South Viet Nam: A New Front

Sitting in a single-story, tin-roofed building on Saigon’s river front, the five-man military court took only an hour and a half to complete the trial. Its verdict: Guilty of treason, plotting and falsely espousing the cause of peace in accordance with Communist policy. With that, South Viet Nam last week sentenced to death the entire ten-mem ber leadership of the Alliance of National, Democratic and Peace Forces, a group of South Vietnamese intellectuals and professionals formed three months ago with the announced intention of bringing peace to Viet Nam through a coalition government. They were tried in absentia; all of them had slipped away during or after the Tet offensive.

The Saigon government found time for the trial even while girding for another Communist attack on the capital, thus underscoring its growing concern about the Alliance. It was formed toward the end of April in an immaculately kept old French plantation at Mimot, in the Cambodian Highlands northwest of Saigon. Within days, Liberation Radio, the voice of the Viet Cong, announced its formation, and Radio Hanoi said that Southern intellectuals, businessmen, even government officials and soldiers had met at Mimot. Congratulatory telegrams poured in from assorted Communist organizations around the world. North Vietnamese Negotiator Xuan Thuy mentioned the Alliance in the Paris talks, saying that with its formation “the front fighting the U.S. and its lackeys has broadened.” An Alliance propaganda officer set up shop in the offices of the National Liberation Front in Paris There were suggestions that the North Vietnamese might see the Alliance as a possible nucleus for a coalition government in South Viet Nam.

Overlapping Program. If the Alliance is not identical with the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong, it certainly comes close. The “Save the Country Manifesto” it issued after the Mimot meeting significantly overlaps with the N.L.F.’s long-announced 14 points in demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops and bases and the creation of an independent, neutral South Viet Nam. Still, nine of its ten leaders have never been identified as Communists or as having had close association with the Viet Cong—although all have neutralist or leftist backgrounds. Chairman Trinh Dinh Thao, 66, a Saigon lawyer and onetime partner of Nguyen Huu Tho, president of the N.L.F., was held at least once by Saigon authorities for championing peace movements unacceptable to the government; Thich Don Hau, the Alliance’s vice chairman, was a leader of militant Buddhists in Hué. The other eight are students, teachers, a journalist and a woman doctor, who is the only known Communist in the group.

Yet U.S. and Vietnamese intelligence seems to share the U.S. State Department’s assessment that the Alliance is “a creation of the N.L.F. and Hanoi.” The Viet Cong, intelligence insists, have been thinking in terms of another front —aimed in particular at the cities—for some time. A document captured last year noted that “the more allies we find, even if they are temporary and precarious, the better.” Communist or not, the Alliance could gain appeal in war-weary cities if the Communists launch another urban offensive or if President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government shows signs of cracking. Obviously, it was with that in mind that the court handed down its harsh verdict.