A Dictatorial Regime

SOUTH VIET NAM

The proceedings started off with a Bang -- a lieutenant named Bang passed out the voting slips. In La Maison Blanche, a forlorn, peeling stucco villa overlooking Cap St. Jacques on the South China Sea, 58 officers of South Viet Nam's Military Revolutionary Council sat on hard, schoolroom-style chairs and scribbled their votes on the ballots. A colonel chalked up the results on a blackboard: Khanh, 50; Defense Minister General Tran Thien Khiem, 5; General Duong Van ("Big") Minh, 1; General Do Cao Tri, 1: blank ballot, 1.

Thus last week General Nguyen Khanh promoted himself from Premier to President and took over virtually absolute power -- at least in theory. He promulgated a new constitution abolishing his previous post of Premier as well as that of figurehead Chief of State, which had been occupied by Khanh's predecessor. General Big Minh, the man who had fronted the original coup against Ngo Dinh Diem's regime. To avoid embarrassing comparisons. Khanh ordered his new title rendered in Vietnamese as Chu Tich (Chairman) rather than Tonf> Thont> (President), the title used by Diem.

Khanh plainly made his move because things had seemed headed for another coup by the nation's ever dissident generals and perennially scheming politicians.

Pregnant Procession. Khanh's action enabled him to get rid of Big Minh, whom Buddhists and leaders of the nationalist Dai Viet Party had wanted to maneuver back into authority, hoping to use him as their puppet. At the same time, Khanh won over one of his most important and dangerous rivals, Defense Minister General Khiem, who got a fourth star and decided to throw in his lot with the Chairman--for the time being at least. Asked whether he was now a dictator, Khanh replied quizzically: "For six months I have been head of a totalitarian regime without being totalitarian. I can head a dictatorial regime without being a dictator." But it would take more than subtle semantics to make Khanh's new powers stick.

The Buddhists, annoyed by Big Minh's surprising ouster, again threatened major trouble. The occasion: the first anniversary of Diem's now infamous police raids on the pagodas during last year's Buddhist uproar. Addressing 4,000 faithful in Saigon, Thich (Venerable) Tarn Chau vowed that "Buddhists will rise against the government if it begins to resemble the former Diem regime."* The Buddhists proceeded to make a series of difficult if not impossible demands, including elimination from the government of all former Diem officials and the final release of four generals whom Khanh had deposed when he took power and has kept under surveillance in the pleasant resort city of Dalat.

In Hue, where last year's Buddhist troubles began, thousands staged torchlight parades, while young militants painted anti-Khanh slogans on walls. Schoolgirls dressed in white passed out mimeographed denunciations of "dictatorship," without specifically mentioning Khanh. The Buddhists also renewed their eternal complaints of "persecution" by Roman Catholic officials, a charge based on only a handful of incidents for which Khanh has invariably made amends. At Tuyhoa in central Viet Nam, an angry crowd of 4,000, led by children and pregnant women, blocked an armored army personnel carrier by throwing themselves in front of its oncoming tracks. According to the government, most were Viet Cong sympathizers.

Missing Monument. No one could be sure whether the Buddhists were deliberately trying to bring down the Khanh regime or whether they were only pressuring him to grant them and their political allies more power. At any rate, through it all Khanh's regime managed to preserve a kid-gloves approach, ordering police to avoid any display of violence. At the same time, the government attempted to placate the Catholics. One night 20 workmen quietly removed a 1,000-lb. monument to President Kennedy that had been installed across the street from Saigon Cathedral against the wishes of the city's Catholics, many of whom blame Kennedy for Catholic Diem's downfall and subsequent death.

In the war, meanwhile, it was one of the government's worst weeks. In Khien Hoa province, southwest of Saigon, two Viet Cong battalions ambushed one 350-man government battalion and killed 81 Vietnamese soldiers and four American advisers, wounded 54. Said a sympathetic U.S. adviser of the Vietnamese troops: "They are so tired they don't mind getting killed any more."

Still, the greatest present threat was not to be found in the guerrilla-ridden jungle but in Saigon, still uneasy under a state of urgency and an 11 p.m. curfew. As if they had never heard of the war, 2,000 students rallied in Saigon, calling for civilian rule. Several demonstrating students admitted that they were in the pay of discontented politicians. Fact is that the army is the only halfway stable element in the situation; the squabbling civilian politicians, plus their supporters among the intellectuals, would undoubtedly ruin what little there is left of South Viet Nam in short order, leading to neutralism. Government censors have lately tried to encourage the press to print "constructive" fiction and cut down on the interminable, vastly popular ghost stories. The prospect of more disorders in Saigon and another coup is the most haunting ghost story of all.

* In a village northwest of Saigon, there was even a kind of re-enactment of last year's notorious Buddhist self-immolations, though it had nothing to do with politics but was carried out by a jilted girl. As her former lover prepared to marry another, the girl crashed the wedding in a gasoline-soaked gown, set fire to her skirts, then chased the bridegroom with the evident intention of setting him on fire too. Guests intervened, and the would-be martyress was hospitalized.

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