Viet Nam: A Cancerous Affliction

LONG before the Americans arrived in strength, official corruption was a tacitly accepted tradition in South Viet Nam--as it is elsewhere in Asia. Indeed, the term does not have the same meaning to Asians as it does to Westerners. Vietnamese officials were always poorly paid, and they were expected to find ways of substantially increasing their salaries by means of minor shakedowns or kickbacks. In the present war, however, big-league corruption involving huge profits has roared out of hand among top officials and military men.

The U.S. Government has usually remained silent about the cancerous corruption that afflicts South Viet Nam today: the pilferage at the docks, the smuggling at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport, and the large-scale theft and export of scrap metal. But Washington has reacted with anger and alarm to recent disclosures about the widespread use of heroin by American G.I.s (see THE NATION) and to charges that Vietnamese officials, high and low, are involved in the hard-drug traffic.

This traffic is only one aspect--albeit the most appalling in terms of human misery--of the corruption in Viet Nam today. The massive U.S. presence has grotesquely distorted the traditional system. It has given the Vietnamese too many opportunities for profiteering, and inflation has aggravated the situation. One statistic helps explain why so many yield to the temptation: since Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in 1963, civil service salaries have doubled, while the piaster has fallen to an eighth of its former value (officially the rate is 275 piasters to the dollar; the black-market rate is about 370).

But such figures do not explain the rise of high-level profiteering. Under Diem, corruption was relatively restrained and furtive. Today it permeates the hierarchy, in large part because President Nguyen Van Thieu has made no convincing moves to curtail it. His supporters point out that he is restrained from effective action by the fact that his political base includes a number of high-ranking officers who are deeply involved in profiteering. With a presidential election coming up in November, they say, he is in no position to start swinging a political ax at influential backers. His opponents, on the other hand, point out that his own uncle, Ngo Xuan Tich, directs the government agency charged with rooting out corruption, while Tran Thien Khoi, a brother of Premier Tran Thien Khiem, is in charge of all antismuggling operations.

Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, warming up for the presidential elections, has tried to make a little political capital by declaring that people responsible for "social injustice" and "corruption" should be shot. "Often they are people in high places, who 'sponsor' underlings, such as generals or high officials," said Ky slyly. "There are many," he added, smiling. "Maybe even myself."

It was an interesting point. Democratic Senator George McGovern recently incurred Ky's wrath by inquiring into printed reports that the Vice President was involved in the smuggling of opium into South Viet Nam. Ky has vehemently denied the accusations, and no evidence has linked him to the trade.

In another area of corruption--organized pilferage--the Saigon government has made some modest progress. Even so, the fate of practically every ship's cargo that is unloaded in Vietnamese ports can be aptly described by a local adage: "You begin with the head of an elephant, and finish with the tail of a mouse."

Lackeys to Smugglers. On the docks of South Viet Nam, pilferage has become a sort of cottage industry. Bands of inspectors are assigned to check a ship's cargo as it is unloaded. For every 100 bags of rice, they may count 80. If the captain is foolish enough to complain, the inspectors may order a slowdown or even a strike. So he will probably choose not to notice as stevedores walk off with "damaged" goods or motorized sampans slip up to unloading barges and nibble away at piles of freight. "I've seen some of those captains on the verge of tears," says one U.S. diplomat. "But there's not a goddam thing they can do about it, and they know it."

Some U.S. officials estimate, in fact, that as much as 50% of the oil, PX-bound appliances and other nonmilitary freight arriving at local ports is being "diverted." The situation at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport is not much better. In the blunt language of a U.S. report issued last February, customs men at the airport are "little more than lackeys to the smugglers."

Unfired Bullets. The Thieu government is now faced with questions about another gigantic form of corruption, the illegal export of scrap brass. The South Vietnamese are prohibited by treaty from selling the scrap metal unless they receive permission from the country that supplied it in the first place, namely the U.S. The material, mostly in the form of flattened shell casings and cartridges, is sold nonetheless to buyers in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. Part of the brass eventually ends up in mainland China, where it may well be used in the manufacture of ammunition for the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.

General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander in Viet Nam, and American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker were briefed six times on the subject in a recent week. But a U.S. investigation was stalled because further inquiry involved the interrogation of top-level Vietnamese officials, including corps commanders and members of the joint general staff.

So far the Pentagon has said as little as possible, in the apparent hope that the matter would not turn into another major scandal. In fact, it already has. The departure of the U.S. 9th Division from My Tho in 1969 was followed by the movement of a huge South Vietnamese army convoy carrying brass scrap to the coast, from which it was shipped to Singapore and Hong Kong. A Korean soldier was caught loading up to 400 tons of brass into huge barrels that were to be shipped to Singapore. The load was confiscated; almost half of it turned out to be unfired ammunition. Nobody knows how many unused shells and cartridges have been diverted to scrap piles over the years for easy profit.

The illegal-scrap-metal network stretches across Viet Nam and involves not only barefoot street urchins who gather used casings, but also the wives of South Vietnamese generals. Even so, surprisingly little public attention has been given to the operation. "One reason it's so hard to prove," says a U.S. embassy source, "is that investigations are extremely dangerous. When so many people are making so much money, they aren't going to stand by and let someone ask a lot of embarrassing questions. It's much easier just to kill him when he gets too close."

Huge Windfalls. U.S. complaints about corruption have irritated the Vietnamese, who point out correctly that many Americans, both civilian and military, are deeply involved in illegal practices. Indeed it is probably fair to say that much of the high-level corruption in Viet Nam today can be traced directly to the complicity of Americans. Last April, for example, a Vietnamese minister asked a U.S. aid official to sign an export permit for 22,000 tons of copper (price: $1,000 a ton), claiming the copper came from generator wiring picked up in Cambodia. The official signed the paper, thereby testifying that the copper did not consist of brass casings. The Criminal Investigations Division decided otherwise; it confiscated the shipment and arranged for the aid man to be transferred.

The U.S. withdrawal, moreover, is making for huge windfalls. U.S. officials are investigating reports that when four Special Forces camps were phased out last year, U.S. officers and men at one camp sold $5,000,000 worth of Jeeps, lumber, weapons, ammunition and wire.

Other profiteering can be traced to U.S. bureaucratic indifference. Scrap lumber in Danang was formerly donated for use by homeless refugees. Today it is sold by contract to a wealthy Vietnamese trash collector, who then sells it to refugees at inflated prices. In one refugee village, where the average daily wage is less than 200 piasters (73-c-), a 4-ft. by 8-ft. sheet of scrap plywood costs 800 to 1,000 piasters; a cardboard carton brings 200 piasters. Under the system that has evolved, the refugees pay rich Vietnamese for the privilege of living under cast-off American crates, and the rich Vietnamese pay U.S. authorities for what amounts to the privilege of gouging the refugees.

Strong Words. Some Vietnamese charge that the real motive behind the current U.S. investigations is to protect American smugglers against their Vietnamese competitors. One newspaper cited the case of Maj. Delbert W. Fleener, occasional pilot for Ambassador Bunker, who was convicted last year of smuggling 850 pounds of opium into Viet Nam from Thailand aboard Air Force planes. The daily Chuong Viet dismissed the flap over narcotics as an attempt by Washington to give the U.S. public a new excuse for getting its men out of Viet Nam. "Could it be," asked the paper, "that the U.S. Government now realizes that the narcotics issue may serve its policy very well?"

Such an interpretation, however, is a careless reading of Washington's mood. Last week New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits warned in a Saigon press conference that the narcotics scandal was "the kind of issue that could upset everything"--meaning the continuation of U.S. military and economic aid. Bunker, in a strongly worded note, told Thieu much the same thing.

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