WHY THEY FLEE

Even in wartime, the flight of up to 2 million people from an opposing army has to be considered an extraordinary phenomenon. Why were they fleeing, and from whom? Through more than two decades of war in Indochina, some observers have maintained that most of the 20 million people below the 17th parallel were at best reluctant antiCommunists. Basically, the argument went, Northerners and Southerners were above all Vietnamese, separated by only the most artificial of boundaries. Despite some provincial animosities, they were capable of getting along pretty well if outside powers would only leave them alone.

Yet there they were last week, struggling toward sanctuaries deeper and deeper in the South. Were they "voting with their feet," in the phrase used to describe, among other things, the escape of East Germans to the West? Was Communism a more important threat to the peasant, as well as the middle-class merchant, than it was sometimes made out to be?

Inevitably, the headlong exodus was interpreted as a political statement by partisans of both sides. Saigon claimed that the refugees were struggling to escape Communist rule; Hanoi attributed the flight to propaganda inspired by the U.S. and South Viet Nam, and claimed that many refugees were forced to flee at gunpoint by panicky ARVN troops.

In large measure the refugee tide could not be explained in such rational terms. "It was hard to say what started it," said a Catholic priest who had escaped from one of the suddenly lost provinces of South Viet Nam, "but panic set off panic." The flight seemed to overtake everything in its path, engulfing military commanders as well as shopkeepers, peasants and schoolteachers. It uprooted entire towns and villages overnight, causing even greater fear. It mercilessly tore families apart and destroyed the trust and friendship that had been built up between individual Americans and Vietnamese during the past decade. It implanted only one compelling, overriding desire in the minds of its victims: to flee, then flee again until they were safe beyond the fighting.

In every provincial capital there was a sort of lemming effect: first the diplomats and the well-to-do left, then the civil servants, the Americans, and finally officers, enlisted men and even policemen--and in no time the stampede was on. "Suddenly all the people were cornered like rabbits," said Don Sewell, an Australian who administered a hospital in Qui Nhon. "They didn't know which way to run next. The whole city was buzzing. I don't know where people were going, but they were going from one end of the town to the other."

Sheer contagious panic aside, for most people the immediate motive probably was to escape the fighting, to keep from getting caught in a murderous crossfire. For a variety of reasons, many South Vietnamese had cause to fear their own armed forces. After ARVN abandoned one town last month, the South Vietnamese air force promptly flattened the place with bombs. In city after city, marooned South Vietnamese troops were running wild. A British diplomat noted: "The civilian refugees have as much to fear from the vanquished soldiers as they do from the victors."

Such explanations still left a sizable number who were clearly running to escape Communist rule, as did some 900,000 Vietnamese in 1954 after the country was partitioned at the 17th parallel. That earlier exodus was organized and dominated by Catholics and anti-Communists and was encouraged by the Saigon regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. There was a great deal of propaganda at the time, and some not so subtle rumor mongering. Father Nguyen Dinh Thi, a priest who was part of that flight but who now lives in Paris, claims that some superstitious Catholic peasants were told that Our Lady of Fatima expected the faithful to go south and that, "if they did not, they would be turning their back on her and on their religion." Some of the fears that motivated the earlier exodus proved to be well founded. In the land reform and political re-education programs launched by Hanoi after 1954, some 15,000 Northerners were killed, according to conservative estimates.

In most areas of the south not 1% of the population really understands Communism," says a U.S. social worker from an overrun province; "but rightly or wrongly, there is that fear of what Communists will do to them. Communism is still a physical threat." Twenty-one years of government propaganda no doubt helped instill that fear; but so did 21 years of exposure to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese tactics.

In this respect, just how real is the danger of a Communist bloodbath? Might there be a slaughter, as Richard Nixon once predicted, that would engulf "hundreds of thousands [of South Vietnamese] who had dared to oppose Communist aggression"?

The general population probably has little reason to fear mass violence; peasants may lose their land but almost certainly not their lives. Yet there are segments of South Vietnamese society that are likely to be targets of Communist vengeance. Among these are former soldiers, policemen, civil servants and as many as 200,000 civilians who were employed by or worked closely with the Americans. The armed forces alone account for a sizable number of refugees: Vietnamese soldiers travel with their families, and with anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 troops in full rout, there could be half a million or so dependents fleeing with them.

A few observers would include in the threatened groups some 4 or 5 million South Vietnamese whose relatives were among the 900,000 that chose to migrate to the South in 1954. Others dispute this judgment, pointing out that the Catholic hierarchy in South Viet Nam does not appear to be overly afraid of Communist vengeance. In the current turmoil, not a single Catholic bishop in the areas overrun by the Communists is known to have left his post.

Perhaps the most serious case for the bloodbath theory rests on what has happened in areas of South Viet Nam that the Communists have occupied in the past. When they briefly took over Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive, they arrived with lengthy blacklists. In the midst of an exceedingly hard-fought battle, they took the time to round up, execute and dump into mass graves perhaps 2,000 civilians in a population of 200,000. When they gained control of several northern provinces late last year, according to a U.S. intelligence source, they killed several hundred civil servants. No information is yet available on how the Communists are behaving in the provinces they have won in the past four weeks by default. Hanoi is now said to regard the 1968 executions in Hue as an "error," and may avoid a repetition of them. But from the evidence, the chance of officially sanctioned bloodshed cannot simply be dismissed as a scare story.

It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that the majority of refugees are fleeing south for purely political reasons. Caught between two warring systems, most would undoubtedly prefer to avoid both. Unfortunately, very few are rich enough, or sufficiently well connected, to do so.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.