Echoes Out of Saigon

One of the most forgotten United Nations fact-finding missions on record was the seven-member delegation that journeyed to South Viet Nam last October. No sooner did the mission arrive in Saigon to investigate Buddhist claims of religious persecution than the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown. Whether the Buddhists had been victims of the Diem regime, or consummate political agitators--or both--overnight became a neglected question. Though every presumed Buddhist immolation had made front pages for months, editors barely noted or even read the 250-page U.N. report when it was published in December.

Last week Connecticut's Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd revived the report and along with it the bitter controversy over the small band of U.S. correspondents in Saigon and the extent to which they may have distorted the news and helped shape Washington's Viet Nam policy. In a recent Senate speech, Dodd suggested that the press had deliberately buried reports of all the Buddhist immolations* that have occurred since Diem's overthrow. Now, in a letter accompanying republication of the U.N. study by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Dodd declared that some of the mission's findings raise "doubts about the authenticity and spontaneity" of the Saigon suicides that preceded the coup.

Dodd argued that "any objective person" reading the report "would have to conclude that the accounts of massive persecution of the Buddhist religion were, at the best, vastly exaggerated, and at the worst a sordid propaganda fraud. We were told that the Diem government was guilty of such brutal religious persecution that innocent Buddhist monks were driven to commit suicide in protest. Now it turns out that the agitation was essentially political." Concludes Dodd: "What this all adds up to is that the American people have once again been grievously misinformed by some of their newspapers on a foreign situation that vitally concerns them."

These were grave charges. But, Dodd insisted, his only aim in circulating the U.N. report to the Senate, was to protect the new regime in Saigon against "a possible recrudescence of the 'Buddhist' agitation, and protect Congress and the American public against a repetition of the one-sided and misleading reporting that unfortunately characterized the recent Buddhist crisis."

*Eight cases have been reported: Three left notes saying they had committed suicide "in gratitude" for the success of previous burnings; one, a 20-year-old girl, wrote that she had intended to take her life under the Diem regime but lost her nerve; four others, according to friends, decided to take their lives for reasons ranging from serious sickness to unemployment.

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