennedy vacillated. On the one hand, he did not want any harm to come to Diem. On
the other hand, he realised that Diem was dragging South Vietnam into oblivion. He tried to
persuade Diem to reform his government, sacking Nhu and appointing a new set of advisers, but
Diem refused to comply. In the end, and against his better judgment, Kennedy decided to opt for
the coup. He instructed his ambassador in South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, to make it known
to the Buddhist generals in the ARVN that the US would not intervene if they staged a coup. The
CIA also began plotting with these same officers.
Finally, on November 1st, the generals struck. Tanks and troops moved into Saigon, and stormed
the presidential palace. Diem and Nhu fled to a Catholic church, where they were arrested and
placed in an APC. Both were murdered, while being driven back to the palace.
Kennedy was shocked, and wracked with doubt and guilt. He was also undecided as to how to
proceed – to escalate America’s commitment further or pull out of Vietnam altogether. But he had
no chance to reach a decision. Within three weeks of Diem’s assassination, he too was dead. US
policy was handed to his successor, Lyndon Johnson.
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