Fading Smiles

Saigon is gradually becoming a stereotypic city under Communist control. All newspapers except those authorized by the Communist Party have been suppressed. A detailed census is being taken, presumably to facilitate supervision of all activities. Political and military officials who served under the old Thieu regime have been ordered to report to "reeducation" centers. Martial music and Communist slogans blare from street-corner loudspeakers.

The easygoing mood that marked the first days of the Communist occupation of Saigon is quickly vanishing, according to Western observers who have recently left South Viet Nam's capital. "The smiles of those days have faded," says Dieter Ludwig, a West German photographer who was expelled from Saigon when the new rulers decided to reduce drastically the number of non-Communist journalists. Saigon has been plagued by a near epidemic of theft and lawlessness. At first the Communists were quite casual about patrolling the streets; soon they began making rounds heavily armed and only in groups of at least five. Lawbreakers, when caught, have been dealt with harshly. Saigon's Liberation Daily, the only newspaper authorized to be published in the capital, has reported cases of soldiers capturing a thief, quickly questioning eyewitnesses, and then summarily executing the prisoner.

The Western-influenced life-style of Saigon has become a target of Communist ire. Blue jeans, nail polish, lipstick and miniskirts have been condemned as vestiges of the defeated capitalist society. Young men have been pressured to trim their long hair, while girls have been urged to wear "clothes that are simple and not stimulating." As a result, more Saigon women these days are wearing the traditional slit-skirt ao-dai, which, ironically, many Westerners regarded as extremely stimulating indeed.

So far, there has been no evidence of the kind of violent mass reprisals that some U.S. officials predicted would accompany a Communist victory in South Viet Nam. Still, many Saigonais still fear a crackdown. Liberation Daily, in fact, may have hinted that such a terror campaign is in the offing; a recent article noted "a popular movement to discover and pursue the wicked elements who were servants of Americans and their puppet Saigon government."

According to most reports, the administration of South Viet Nam is completely dominated by the North Vietnamese. So many bureaucrats have apparently left Hanoi for posts in the South that journalists in North Viet Nam's capital complain that many of their best sources are now in Saigon. Despite the influx of cadres from the North, Saigon's new rulers have problems running the city. Banks remain closed, the telephone system is hi chaos, and some offices remain unstaffed.

Gunfire Exchanges. Outside Saigon, the Communists also have problems. A Tass dispatch from South Viet Nam last week confirmed that there have been frequent exchanges of gunfire a few miles north of Saigon between Communist troops and holdout ARVN units. This last-ditch resistance is likely to be short-lived; one member of an anti-Communist army group, in a letter to his family in Saigon, conceded that "we know we have no chance of winning, but we will fight anyway."

More threatening to the new regime is the South's economy. Saigon is short of food and fuel; trade and commerce have contracted severely because of the prolonged bank holiday, and hundreds of thousands of former government bureaucrats and soldiers are without jobs. While Communist officials have been vowing "to restore production as quickly as possible," unless they do it soon, economic chaos could trigger widespread unrest among the South Vietnamese. There is, however, a question of how long they will remain South Vietnamese. North Viet Nam's National Assembly voted last week to unify all of Viet Nam, with Hanoi as its capital.

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