South Viet Nam: The Crackdown

Over and over, the desperate voice shouted into the telephone: “They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda. They are breaking into Xa Loi Pagoda.” In the background, gunfire mingled with the confused screams of Buddhist monks and nuns and the clanging alarm of the huge brass gong that hangs in the bell tower of Saigon’s largest pagoda. Suddenly the phone connection from the temple went dead.

It was 12:20 a.m. Using their rifle butts as clubs, squads of tough, riot-trained “special forces” smashed into the pagoda, battering a path through a small guard of young Buddhist monks. The troopers had a list, and each monk on the list was considered to be a “Communist in disguise.” On the temple’s second floor, one monk tried to resist and was thrown bodily from a balcony to the courtyard 20 ft. below. Other monks and nuns were routed from behind a flimsy barricade of wooden benches and forced outside by tear gas and gunshots.

Sacking the pagoda’s main altar, the raiders carted away the charred heart of Buddhist Martyr Thich Quang Due, who last June was the first of five Buddhists to burn himself to death in pro test against the Diem government’s anti-Buddhist drive. But the Buddhists managed to spirit out of the building the receptacle holding Quang Due’s ashes. “The ashes are holy,” said one monk. “We would give 15 lives to defend them.” Two other monks escaped over the back wall of Xa Loi (pronounced sah loy) into the grounds of the adjoining U.S. Aid Mission, where they were given temporary sanctuary.

To the Diem government, the crackdown obviously seemed necessary to protect the regime—and enforce the law of the land—against Buddhist defiance. But it was brutal, nonetheless, and it aroused a strong new wave of sympathy for the Buddhists. It also put U.S. policy in South Viet Nam, which involves the lives and safety of 14,000 U.S. troops, into an agonizing dilemma. While often unhappy with Diem, the U.S. has proceeded on the assumption that it was safer to stick with him than risk the chaos that might surround a switch to a new, unknown and unpredictable regime. But by his move against the Buddhist monks, who have the growing support of the country’s vast Buddhist majority, Roman Catholic Diem may finally have shattered his own political usefulness. He also opened up the possibilities of coups, countercoups, and even civil war—from all of which only the Communist Viet Cong could benefit.

Boola, Boola. Until last week, prodded by the U.S., Diem had displayed an apparent willingness to conciliate the Buddhists. Feeling betrayed by Diem’s crackdown, one ranking U.S. embassy officer said: “All the time they’ve been preaching conciliation to us, they’ve evidently been planning just the opposite.” The Buddhist crisis had begun as a religious one, but gradually turned into a major political conflict. The Buddhists are far from passive martyrs. Their religious and social demands—a fairly modest package demanding full equality with the country’s Roman Catholics—had never sounded crucial, especially since even Diem’s worst enemies could not point to any real anti-Buddhist discrimination or persecution. But when government troops stupidly killed nine Buddhists in a demonstration in Hué (pronounced whey) four months ago, the Buddhists made the clearly political demand that the government accept “responsibility” for the incident. Since then, the Buddhists have developed into a serious opposition movement.

Pagodas, sporting protest signs in Vietnamese and English, became command posts where duplicating machines ground out hundreds of thousands of messages, and the sound of typewriters and telephones blended with the boom of temple gongs. Appeals for aid were broadcast to President Kennedy, Pope Paul VI, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant. At a grisly, well-organized press conference in Saigon, Buddhist leaders introduced a tiny, withered Buddhist nun as a candidate for self-immolation in protest against the Diem government. When one Buddhist spokesman who had studied at Yale wanted to pass out the latest communiqués from the pagoda, he would stroll up to a Yale-educated U.S. newsman and say: “Boola, boola.”

In the early phases of the quarrel, Diem probably could and should have conciliated the Buddhists. But he vacillated. His brother and sister-in-law, Ngo Dinh Nhu and Mme. Nhu, insisted that unless the Buddhists were crushed, there would be a coup threatening the very existence of the family’s rule. Mme. Nhu’s fiery philippics lent impetus to the Buddhist movement just as it appeared to be flagging. By last week, after three Buddhist suicides spurred new protest demonstrations throughout the country, it was clearly too late for conciliation. Even if Diem had wanted it, the Buddhist leaders themselves no longer wanted it; they were plainly determined to press their advantage. And so the government evidently yielded to Nhu’s get-tough policy.

Rope Trick. The crackdown in Saigon was duplicated all over South Viet Nam, and more than 1,000 people were imprisoned. In the Buddhist stronghold of Hué, the approach of government troops was signaled by the beating of temple drums and the clashing of cymbals calling for help. Beating pots and pans to rouse their neighbors, the angry populace poured from homes and raced to defend the city’s temples. At Tu Dam Pagoda, monks tried to burn the coffin of a priest who had burned himself alive in the Buddhist suicide protest wave. But government soldiers, firing M1 rifles as they advanced, overran the temple, snatched the smoldering coffin away, and smashed a statue of Gautama Buddha. From the temple’s treasury they took an estimated $30,000 and left the pagoda a gutted ruin.

Near Hué’s Dieu De Pagoda, the government forces met their first determined resistance. As troops tried to stretch a barbed-wire barricade across the bridge leading to the temple, a mob tore it down with bare hands. With fists, rocks and sharpened sticks, the crowd fought the heavily armed troops for the bridge. Tear-gas grenades thrown by the soldiers were caught and thrown right back at them. When troops tried to clear a way through the bridge defenders with their rifle butts, the crowd tore the weapons from their hands and jabbed the soldiers in the groin.

After a five-hour pitched battle, the government finally won control of the bridge at daybreak by driving armored cars through the screaming, spitting, swearing mob. The defense of the bridge and the temple cost the townspeople an estimated 30 dead and 200 wounded. Ten truckloads of bridge defenders were carted away to jail, many streaming blood, and an estimated 500 people were arrested throughout the city, including 17 of the 47 Hué University professors who had resigned earlier in the week in protest against the firing of the school’s rector, a Catholic priest and an opponent of Diem’s brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc.

Though a 24-hour curfew was clamped on Hué, the city’s residents were still defiant. One Buddhist monk fled through the streets hotly pursued by three government troopers. The priest raced down an alley at whose entrance sat an aged Vietnamese woman. As the soldiers turned into the alley, the woman pulled tightly on a rope stretched across the street, bringing all three soldiers tumbling down. Then she scuttled away to safety.

Article 44. At 6 a.m., Radio Saigon crackled to life and President Diem came on the air. “Under Article 44 of the constitution,” he said, “I declare a state of siege throughout the national territory. I confer upon the army of the Republic of Viet Nam the responsibility to restore security and public order so that the state may be protected, Communism defeated, freedom secured, and democracy achieved.” Under the martial law proclamation, the army was given blanket search-and-arrest powers and empowered to forbid all public gatherings, restrict press freedom, and prohibit the circulation of all “printed material and other documents harmful to public order and security.”

In Saigon the army imposed a tight 9 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew. Carrying automatic weapons and rifles with fixed bayonets, troops in full camouflage battle dress guarded every major bridge and intersection. Tight censorship was clamped on all outgoing news, and reporters were forced to give their stories to travelers flying to neighboring countries—or to fly out themselves with their copy. Telephone service in the homes and offices of all U.S. military and embassy personnel was cut off.

The political repercussions began at once. Protesting the government’s action, Foreign Minister Vu Van Mau quit his post, shaved his head and announced that he would go to India to become a contemplative Buddhist monk. South Viet Nam’s Ambassador to Washington, Tran Van Chuong, who is Mme. Nhu’s father, also quit, with a sharp denunciation of his daughter’s policies and of the Diem government for “copying the tactics of totalitarian regimes.” As long as Diem stays in power, he added, there is “not one chance of winning the war against the Communists.”

In Saigon more than 500 University of Saigon medical students boycotted classes and held turbulent anti-government meetings. When a professor tried to rip down a pro-Buddhist poster, he was stoned by students. Throughout the city, martial law posters were surreptitiously defaced or torn away. Students jeered at soldiers patrolling the streets: “Why don’t you go back to fighting the Viet Cong?” The government retaliated against student unrest by closing all Saigon’s schools.

The Ugly American. The crackdown in South Viet Nam caused consternation in Washington. In a blunt condemnation the State Department said that Saigon’s strong-arm tactics represented “a direct violation by the Vietnamese government of assurances that it was pursuing a policy of reconciliation toward the Buddhists. The U.S. deplores repressive actions of this nature.”

The move against the Buddhists was obviously timed to be over and done with before U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon. When it happened, Lodge was in Japan. On the way out from San Francisco by commercial jet, he had found himself across the aisle from Novelist Eugene Burdick, co-author of The Ugly American, and that self-appointed expert on U.S. errors in the Far East offered the ambassador a half-hour briefing, to which Lodge listened diplomatically. The gist: don’t rely on embassy officers, consult seasoned newsmen, beware of communications blocks in the embassy, get fighter cover for those combat helicopters.

On orders from President Kennedy, Lodge cut short his stay in Japan, and by hastily commandeered U.S. Air Force DC-6 proceeded at once to Saigon, where he was met by a Vietnamese protocol officer, embassy officials and General Paul Harkins, commander of the U.S. troops in South Viet Nam. As if to dramatize U.S. disapproval of the government action, Lodge went to the U.S. Aid Mission building to talk to the two monks who had been given sanctuary. Ignoring demands that the monks be turned over to Vietnamese authorities, Lodge ordered the U.S. staff to get some vegetables for the vegetarian priests.

Anti, Anti, Anti. What to do next was a question thickly clouded for both Lodge and Washington by confusion over precisely who was in control of the situation in South Viet Nam.

Diem still seemed in complete charge and in a cable to the New York Herald Tribune’s Marguerite Higgins he declared, “I trust in the army and in fact I maintain control over the situation.” But it looked increasingly likely that the key figure behind the government’s move had been Brother Nhu, head of the 10,000-strong special forces and secret police. For weeks there had been hints that he might try a coup of his own—supposedly to forestall the anti-Diem coup that he kept predicting unless the Buddhists were put down. Any change in government policy, he had warned, would be “anti-Buddhist, anti-American, anti-weakness.”

It was Nhu’s special forces that sacked the pagodas; regular army troops were only called in after the job was done to help keep order. Theoretically, under the martial law proclamation, it is now the army that runs the country, and, again theoretically, Diem placed top authority in Major General Tran Van Don, 46, a highly respected, onetime corps commander who has had great military success against the Viet Cong. But Don may merely be a figurehead. Hostile to the government, he was pulled out of his field command last December and kicked upstairs to a staff job, where he would have no troops at his disposal in case the thought of a coup ever crossed his mind.

Diem and Nhu evidently intended to vest real military power in another, very different officer, whose loyalty the Ngo family can count on, Colonel Le Quang Tung, commander under Nhu of the special forces. A devout Catholic, Tung comes from central Viet Nam, birthplace of the Ngo family, apparently has no political ambitions, and was once a top official in Nhu’s secret organization, the Can Lao Party. As long as a month ago, large units of special forces were moved into Saigon under Colonel Tung’s command. The big question is whether Tung can keep control and whether the regular army will go along —or will turn against the regime.

The Course of Events. After nine years of absolute power, the Ngo family had taken a considerable risk in letting so much authority slip from its hands under the martial law proclamation. Taking over the functioning of all government ministries, the army for the first time has a viable power structure of its own. It may well stay loyal as long as Diem remains in the presidential palace, but Nhu is vastly unpopular with most of the military commanders except Tung. The army immediately tried to dissociate itself from the Buddhist crackdown. All official bulletins from the army-controlled government information center pointedly mentioned that Nhu’s special forces, and not the army, had wrecked the pagodas.

But having discovered that an opportunity for power now exists outside the Ngo family, various military factions may well begin to jockey for sole authority. At week’s end, according to one report, this fear was realized at the small town of My Tho, just south of Saigon, where Buddhist and Catholic troops turned on each other.

In the field, action against the Viet Cong has come to a virtual standstill. “This wrecks the Army’s efforts against the Reds,” said a senior U.S. intelligence officer. “They’re too busy enforcing curfews to fight. How the Reds must be loving this.” More than ever, Diem’s government—or any other in South Viet Nam—depends on U.S. backing. Yet even if Washington should officially decide that Diem has become a liability in the fight against the Viet Cong, the U.S. will not support a change in government while the powers in Saigon are still settling accounts among themselves. Said one Washington official: “When the rumbling of opposition starts within a regime of this sort, you can’t tell where events are going to take it.”