South Viet Nam: Challenge to SEATO

In Saigon last week, South Viet Nam’s embattled President Ngo Dinh Diem was forced to a bitter admission. In the wake of Communist assaults on fortified posts and provincial centers, Diem confessed that his government was no longer engaged in police action against the Viet Cong guerrillas, but now faced “a real war waged by an enemy who attacks us with regular units fully and heavily equipped.” The 150,000-man South Viet Nam army is spread so thin that in recent battles it has been outnumbered by the Communist foe.

At Gun Point. Last week the, Reds struck again, and in a way calculated to emphasize their defiance of world opinion. On Sunday morning, Colonel Hoang Thuy Nam, 56, set off in his chauffeur-driven Citroën to visit his small farm, some twelve miles north of Saigon. Colonel Nam is not only a soldier in South Viet Nam’s army; for the past seven years he has served as his nation’s chief liaison officer with the International Control Commission, manned by a Canadian, an Indian and a Pole. The I.C.C. is supposed to “verify” the observance of the treaty terms of the 1954 Geneva Conference, which divided up French Indo-China.

As Colonel Nam’s car left the main road and passed through a grove near his farm, it was brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of 20 armed Communist guerrillas. At gun point, the chauffeur was forced to drive back to the highway and turn off on a little-used country road. There, the guerrillas took Colonel Nam from the car and disappeared with him into the jungle. The chauffeur, together with two of the colonel’s frightened children—an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter—was sent on his way.

In Saigon, a U.S. embassy aide pointed out that “since Colonel Nam worked with the I.C.C. since its founding, this can be considered an affront to the commission itself.” One I.C.C. member confessed his “distress” over the incident, then asked plaintively: “But what can we do about it? We have no power to act in such cases.”

Under Protection. He might well have added that the I.C.C. seems unable to act in any cases whatsoever. Over the past five years, the South Viet Nam government has angrily called the I.C.C.’s attention to 700 documented items of Communist subversion and sabotage. Not one has been investigated. It is probably just as well, because, under the terms of the hastily written Geneva accord, the I.C.C. is a troika setup, with each of the three members holding a vote; it functions as a judiciary body without executive or police powers. Receiving a complaint of Red violations, the I.C.C. can only ask the government of Communist North Viet Nam if the allegation is true. When the Reds deny the charge, the matter is ended.

The only international group conveniently at hand on whom South Viet Nam can rely is the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, made up of the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan. Though neither South Viet Nam, nor neighboring Laos, nor Cambodia is a signatory of SEATO, all three countries are under the “protection” of the eight-nation alliance.

At a closed meeting in Bangkok of SEATO’s top military advisers last week, the first day’s communique announced the discussion of “plans to resist Communist aggression in the treaty area.” Thailand’s Defense Minister said he had received personal assurance from Pacific Commander in Chief Admiral Harry D. Felt that the U.S. would give Thailand full support against Communism “even if the other SEATO members did not act.” The pledge given Thailand can have no meaning, however, should the U.S. permit South Viet Nam to fall to the Communists by default or indecision.