Before April 30, 1975, the propaganda system of the Communist regime in Ha Noi had concentrated great efforts to depreciate the non-Communist regime in South Vietnam. It tried the best to prove that everything done by the South Vietnamese government was wrong or false or corrupt.
After 22 years, the Hanoi government has done nothing better than what the South Vietnamese had in 1955 when the late President Ngo Dinh Diem came to power.
1. Though annual economic growth is reported at 8 to 9 percent during the last few years, the gap between the rich and the poor gets larger and larger. The South Vietnamese peasants' life are much worse than during the war. This year, despite the fact that rice production in the Mekong delta greatly increases, the farmers earned much less. Hanoi is selling rice at very low price for hard currency and the farmers suffered. Meanwhile, people in many mountainous areas particularly in North Vietnam are frequently facing starvation.
In 1975, South Vietnam was better than the Southeast Asian countries in every aspect though it was in war especially in freedom of speech. Now those countries are taking advantages of Hanoi's ill management to exploit cheap labor and natural resources, not much different from what the French colonialist regime had done before 1945.
2. Corruption becomes out of control and it seems that there is no way to stop it. Everyone in Vietnam admits that corruption now is at least a hundred times more than under the former Saigon government. Authorities at any branch, any level are squeezing bribes from all walks of life, businesses of all sizes, in all kinds of services. The poorest - sidewalk peddlers, cyclo drivers - are not spared. The lowest bribe is a filter cigarette, the highest is unknown, but certainly both extremes exceed those in the former regimes.
3. Education suffers a serious downgrade, both in culture and in ethics as well as knowledge in science and technology. Communist high ranking cadre Tran Bach Dang has admitted that South Vietnamese students in 1975 were much more polite than those in North Vietnam.
Social evils such as prostitution, drugs, sex related diseases, gambling, organized crimes, homicdes are rising several times higher than when America troops were still in South Vietnam.
4. The South Vietnamese regime had a relatively stable judiciary system with every efficient law and regulation for a free economy. Since April 30, 1975, the communist regime has revoked all laws in South Vietnam without replacing the new ones, because they had none. Handful of newly enacted laws and regulations since 1985 are ambiguous and can be amended overnight without notice. The more and more worsening red tape fosters corruption and hinders economic reforms and management, and foreign investment.
South Vietnam representatives in various international conferences were often elected to be chairmen or vice chairmen of the presiding panels. South Vietnam foreign ministry was also entrusted with drafting the UN convention governing the rights over the waters and continent shelves. It is impossible to say when the Hanoi government will be capable to be given some similar tasks..
5. Environment protection has been ignored or just belittled. Forests were destroyed at least 4 times (estimated in 1982) than that defoliated by American and South Vietnamese armed forces in war. Abuse of quick lime as insecticide in North Vietnam seriously reduced the population of birds and particularly fishes in most water bodies. South Vietnam suffers the same by ill planned irrigation canals.
6. Since the 1980's, Hanoi government restored almost everything that it had abolished in South Vietnam in 1975. A few examples, in education: re-establishing the school surveyors in charge of discipline and study; re-establishing the "baccalaureate part I and part II" (high school diploma part I after 11th grade and part II after 12th grade) ; restoring school uniform. However, while Hanoi is building up large national revenues, money allocated to education are below 11 percent of national budget, or around $7 per student a year.
7. Before 1975 in SVN, only the central government ran national reconstruction lottery, selling less than 700.000 tickets a week. It was attacked bitterly by Hanoi propaganda. Since 1976, dozen provinces have been running lotteries and selling several million tickets a day, each drawing prizes daily.
7. South Vietnam has many times won various Asian sports championship in tennis, table tennis, soccer. For the last. 22 years under the Hanoi regime, sports have suffered a lot. Teams and individual athletes won no prize. A German soccer coach who had been training the South Vietnamese national soccer team before 1975 returned to Vietnam a few years ago in a contract to train a national team but he resigned a few months ago because a disagreement with the communist authorities and , understandable, because of despair over the ill management and political interference.
Most of the matches in Vietnam today end up with politically pre-arranged scores.
8. If the Communist leaders in Hanoi had kept their promise of reconciliation after April 30, 1975, had had not locked up several hundred thousand former South Vietnamese officers and civil servants in concentration camps for years, their Communist regime would certainly face little opposition and would have built a prosperous Vietnam, far better than any Southeast Asian countries.
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YOUNG VIETNAMESE LIVING IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES!
You are young patriots who may think a lot about Vietnam, your mother country.
The best way you should do to help our beloved nation and people is to liberate Vietnam from the Hanoi dictators by the most peaceful way possible and conforming to the laws of the countries you are living..
Join any Vietnamese party or movement or organization that aim at democracy, freedom and human rights for Vietnam among the Vietnamese émigrés. You will be the main force unifying the Vietnamese patriots abroad in struggling for the better Vietnam.
BELIEVE IN OUR VICTORY.
Before November 1991, who could have thought that the formidable Soviet Union would collapse without shedding a drop of blood, even after the disintegration of the Eastern European Communism?
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