VIET NAM: The Lesson of Seven Nails

The Viet Minh propaganda line on the 800,000 Vietnamese who have fled to the south is that they were forced by their priests to leave, and are now anxious to return. In Hanoi, the Communists faked hundreds of complaints from refugee families and sent them to the International Control Commission, to divert the commission from complaints of Viet Minh infractions in the north. Last week, in two white jeeps and a black Citroën, a team of truce officers (an Indian, a Canadian and two Communist Poles) drove into a large Roman Catholic refugee settlement at Lacan, about 30 miles northeast of Saigon. “Do you want to go back to the north?” the officers asked a crowd of the refugees. “Khong, khong!” (No, no), the refugees responded. Twelve times the commission’s officers repeated their question, and twelve times got the same answer.

Some refugees grabbed axes and knives and tried to attack the few Viet Minh observers on duty with the commission. Women hurled rotten eggs. One Vietnamese kid seized a Viet Minh officer’s hat and ripped off the yellow-starred badge. The embarrassed Communists soon learned why nobody among the 15,000 refugees asked to be returned: the Communists had once captured one of their priests and in a public execution had driven seven long nails into his head.