Fire in the Lake (12 page)

Seven years later, in 1954, no one, and particularly not the French, could deny the existence of an independent nation-state in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic had all the attributes of a nation-state, including the essential one of an army capable of making it too expensive and too dangerous for the French to continue their occupation of the country. What was not so well appreciated by the Americans as by the French who had fought the war was that the new Vietnamese government had a stronger claim to legitimacy than did most governments in Southeast Asia. To win the war, Ho Chi Minh had had to enlist the active support of a great percentage of the population. By themselves the city elites could not decide the struggle for independence. Because the French undertook a large-scale military reoccupation, the Vietnamese elite depended upon the people of the countryside, upon the vast reserves of manpower that had lain untouched since the Tay Son rebellion at the end of the eighteenth century. When the French moved into Hanoi, the Viet Minh went deep into the countryside like divers, and the villages had closed over them. Attaching themselves to the “net ropes” of the peasantry, they built a clandestine political organization large and strong enough to sustain not only the guerrillas but the regular armies that fought the French on their own ground. In mobilizing the Vietnamese population to defeat a modern European army, the Viet Minh proved themselves in a test that few nationalist movements have undergone and fewer still survived.
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The French could not deny the existence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. But they could for the purposes of negotiation question how much territory it controlled. Even at the peace talks after their great victory at Dien Bien Phu, the Viet Minh did not control the cities of Vietnam or the greater proportion of the southern provinces below the 13th parallel (the region of Nha Trang).
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The effort of war had been unevenly distributed between north and south. In the north General Vo Nguyen Giap raised and trained regular divisions in the mountains to fight with the guerrilla forces attached to the villages of the Red River Delta. The French armies could choose either to fight the North Vietnamese regulars in the mountains or to garrison the populous delta, but they could not do both at once — and on that dilemma their war efforts foundered. But the Viet Minh did not so completely mobilize the south. They raised guerrilla forces adequate to harass the French garrisons, to contest their control of the population, and to draw their armies away from the north, but they did not support large units there. In part this was simply because the Mekong Delta was furthest from their supply lines into China and its flat plains offered no secure bases. In part it was because the south did not respond to them as strongly as did the north. In the Mekong Delta the guerrillas controlled only the peninsula of Ca Mau and the region surrounding the Plain of Reeds south and west of Saigon. They contested other parts of the Delta and held most of the thin backbone of central Vietnam, but they made only limited inroads into the territories controlled by the sects. Moreover, the southern Viet Minh often did not measure up in quality to their northern counterparts. Isolated within the vast horizons of the Delta, they would tend to lose contact with the central command and drift off into inaction or the banditry that characterized most of the political groups in the south — a sin known to the Communists as “mountaintopism.” Occasionally the northerners lost patience. In 1951 they executed Nguyen Binh, the chief of all the southern forces, for a series of strategic errors, including the staging of a premature uprising in Saigon.

But in 1954 it did not seem justice or indeed a reality of power that because the Viet Minh had won the war mostly in the north they would therefore have to give up the south. By 1954, after seven years of an expensive and bloody war, the French had renounced their original intention to preserve Vietnam as a part of the French empire. Their main aim at that point was to save the French Expeditionary Corps and extricate themselves from an expensive and ultimately futile conflict. Many French and American officials at the time believed that given the current military situation, any political settlement would have left Ho Chi Minh in control of the entire country.
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The French and their allies, however, persuaded the Viet Minh to negotiate the whole question of Indochina within an international conference including the great powers — France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. At this conference the whole issue of the colonial war was shifted to an entirely different stage and was settled within the context of all the other cold-war conflicts. The agreement there concluded was more favorable to France than many French officials had expected.

Convening in April 1954, the Geneva Conference in three months issued two documents bearing on Vietnam: first, an armistice, signed by the French and DRVN military representatives, that provided for an exchange of prisoners and a regroupment of both combatants to either side of a demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel. The armistice included a provision for the movement of civilian population between the zones within a three-hundred-day period and four articles that prohibited all future foreign military involvement in that country.
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The second document, the Final Declaration of that conference, repeated the strictures of the armistice and elaborated on the political and administrative arrangements to be made in Vietnam. Most significantly in view of the events to follow, it specified that the demilitarized zone should not constitute a political or territorial boundary, but merely a temporary military demarcation line. Following the period of truce, a political settlement should be made on the basis of “respect for the principles of independence, unity, and territorial integrity” of Vietnam and by means of free general elections to be held in July 1956. In neither of the two documents was there any mention of a second state in Vietnam: it was the French who were to administer their regroupment zone in the south during the period of the armistice. The Viet Minh remained somewhat dissatisfied with the postponement of the political settlement, but, exhausted by the war and under some pressure from Moscow, they finally agreed to sign the declaration. In the future they would be wary of any such political compromise.

The Final Declaration of Geneva was never signed by any of the participants to the conference for the reason that the United States refused even to give its oral consent. Before the conference most U.S. officials had hoped that the negotiations would end in failure; they had hope that France would continue to find the strength to carry on the war against the Viet Minh.
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By 1954 American officials and politicians of both parties had come to regard Vietnam as vital to U.S. security. Since the victory of Mao Tse-tung five years earlier, American officials judged that China, in alliance with the Soviet Union, constituted the leading threat to American global interests. Whatever these interests were, and whether or not the official line accurately reflected them, the United States had in the early 1950’s begun to transfer its European policy of the “containment of Communism” to Asia. With the Korean War and the continued support for Chiang Kai-shek, it had begun to build a wall of anti-Communist American dependencies around China. Vietnam, as the officials saw it, constituted the crucial southern element of that wall: if Vietnam “fell” under Communist domination, then the whole of Southeast Asia would follow after it. In 1950 the United States began to subsidize the French war in Vietnam and by 1954 U.S. military aid covered 80 percent of the French war expenditures.
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After the Korean War, President Eisenhower contemplated sending tactical nuclear weapons and/or American troops into the conflict. He finally rejected the proposals in his desire not to engage the United States in yet another land war in Asia. When it became clear that the French could no longer carry on the war by themselves, he looked to the Vietnamese government the French had set up in Saigon as a new vehicle for continuing the struggle. Two months after the Geneva Conference, Secretary of State Dulles set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in a treaty whereby the signatories agreed to assist each other in case of armed aggression from the outside. At the time the organization had only three Asian members, Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines — and not Burma, India, and Indonesia, as Dulles would have liked — but a separate protocol covered “the states of Cambodia and Laos and the free territory under the jurisdiction of the State of Vietnam.”

In fact the Vietnamese government supported by the French in Saigon had most dubious credentials for statehood. Its very creation had been merely a matter of French convenience — and temporary convenience at that. In 1946, at the very beginning of the war, the French had created a legal fiction called “the Republic of Cochin China” in order to substantiate their claims to the existence of a French union combining the associated states of Indochina. Four years later the French dismantled the “republic” when the exigencies of war demanded that they attempt to provide a rallying point for non-Communist Vietnamese and to demonstrate to American satisfaction that they were fighting an anti-Communist, rather than a colonial, war. The “republic” was clearly inadequate to these purposes, for even the Emperor Bao Dai refused to participate in a government of Cochin China alone. Finally giving in to the principle of a unified Vietnam, the French brought back Bao Dai and on January 1, 1950, installed him as the head of a new “national” government called “the State of Vietnam.” But as the French had created the state mainly for public relations purposes, so the state itself remained to a great degree a mere formality. For as long as the French remained in Saigon they continued to control its budget, its external relations, its internal security arrangements, and its jurisdiction over the French in Vietnam. In fact it had only two attributes of a government: first, a small administration composed of old colonial functionaries whose territorial reach extended not far beyond the outskirts of Saigon, and, secondly, an army of some three hundred thousand men split up into small units and commanded by French officers.
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Taking most accurate stock of his position, Bao Dai removed himself from Saigon to the resort city of Dalat, where he spent the next four years amusing himself with big-game hunting and the distribution of well-paid government appointments. Not until the eve of the Geneva negotiations did the French sign a paper granting the state of Vietnam full independence — a gesture that gave them the means of claiming that they had “handed over” Vietnam not to the Viet Minh, but rather to the Bao Dai government.

The gift, however, seemed of questionable value to anyone. As the period of truce began, the Viet Minh leaders in the north went about consolidating the government they had exercised in fact since the beginning of the French war. In the south only confusion reigned — a confusion not at all alleviated by the Viet Minh’s regroupment of some ninety thousand soldiers and cadres (the vast majority of them southerners) to the north. The Viet Minh had not been the only ones to fail at organizing the Mekong Delta. For the course of the war the French had managed, rather than actually governed, the Delta, and partly as a result of their attempt to conciliate all the non-Communist groups, the south had become a political jungle of warlords, sects, bandits, partisan troops, and secret societies. To French observers at the time there seemed to be small chance for the establishment of an administration, much less a nation-state, in the midst of this chaos.

Now in control of the entire western portion of the Delta, the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai represented a military as well as a political force — or rather, a series of forces, for, since the death of the first Cao Dai grand master and the murder of Huynh Phu So at the hands of the Viet Minh, both sects had split into a number of rival factions. While the Cao Dai remained a church with dissident regional factions and several none-too-cooperative military leaders, the Hoa Hao, without a religious hierarchy, had divided between three different regional warlords. The distinctions between them were, however, small, as the leaders of all the factions looked forward to assuming control of the country or, failing that, control over their own agricultural bases and the rice trade with Saigon. For the sake of freeing their regiments in the north, the French had given military aid and advisers to most of the factions during the course of the war. Though under obligation to the French, the sect factions directed their war efforts almost impartially against the French, the Viet Minh, and each other — depending upon who happened to cross the path directly in front of them. They disliked the Viet Minh, and that was enough for the French in the short term, for they had the power to keep their own territories free of them. The difficulty came only at the end of the war when the sects, with something over two million adherents, refused to allow their troops to be integrated into the national army and refused to permit officials from Saigon to enter their territories. The modicum of control the French had over them came from their manipulation of military aid, and thus it was very much open to question what the sects would do if, and when, the aid ceased and they were left to themselves.

But the affairs of the sects were grand politics next to those of the other French-supported fiefs near Saigon. During the Japanese occupation a man called Le Van Vien, or Bay Vien, had put together a gang of river pirates to collect taxes on the private traffic in and out of the city. In 1948 the French intelligence services had agreed to recognize his gang in return for his submission. A few years later they gave this genial but absolutely ruthless pirate the title of brigadier general in their auxiliary forces as well as the tacit right to control the vast gambling establishment, Le Grand Monde, and to collect taxes from the rich Chinese merchants of Cholon. On his return to Vietnam, Bao Dai gave Bay Vien his support against his own police chief in Saigon — an inexplicable act to those Americans who assumed they knew the difference between the Vietnamese J. Edgar Hoover and the Vietnamese Al Capone.