Introduction

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-16192-4 — Saigon at War Heather Stur Excerpt More Information Introduction It was a tense week in Saigon in October 1974, when a South Vietnamese university student slipped into the office of the city’s archbishop to deliver a letter addressed to North Vietnamese youth. Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh was headed to the Vatican for an international meeting of Catholic leaders, and he promised the student he would hand the letter off to his Hanoi counterpart when he saw him at the conference. The letter implored North Vietnamese students to join southern youth in demanding an end to the fighting that the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement was supposed to have halted. Both the archbishop and the student risked arrest for circulating the letter. Authorities had raided the offices and shut down the operations of four newspapers that had published it. That the leader of South Vietnam’s Catholics would be involved in clandestine communication between North and South Vietnamese students would have been surprising in the early 1960s, but by the mid-seventies, many Vietnamese Catholics had grown weary enough of the war that they saw peace and reconciliation, even if under Hanoi’s control, as the better alternative to endless violence.1 Within days of the Saigon newspapers publishing the letter, splashed across the front page of the Washington Post was an Associated Press photograph of Madame Ngo Ba Thanh, a prominent anti-government activist, leading Buddhist monks and nuns in a protest against the war 1 Telegram from Secretary of State to All East Asian and Pacific Diplomatic Posts, Oct. 22, 1974, Record Group (RG) 59: General Records of the Department of State, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), accessed electronically: http://aad.archives .gov/aad/createpdf?rid=227831&dt=2474&dl=1345. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-16192-4 — Saigon at War Heather Stur Excerpt More Information 2 Saigon at War and President Nguyen Van Thieu. Staff members of one of the seized newspapers believed the Washington Post coverage of Ngo Ba Thanh’s demonstration was what had led to the government’s crackdown on the Saigon press. President Thieu had not yet figured out how to balance freedom of the press with self-preservation, and international media attention to anti-government protests only made him act more authoritarian. Meanwhile, bombs set by the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), or, as the Americans called it, the Viet Cong, destroyed two spans of bridge just northeast of Saigon, cutting off traffic to a major military installation of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force (VNAF).2 From a desk in the US Embassy in Saigon, it looked like the type of political chaos that had defined Saigon since the partition of Vietnam, if not before.3 Despite various government efforts including imprisonment and tor- ture to repress political dissidents, Saigon, the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, was a politically vibrant city with dozens of newspapers and magazines that promoted political positions ranging from support for the Saigon government to neutrality to peace at any cost. The political dynamism included shifting loyalties that made it difficult to pin a particular group to a particular cause. Unexpected alliances developed, such as that between Catholic leaders and university students. Catholics had been loyal to Ngo Dinh Diem in the 1950s and early 1960s, but by the late 1960s, some Catholics had begun to turn to liberation theology, the Catholic movement throughout Latin America that emphasized social and economic justice alongside political liberation from authoritarian regimes. Vietnamese Catholics interested in this doctrine had moved to the left and joined peace movements, arguing that peace under communism would be better than continued war. University students debated which stance to take regarding the Saigon government and the escalating war in Vietnam. Older social critics worried about the impact of Western culture on Vietnamese traditional values while a younger generation embraced American fashion and music even if they opposed US intervention in Vietnam. These groups worked sometimes in tandem and sometimes alone to assert their views of how democracy should work in Vietnam, what the Republic of Vietnam’s4 (RVN) identity was, and 2 Ibid. 3 Telegram from US Embassy Saigon to Secretary of State, Nov. 23, 1974,RG59: General Records of the Department of State, NARA, accessed electronically: http://aad.archives .gov/aad/createpdf?rid=256715&dt=2474&dl=1345. 4 Since the division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel in 1945, Americans have com- monly referred to the Republic of Vietnam as “South Vietnam” and the Democratic © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-16192-4 — Saigon at War Heather Stur Excerpt More Information Introduction 3 how it related to broader conceptions of postcolonial Vietnamese identity. They were often at odds with the national government. Saigon, and, by extension, the Republic of Vietnam, had a politically interested and engaged citizenry. Some citizens supported the National Liberation Front (NLF), the Communist movement in the South that Hanoi directed as part of North Vietnam’s war effort. It was established in 1960, and it waged political and international relations campaigns as well as fought a military war in alliance with the North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnam and its American allies.5 Others in the South were vehe- mently anticommunist. Americans frustrated South Vietnamese across the political spectrum because they seemed indecisive, skeptical of local per- spectives, and oblivious to the challenges of nation building. Students, journalists, and politicians traveled the world as diplomats and cultural ambassadors, pleading South Vietnam’s case to a dubious international audience. The government and the media worked to construct a national identity with specific roles for men, women, and youth. South Vietnam was born of war and died in war, but in its brief twenty years of life, it contained a chaotic political milieu that reflected what happened when citizens struggle to establish a nation in the midst of a war and under the burden of foreign intervention that was ambiguous in its purpose and goals. While both contemporary observers and historians and journalists looking back cast South Vietnam as a client of the United States, it actually was an example of democracy lost. The diversity of voices speaking about and acting out what a free South Vietnam might be, illustrated a more complex reality than the image of an American “puppet.” Yet it was the very performance of democracy that led to South Vietnam’s demise. Its diversity meant that there was not a unified voice to speak for South Vietnam, and both the United States and North Vietnam felt threatened by what often looked to be, and sometimes was, political chaos in South Vietnam. When, as the war carried on without a clear endgame, South Vietnamese activists began to join forces in a strong pledge toward a united Vietnam, the various power brokers who ruled the war continued fighting. Republic of Vietnam as “North Vietnam.” US policymakers often referred to the government of South Vietnam as the “GVN.” In this book, I use both the abbreviations “RVN” and “DRV,” and the names “South Vietnam” and “North Vietnam.” To refer generally to citizens of these states, I use “South Vietnamese” and “North Vietnamese.” 5 An important study of the NLF is Robert K. Brigham’s Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-16192-4 — Saigon at War Heather Stur Excerpt More Information 4 Saigon at War A major tension defined Saigon’s political scene and South Vietnam’s character more broadly. Would any head of state have been able to establish democracy when there was a movement in the country that existed for the sole purpose of destabilizing the Saigon government? The movement employed local actors for both its military and its political wars, and it cultivated sympathy, if not support, from local activists and organizations. Although the NLF was allied with the Hanoi government of North Vietnam, it looked like a southern movement, and so its leaders could claim that they were the true representatives of the southern popu- lation. The governmental dysfunction in Saigon inadvertently assisted the NLF. After the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963,a series of coups spun a revolving door that ejected and installed a series of leaders, none of whom were elected or endorsed by the people. From the perspective of Nguyen Van Thieu, the only elected president of South Vietnam since Ngo Dinh Diem, the tension was between cultivating democracy and self-preservation. Thieu and his predecessors were not popular, and the NLF made a compelling case about its right to represent the South. It resonated with those who opposed US intervention in Vietnam and with those who believed that South Vietnam was a puppet nation that would not exist if the elections written into the 1954 Geneva Accords to unite North and South Vietnam had been held. Under these conditions, was it possible to nation-build a democracy in South Vietnam? Although political action took place throughout South Vietnam, Saigon, as the capital city, was the center of the national government and, therefore, the focus of democratic activism. In 1970, two years after the Tet Offensive failed to topple the Saigon government, NLF leaders decided to try instead to instigate a mass political uprising in the city. In speeches and written communications, NLF representatives asserted Saigon’s significance.

Load more