INTERNAL CONFLICT
By Van Nguyen
Preferential treatment of
the Party leadership against the military units and personnel regrouped to the
North following the Geneva Agreement in July 1954 is phenomenal. Nguyen Van Tran,
the politics commissioner of Zone VII (Saigon and adjacent Ares), noted in his memoirs (1995) bitter grievances
cadres, troopers, and their family members suffered in the North before and
during the Vietnam War (1955-75). As a matter of fact, negligence of their life
newcomers is perverse. Adults are jobless. Children are left to famish. Chaos
took place in large resettlements in Haiphong, Vinh Phu, Ha Dong, and Hanoi. High school students at Te a (Theatre)
Quarters dropped out from classes, loitering in the streets and looting shops. Discrimination
is open in populated resettlements. Schools for children from the South are
denied permission to operate. Dissent broke out right in the heart of the
Capital of the country. As many as four thousand dissenters at Chuong My, Ha
Dong, rambled the fields, destroying crops. Thousands of teenagers from
families of soldiers and cadres from the South joined in protest against the
communist administration during the agrarian reforms in 1856 a Cau Giay
District in Hanoi.
Leading cadres and the intellectuals
from the South are largely disregarded. They are seen as politically independent
as they accustomed to free thought have enjoyed free thoughts of equality and
liberty and cultural ways of life under French colonialism. Their interpretations
of Marxism vary according to groups. Differences in opinions on the strategy
for national unification following Beijing. Strategy -taking the South by
force- is thoughtless; it only causes tension-surfaced. Contradictions over orthodox
Maoism and methods of thinking are common among members of the body of
leadership from the South. To this disadvantage, former key members of the
Council of Resistance in the South such as Pham Van Bach, Pham Ngoc Thuan, Tran
Buu Kiem, Huynh Van Tieng, Nguyen Van Huong, Tran Van Nguyen, Dang Minh Tru, Dang
Minh Tru, Nguyen Phu Huu, Ta Nhut Tu, Ta Nhu Khue, Ca Van Thinh, Nguyen Van
Chi, Hoang Xuan Nhi, Le Van Thiem, Ho Van Lai, Tran Huu Nghiep, Dang Ngoic Tot,
Nguyen Van Am, Nguyen Van Hoa, Ho Van Hue, and Pham Thieu, are kept at the
loose end. Long-standing party members
of prestige such as Tran Van Giau, Ton Duc Thang, Nguyen Van Tao, Nguyen Van
Tran, Ung Van Khiem, and Duong Bach Mai fell into disgrace. Ton Duc Thang, Ung
Van Khiem, and Nguyen Van Tao assumed nominal role. Ung Van Khiem and Duong
Bach Mai suffered a doubtful death.
There is no surprise
opposition from elements of all walks of life from the South regrouped to the
North surfaces during the land reform 1956-58, and hostility is felt among the
intellectuals from the South during the Nhan Van Movement (Humanities) that coincidentally
take place at the same time. Sources believe that the reasons for conflict are
even more complex. Most communist party members from the South are not
Moscow-trained. They are originally members of the Communist Party of France or
the Fourth International.
Political
cleavage between the ruling leadership of the Party and prominent party members
in the South widened following the communist coercive takeover of Saigon. There
should be two Vietnams according to 1973 Paris Agreements on the Ending the War
in Vietnam. The withering victory
of spring 1975 generated new divergences within the Communist Party. The communists
from the North persistently established the unified Vietnam as planned at any
cost. The communists of the South, who believed they themselves, could judge
well the local situation with keen observations. The pointed out the
contradictory character of political North-South conflict and solve it on the
sociological plan. They believed they could tackle the dilemma. The two Vietnams, both
the North and the South, enter the U.N.
As a matter of fact, Tran Bach Dang, a
leading communist party member of the South, expressed it very clearly to
Wilfrid Burchett. The communists of the
South advocated a liberal politics with regard to the local bourgeoisie whose
economic interests and patriotism they measured on their own terms and they
appreciated. “One of the advantages of a state of non-reunification,” said Tran
Bach Dang, “is that it would allow us to have two voices in the United Nations
during a certain time.” The argument is strongly diplomatic and probably camouflaged
many other things that are more concrete. In the opinion of Kissinger, the
United States may set obstacle to such a double admission as it may led to the entry of South Korea. At the same
time, it would set into play an advantage for the communist leadership who
would unify everything in a very short time. As a result, prominent
figures in the Privy Government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the Front
for the Liberation of South Vietnam were one by one subtracted from the list of
members of the Party leadership and the administration. Among them were Truong
Nhu Tang, Nguyen Van Hieu, Nguyen Van Kiet, Luu Huu Phuoc, Tran Bach Dang, and
others
The burning
failure of the “Nortenernization of the South” brought along with it silent and
persistent growing dissidence. After a time of long brooding, this opposition
was expressed in 1988 with the project of creation of a Southern club of
veteran resistant’s who then came to publish without authorization four
journals whose contents of opposition was marked with a radical tone. Three
great revolutionaries of the South, Tran Van Giau, one of the founders of the
Party in the 1920’s, Tran Van Tra, the general who conceived the plan of the
victorious offensive of 1975, and Tran Bach Dang, a former well-known
high-ranking cadre responsible for clandestine operations in Saigon. The club
was animated an equipped with other
veteran eminent figures, notably the former leader of the unions, Nguyen Ho,
the former cadre responsible for the information and propaganda activities in
Saigon, Ta Ba Tong, and the director of television, Huynh Van Tieng. The
argument found a very large echo in the peasantry that the southern leaders had
already placed in a more liberal frame than they had for the cooperatives.
Apprehended by the events that raged in East Europe in 1989, the central
direction sought to divide and recuperate the movement as early as the first
semester of 1990. Ta Ba Tong was convoked from duty to live under surveillance
in a villa. Nguyen Ho left for refuge beside the provincial authorities of Song
Be who protected him.
The crisis
seemed to febrifuge. When General Tran Van Tra came on a visit to New York in
1990 to participate in a conference organized by the University of Columbia, he
stressed there are divergences in opinions on the concepts of military strategy
between the Vietnamese and Beijing. In an interview with a daily of the refugees
of South Vietnam “Ngay Nay”
(Today) published in Houston, Texas, when asked on the literature of opposition
that had propagated in the country for many years, he declared that the Party was
in favor of it because it allowed opposition to exist, taking the pulse of
public opinion and disclosing in time the errors to correct them.When coming to
attend the congress of the French Communist Party in Paris a month later, Nguyen
Thanh Binh, the Vietnamese delegate, refused to contact with the press. A firm believer
in orthodox Marxism and Confucianism as well, he was content to call himself a
member of the pro-communist Vietnamese elite in France by blaming Tran Van Tra
for ignorance about the situation and lack “filial piety” towards the Party. (Georges Duhamel, Ibid)
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