Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [343]
In the long term, the Geneva Accords served to cause a deep polarization within the country and to widen the conflict into an ideological battle between the superpowers, fought out on Vietnamese soil. The immediate consequence, however, was a massive exodus from the north during the stipulated 300-day period of “free movement”. Almost a million (mostly Catholic) refugees headed south, their flight aided by the US Navy, and to some extent engineered by the CIA, whose distribution of scaremongering, anti-Communist leaflets was designed to create a base of support for the puppet government it was concocting in Saigon. Approaching a hundred thousand anti-French guerrillas and sympathizers moved in the opposite direction to regroup, though, as a precautionary measure, between five and ten thousand Viet Minh cadres remained in the south, awaiting orders from Hanoi. These dormant operatives, known to the CIA as “stay-behinds” and to the Communists as “winter cadres”, were joined by spies who infiltrated the Catholic move south. In line with the terms of the ceasefire, Ho Chi Minh’s army marched into Hanoi on October 9, 1954, even as the last French forces were still trooping out.
The Geneva Accords were still being thrashed out as Emperor Bao Dai named himself president and Ngo Dinh Diem (“Zee-em”) prime minister of South Vietnam, on July 7. A Catholic, and vehemently anti-Communist, Diem knew that Ho Chi Minh would win the lion’s share of votes in the proposed elections, and therefore steadfastly refused to countenance them. His mandate “strengthened” by an October 1955 referendum (the prime minister’s garnering of 98.2 percent of votes cast was more indicative of the blatancy of his vote-rigging than of any popular support), Diem promptly ousted Bao Dai from the chain of command, and declared himself president of the Republic of Vietnam.
Diem’s heavy-handed approach to Viet Minh dissidents still in the South was hopelessly misguided: although the subsequent witch-hunt decimated Viet Minh numbers, the brutal and indiscriminate nature of the operation caused widespread discontent – all dissenters were targeted, Viet Minh, Communist or otherwise. As the supposed “free world democracy” of the South mutated into a police state, over fifty thousand citizens died in Diem’s pogrom.
History |
Back in Hanoi…
In Hanoi, meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh’s government was finding it had problems of its own as, aided by droves of Chinese advisers, it set about constructing a socialist society. Years of warring with France had profoundly damaged the country’s infrastructure, and now it found itself deprived of the South’s plentiful rice stocks. Worse still, the land reforms of the mid-1950s, vaunted as a Robin Hood-style redistribution of land, saw thousands of innocents “tried” as landlords by ad hoc People’s Agricultural Reform Tribunals, tortured and then executed or set to work in labour camps. “Reactionaries” were also denounced and punished, often for such imperialist “crimes” as possessing works of the great French poets and novelists. The Rectification of Errors Campaign of 1956 at least released many victims of the reforms from imprisonment, but as Ho Chi Minh himself said, “one cannot wake the dead”.
With Hanoi so preoccupied with getting its own house in order, Viet Minh guerrillas south of the Seventeenth Parallel were for several years left to fend for themselves. For the most part, they sat tight in the face of Diem’s reprisals, although