Reconstruction & Revolution in Vietnam

WHEN THE LAST Americans left Saigon last spring, Vietnam quickly faded from the public view. Newspapers moved on to other questions, radicals found other causes to fight for. Even the Vietnamese refugees who came here have dropped out of sight. Though movies like Hearts and Minds kept some sense of guilt alive and reinforced a determination to avoid repetitions of the war in Southeast Asia, very little attention has been paid to the task of reconstructing a country whose entire social and economic structure was destroyed by 30 years of war. On the whole, Americans seem to have written off the war in Vietnam as a bad mistake and forgotten about the country itself.

Nevertheless, the American departure last April was only the beginning of an enormous job for South Vietnam's Provisional Revolutionary Government. Aside from the million orphans and 181,000 physically disabled Vietnamese we left in our wake, the PRG had to cope with total social and economic chaos. Before the Americans arrived, at least 85 per cent of the South Vietnamese lived in rural areas. By 1970, more than 65 per cent of the population was concentrated in the cities as a result of the American government's forced draft urbanization program--a program which left the Vietnamese countryside defoliated and riddled with 30-foot-wide bomb craters. Saigon's population skyrocketed from 450,000 to nearly four million by the time we left. Three million South Vietnamese were left unemployed. Many had worked for Thieu's army or civil bureaucracy, or in American-financed factories processing American raw materials. Two hundred thousand Vietnamese women had become prostitutes, while perhaps as many as three million adult Vietnamese had contracted venereal disease.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES resulting from forced urbanization and rural devastation form the major obstacles to reconstruction. The PRG's attempt to persuade peasants to return to their farmsteads immediately after the end of the Thieu regime failed, as refugees from the central provinces found it easier to stay on in the cities than to face fields full of unexploded American mines. The PRG discovered it had to assist them in order to repopulate the rural areas. South Vietnam's leaders created what they call New Economic Areas--rural areas, mainly in the north and central parts of the country, that have not been previously cultivated or had been destroyed by American bombs. Teams of volunteers accompany returning peasants into these areas to clear out unexploded mines and set up irrigation systems. Each family that goes back receives a home and land for a garden and rice paddy and is given spending money until it can support itself, farm implements, and medical and technical advice.

This "back to the land" program is now one of the PRG's highest priorities. South Vietnam cannot provide jobs in industry for all the Vietnamese left in the cities at the end of the war, nor can it feed them unless they return to the countryside. Hundreds of hectares in each province have already been reclaimed, and in the cities special educational meetings are being held to explain the program's objectives to those who remain. The PRG hopes to help 100,000 peasants a month return to their homes, so that by the end of this year 1.5 million of Saigon's present inhabitants will have returned to rural areas.

Cooperatives and mutual aid societies have sprung up throughout the south as families group together to buy equipment for production. Along the coast, fishing cooperatives form to purchase motor boats. In farming areas, peasants band together to build irrigation systems or buy pumps. Schools are going up everywhere--by last October, four million children were in grade school. Schooling is free for the first time in South Vietnam's history: the government provides the materials and the villagers help build. Teachers are being trained as quickly as possible, and many are coming down from the north to help out.

UNTIL THE REST of the land can be reclaimed, however. Saigon will remain crowded and noisy. The PRG is unwilling to move people to the countryside unless it is certain they can be productive there. John Holum, one of Sen. McGovern's aides who accompanied the senator on a whirlwind trip to the two Vietnamese capitals last month, says that while Hanoi is "a quiet, dignified city with everyone going about their business," Saigon has "a carnival atmosphere, it's noisy, there are a lot of people standing around, dressed in Western clothing." Small stands on the streets of Saigon still sell Salems and Coca-Colas left from the American occupation. Hondas scream up and down the streets. South Vietnam still bears the marks of the war. While the government has managed to keep everyone fed and clothed, with the aid from North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and many other countries, the unemployed are only gradually being reabsorbed into the economy.

The South Vietnamese have had more trouble with industry than with the land reclamation scheme. Most industries depended heavily on American capital, fuel and raw materials, and when the United States declared an embargo on trade with the PRG, most of those factories that had not already done so in the last months of the war closed down. But the Vietnamese are now developing substitute raw materials for those they once imported from the U.S. A factory that once made the plastic mats that replaced homemade reed mats in many Vietnamese households has been converted so that it can use native reeds. A company that imported Virginia tobacco now uses domestic tobacco, grown by villagers who have learned how to cure it from the government Textile factories that replaced the centuries old silk industry in Vietnam with cheap cotton goods now use cotton imported from the north. The PRG's goal in industry is to reach the highest level of production possible without new capital investment; the rural areas have top priority, and only when that sector of the economy is stabilized will the government put more money into industrial development. Oil deposits off the coast will remain unexplored for the moment, since Vietnam has neither the capital nor the technical power to exploit them.

IN AN EFFORT to avoid any further disruption of the economy, the PRG has only nationalized the businesses of those who left the country with the Americans. Like the North Vietnamese government, the PRG is willing to work with those local capitalists willing to cooperate with it, allowing restricted profits and providing capital to bankrupt businesses. At this point, production and employment opportunities are more important than a strictly state-owned industrial sector.

But the PRG has not found reconstruction easy. In the first months after liberation, South Vietnam experienced a severe rice shortage, as the last violent months of the war disrupted planting in most of the central provinces. By the time Thieu's government fell, almost 2 per cent of the population in those provinces was dying of starvation each month. During the first three months of the PRG's government, the North Vietnamese sent 70 per cent of their rice stock south to give the new government a breathing space. But entrepeneurs were able to hoard the rice, which the PRG sold at half price, and resell it at prices even higher than those of the Thieu regime. Last September, however, the PRG issued an economic statement that outlawed such hoarding and temporarily froze private assets over 100,000 piastres. Since then, it seems to have gained control over the speculation that accompanied the influx of rice from the north.

The PRG has been as tolerant of those who collaborated with the Thieu regime as it has with private property owners. There have been no reports of bloodbaths or purges, no talks of massacres. The million or so South Vietnamese who were members of Thieu's army have not been mistreated. The PRG merely explained its policies to low-ranking soldiers and sent them home, while higher-level officials are going through somewhat longer re-education in centers one Vietnamese scholar described as "more like universities than prison camps." Religious communities have been unmolested, and Buddhists and Catholics remain free to practice their religions.

EDUCATION AND re-education are major points in the PRG's program to prepare the country for reunification. Government policies are carefully explained and flexibly administered. Each village has a weekly "speaking out" session, in which villagers voice complaints and ask questions of local administrators. A trend that began to develop last fall of bureaucratization in the government was thus quickly stopped. While decisions probably take longer because of this kind of participation, the PRG can ensure it has support for its policies.

South Vietnam still has serious problems. It still has a need for technological and medical aid and knowledge and still has to deal with the war's legacy of drug addicts and prostitutes. But for the past nine months the north has produced more than ever in all sectors of its economy, under the slogan "All for the South," and reunification--scheduled for this summer--will make it easier for the two regions to integrate their needs and resources. The two areas will probably remain culturally distinct from one another for some time, as the effects of the American occupation in the south are not likely to be easily eradicated, but already their governments work closely together in preparation for unification. The Vietnamese people will elect representatives to a National Assembly this spring, as soon as the PRG finishes conducting a census of the south, and the two Vietnams will merge.

Despite its progress in rebuilding the economy, the problems facing the Vietnamese go far beyond reconstruction. Vietnam will eventually have to build unified programs for development, programs that will embody their socialist aspirations. The real question for the Vietnamese is whether they can modernize without sacrificing the democratic participation that now characterizes their political and economic decision-making. The governments of both North and South Vietnam have already shown concern with this problem, and how well they solve it will determine the ultimate success of their revolution.

Eventually, the U.S. will have to recognize united Vietnam. But the Vietnamese consistently stress their independence of other countries, including the Soviet Union and China. "Without the cold and bleakness of winter," Ho Chi Minh once wrote, "the warmth and splendor of spring could never be. Misfortunes have steeled and tempered me, and further strengthened my resolve."