South Viet Nam: Anarchy & Agony

The Catholic youth was led by his Buddhist captors through Saigon’s wide, tamarind shaded streets, past truckloads of police who did nothing to save him, toward the central market. There, a Buddhist mob howled andrushed the prisoner. A ten-year-old boy plunged a dagger into his thigh: the victim tried to flee but was stopped beore he went 20 steps. A bicycle wasthrown on top of him, and the mob jumped up and down on it. Finally, theCatholic struggled up, dragging a broken leg behind him, but was cut down again and killed by flailing clubs.

The scene typified the nightmare that was South Viet Nam’s capital lastweek. A year ago, its streets seethed with Buddhists crying persecution at the hands of Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem. Now it was clearer than ever that Diem’s overthrow had by itself brought little tolerance to the country. In an agonizing week of near-anarchy, Buddhists, Catholics and students went on a rampage that resulted in 30 dead, hundreds injured. Saigon’s fourth government in ten months collapsed. For the U.S., it was perhaps the most critical setback to date in the weary effort to help win the war against the Communist Viet Cong.

At a Signal. Chief political victim was goateed little General Nguyen Khanh, who during seven months in power had striven vainly to unite his people in the antiguerrilla struggle. When the U.S. last month hit North Viet Nam inretaliation for the naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Khanh used the situation to impose martial law, hoping to strengthen his regime. Thentwo weeks ago, he tried further to consolidate his position and persuaded his Military Revolutionary Council, the country’s nominal ruling body, to promote him from Premier to President and grant him virtually absolutepowers. Khanh acted with the knowledge and at least qualified approval of U.S. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor. But Khanh simply could not make his new authority stick. As if at a signal, South Viet Nam’s petty, selfish political and religious factions cut loose, not really giving a hoot about the war, hating oneanother more than the Viet Cong, and using Khanh’s power play as an excuse to move on one another.

The pawns of all these groups were the students, who poured into the streets denouncing dictatorship and demanding democracy, heedless of the fact that Viet Nam is in the midst of a bitter war, and that even history’s most advanced countries have usually found it necessary to suspend democracy in wartime. Furthermore, many students feared that Khanh, with complete power, mightend their traditional draft exemptions. Communist agents were plainly instigating and exploiting the situation. Some of the mobs moved in military formations, signaling one another by blowing whistles and beating drums.

Pogrom by the Sea. The Buddhists started yelling that the new government setup denied them sufficient authority, particularly since their man, General Duong Van (“Big”) Minh, had been ousted as nominal chief of state. Although they had little cause for complaint under Buddhist Khanh’s rule, the monks now claimed that too many of Diem’s old followers remained in the government. Busily stirring up ancient hatreds between the two faiths was Thich Tri Quang, the monk who enjoyed refuge in the United States embassy last year—an ambitious, probably neutralist and possibly pro-Communist intriguer.

The Catholics, in turn, were up in arms for fear that too much power might now be grabbed by the Buddhists, whom they consider unwilling or incapable of waging a successful war against the Reds.

In coastal Danang, 380 miles north of Saigon, an “executive committee” of 15 Buddhists arrived by bus from the militantly Buddhist city of Hue. What followed was an anti-Catholic pogrom. A mob invaded a fishing village housing 4,000 Catholic refugees from Communist North Viet Nam and, as the residents fled in boats, burned 90% of their homes. The government was either unwilling or unable to stop the riots. Beyond detaining 40 looters, Vietnamese troops in Danang merely watched the proceedings. Their Buddhist commander, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, appeared once, drew cheers from the rioters, retired after inspecting the ruins. Mobs broke into a church and smashed a statue of the Virgin. Roving bands looted everything, including stocks of vitamin pills. When prostitutes in a second-story window heckled the rioters, they burst in, pitched one girl from the window, killing her. Another gang stormed a hospital, dragged out a Catholic patient and speared him to death. Three Catholics were lynched, one hanged from a tree with barbed wire. Some Catholics retaliated by throwing grenades.

The Cave-In. In Saigon, the disorders grew. Catholic students set fire to the building of the predominantly Buddhist National Students’ Union, whose members, for their part, sacked the budget department of the Information Ministry —only to apologize, explaining that they had meant to destroy the department of censorship. On the third day, 2,000 students staged a sitdown in front of Khanh’s office, while agitators squatting among them denounced him as “too tricky.” Finally Khanh decided to resign as President, and the 62-member Military Council announced that it would “select a new national leader.” With the U.S. continuing to announce its strong support of Khanh, it seemed possible that he might hang on under some new setup.

As deliberations went on in the yellow stucco Joint General Staff GHQ, a loudspeaker Jeep appeared at Buddhist headquarters, warned of imminent Catholic reprisals; that night the Jeep toured Catholic quarters, warned of Buddhist hordes. No one bothered to get the rumormongers’ names, but both sides took the alarms seriously.

An Affair of State. Next morning, thousands of Catholics from a village outside Saigon moved on the capital in an armada of three-wheeled Lambrettas, wielding clubs, machetes and pistols. At the outskirts, the hymn-singing men, women and children in conical straw hats picked up prepared banners proclaiming “Down with Neutralism.” One group surrounded a Buddhist technical school, clashed savagely in monsoon rains with Buddhist boys in blue school uniforms. The parading Catholics reconverged on the military GHQ, shouted for Khanh to remain in power.

Suddenly a shot cracked out. The Catholics insisted that it was fired by an army colonel, others thought it came from the crowd, possibly from a Red agent. In any case, panicky guards loosed a 60-second fusillade that killed six in the throng, wounded twelve. In the stunned aftermath, the mob picked up a dead 17-year-old boy, laid him along a barbed-wire fence. His mother pushed his tongue back into his mouth and closed his eyes; others draped a crucifix around his neck and a Vietnamese flag over his body. Khanh emerged expressing sorrow, and pleaded, “Please go back to your homes. This is an affair of state.”

Jerry-Built Compromise. The generals meanwhile arrived at a jerry-built compromise: a triumvirate composed of Khanh, Big Minh and Defense Minister General Tran Thien Khiem should run the country for two months. Big Minh was included to placate the Buddhists, Khiem to please certain army factions. A bespectacled, tight-lipped cold fish, who served Diem as a division commander in the embattled south, Khiem, 39, was among the generals who turned against Diem. Last January, as commander of troops surrounding Saigon, Khiem made possible Khanh’s coup, but has since become his foremost challenger.

Named “The National Provisional Steering Committee,” the trio was charged with calling a national convention that would be “entrusted with the task of electing a provisional leader for the nation.” As for the junta, it announced modestly: “The armed forces will return to their purely military mission of protecting the nation and fighting Communism, neutralism, colonialism and all forms of dictatorship and betrayal.”

The council added that it would later replace itself with a “Committee of Unification” made up of the three generals and representatives of the Buddhists, Catholics, and possibly of the students. Despite an appeal by the triumvirate “to love one another,” Vietnamese continued to roam the wreckage-littered streets, setting upon one another with bricks, bamboo rods, lead pipes, meat cleavers, nail-studded clubs, chains, truncheons, Molotov cocktails. The companions of one dead Buddhist dipped their hands in his blood, smeared it on their faces as war paint. A Catholic youth lay in a first-aid room, a hatchet protruding from his head.

Jack in the Box. Khanh and other army commanders had hesitated until the last moment to use force to quell the riots since they wanted to avoid making martyrs. Late in the week, faced with a real chance that Communist-led mobs might take over Saigon, the government finally rushed in paratroopers, who cleared the streets at bayonet point. Buddhist and Catholic leaders issued statements disclaiming responsibility for any further riots. About all Washington spokesmen could do was to assure everyone again that “there is absolutely no chance that we will pull out of Viet Nam.”

At week’s end, out of the chaos in Saigon emerged still another leader fig ure of sorts: Dr. Nguyen Xuan Oanh. 43, who was Khanh’s Vice-Premier for Finance. Oanh (pronounced Juan) announced that he had been appointed “Acting Premier” by the 60-day caretaker regime. A Harvard-trained Ph.D. in economics, who was out of Viet Nam for 16 years prior to Diem’s fall, Oanh taught economics at Connecticut’s Trinity College for five years, later worked for the U.N.’s International Monetary Fund. He is an amateur artist, is so Americanized that he is known affectionately in Saigon’s U.S. colony as “Jack Owen,” after his last two names. Vietnamese insist that Oanh carries a U.S. passport, something on which the State Department cautiously refuses to comment.

“Jack Owen” had evidently been thrown into the box after all the other contenders had bogged down in deadlock, and it would be a miracle if he completed his short term. Asked what had happened to Khanh, Oanh explained that his ex-boss was still technically Premier but unfortunately “unwell,” perhaps “mentally” from the long strain, and had repaired to the mountain resort of Dalat, South Viet Nam’s traditional resting place for politically afflicted generals. Khanh had kept four untrusted officers there himself for seven months. Oanh allowed as how it might be a lengthy illness. “I would say he will need quite a long period of medical treatment.”

U.S. officials in Saigon and Washington claimed that Khanh was only ducking out of the fray to let things cool off, could well re-emerge in a dominant role. After maintaining official silence all week, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said he did not know when Khanh would return to duty, he added that, in his view, Oanh’s appointment “does not represent a major change in the Viet Nam government.”

But what government?