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On July 20, 1954, the
unforgettable date to the Vietnamese of both sides, the Geneva Peace Talk came
to the final hour and the Cease-Fire agreement was signed. According to the
agreement, the Ben Hai River at the 17th North Parallel would divide Vietnam
into two parts. The North would be under the Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime;
the South would be under a Western-supported government. People have the right
to live in one of the two parts.
Last week, the Communist regime in Vietnam
celebrated the anniversary with ceremonies and conferences around topics about
its victory at the 1954 Geneva peace talks. The Vietnamese overseas community
celebrated the same anniversary but with different points of view.
State-controlled publications and broadcast from Vietnam dare not relate the
least historical facts and undeniable realities that prompt unfavorable feeling
towards the communist regime.
The Communist media does not fully describe the
whole image of Vietnam at the time and how the agreement has brought in
important changes. These changes strengthened roots of the internal conflict
and profoundly affected the war that followed (1959-1975). To fully understand
the Vietnam War, one should have acquired a wide range of knowledge about
military situation and political atmosphere in Vietnam at least since 1945.
Here are some examples.
The nationalist-Communist conflict was simmering
long before 1945 at low intensity. It became an overt feud more and more bloody
since the Communist leaders turned to terrorism as principal means to cleanse
their opponents (non-Communist party
leaders, local and central figures) from the political arena.
After 6 years of fighting hard, the Resistance
War against the French aggressors’ army since December 1946 came to a sharp
turn in 1950-51 when Ho Chi Minh regime turned completely to the Communist
bloc, Chinese Communists in particular. New policies openly following Communist
doctrines from Lenin, Stalin and Mao to the letter emerged in indoctrination
courses. Ho’s Workers’ Party banned most of art and literature works composed
before 1951 anywhere in Vietnam, labeling them “bourgeoisie” remnants. There
were radical changes in many sectors including education and ethical teaching.
All was reshaped after the Chinese molds.
Elementary students in the Resistance areas were
to learn group dancing with music in Chinese style and tone. At the same time,
the “purging” campaign in the Resistance army eliminated from the force most of
brave and talented commanders whose had been from the “landlord” and other
“reactionary” origins. The year 1951
saw a great number of patriots of all walks of life fled the Viet Minh areas
for the French controlled cities and towns.
The Land Reform Campaign launched in 1953 as an
experimental phase in a limited area was horrible enough to many people. It
sped up the flow of non-Communist patriots into the nationalists’ controlled
land, and thus it frightened many more people away to the South.
Among the flow of common people and intellects,
specialists, there were many young military officers who had been brave
warriors fighting against the French for the national independence. The young
patriots then found their way to the newly established National Army under Bao
Dai, the last king of the Nguyen dynasty. Though French government supported
that army, the young patriots felt it safe to fight beside the old foreign
enemy, the French soldiers, against their new foes, the Communists.
According to many Vietnamese patriots, if the
Ho’s regime had not imposed such policies on the Vietnamese people, the final
victory could have been achieved before July 1954 and Vietnam could have not
been divided. Furthermore, the refugee movement depleted the population of
skilled technicians, experts and intellects from Hanoi and other North Vietnam
provinces. More than 90 percent of doctors, engineers and high-ranking
technologists left for the South.
The 1954
Geneva Agreement made a good opportunity to the non-Communist patriots to have
a side to stand, a separate land to live in a true democracy as they had been
aspiring for. Since 1945, independence and freedom were the noble causes that
encouraged them to fight the French colonialists. But it had been the Communist
Party’s atrocity on its would-be dissidents that drove them to the nationalist
side.
After July 20, 1954, the North Vietnamese
welcomed the news about the ceasefire at almost the same time with an
announcement from the nationalist government concerning free migration to the
South.
The migration plan assisted by the USA and its
allies helped nearly 950,000 ethnic North Vietnamese Communist refugees move to
the territories South of the 17th Parallel. Many nationalists who
found their way fleeing the Viet Minh control to join the flow of refugees
moving to the South later became high ranking government officials and armed
forces officers in South Vietnam. (There were about 100,000 Vietnamese in the
South who were Viet Minh soldiers and civilians moved to the North on ships
provided by Poland). The Hochiminh regime imposed every suppresive meaure it
saw necessary however bloody it might be, to stop the waves of refugees from
areas far away from Hanoi, deep in the Communist controlled regions. Most of
the crackdowns failed while refugees suffered lot of blood.
When Ngo Dinh Diem became prime minister then
president after the referendum one year later, he got strong support from
people who moved south from the North (although years later many of them went
against him because of his despotic ruling).
The generous aids of the United States without
colonialist motivation and the American Spirit of 1776 had attracted many
nationalist patriots to leave for South Vietnam to build a democratic
independent state in the South. They were eager to support a new regime with
all their hearts and minds.
That greatest mass of political refugees in the
Vietnam history is one of the undeniable facts that prove the cause of
anti-Communism in Vietnam. Unfortunately, by one reason or another, the mass
media and the academic circle in the USA seemed to ignore them, or to belittle
their role in the 1959-75 War and the endless existence of the Vietnamese
anti-Communism.
The North Vietnamese refugees resettled in South
Vietnam have contributed their great part in the achievements of considerable
success in culture, arts, education, moral, business management, military art,
science and technology, academic research and studies. The refugees also
blended themselves and their characters with the local people, so they have
leveled off differences between the two regions that had been created naturally
by lack of communications and intentionally by the French colonialists.
The appearance of South Vietnam, in Saigon
particularly, has changed significantly since the refugees were integrated into
the South Vietnamese society. People from the two origins with hand in hand,
were producing changes to the better in every fields of the South Vietnam
society. The changes could be observed in small businesses managing, style of
writing in books, magazines and newspapers, foods and recipes, gastronomy,
working attitudes, fashion styles, religious practices. That helped South
Vietnam place itself ahead of many Asian countries in technology and even in
many economic fields despite the destructible war, except for Japan, Taiwan and
Mainland China, in certain domains.
As politics and war matters are concerned, many
people assert that without the refugees in 1954-55, South Vietnam had been lost
to the hands of the Communist leaders at least 5 to 10 years earlier. In such
case, the “Public Motivating Campaign” (rhetoric of the Land Reform) could have
decimated the South Vietnamese middle class, landlords and former Saigon
government and military servicemen to the number of no less than six digits. At the time, Communist leaders Hanoi in was
very faithful to its Mao’s teaching, were determining that “On any land that
the Revolution has just liberated, there must be Public Motivation.”
In North Vietnam, the campaign massacred several
thousands landlords and “reactionaries” in 1955 and 1956. The smallest figure
is 15 thousand victims (President Nixon’s speech, 1972. Other authors estimated
as high as 80 to 100 thousand victims killed by “People’s Courts.”)
In such terrible Fear Machines hanging over the North Vietenamese population, who dared accept a general election in the two Vietnams in 1957 as stipulated by the Agreement?
Still many Vietnamese believe that if the Agreement had been in effect and the two
sides had lived in true peace with each other, South Vietnam would have
certainly been leading the Southeast Asian nations in economic development into the 21st Century. It was
rather well developed second to no one in the South Asian region in the early
1970s despite the brutaly destructive war. If
living in such peace for the
last 50 years, the North would have developed, probably not as fast as the
South, but not too far behind most of the Southeast Asian nations as today.
If there had not been 950,000 refugees in 1954,
there wouldn’t have been waves and waves of a million-plus Vietnamese refugees
fleeing the country for the land of the free half way around the world in two
to three decades later, after 1975. The second flow of refugees, to Western
countries as far as half the globe, is the largest in the world history. This fogure does not include an estimate of
100,000 refugees who lost their lives on high sea and in wild jungle on their
way to the free world.
The facts should be well learned by ones who are
advocating the current Communist regime without a shortest question on how does
it has been treating its people. We all know that giving assistances to a
people is different from propping up a dictatorship that has purged millions of
its people and pushed more than two million refugees out of Vietnam since 1975.
Those dictators are calling dissenting people for what they called “great
unity” and “forgetting the past for reconciliation” but they have never moved
their hands a millimeter towards such noble rhetoric.
In fact, the 1954 Geneva Agreement has actually
created two nations from the territory and people of the same origin. The South
Vietnam nation has built its own identity and constructed its own style of a
free society whose specific values couldn’t be mistaken. Though that nation is
annexed to the other, it still exists in the world history as a symbol of the
Right defeated by the Wrong.
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