A Dubious Communist Victory

Long after Saigon's "liberation;" Hanoi still faces hard times

It has been just five years since the jubilant troops of North Viet Nam swept into the crushed city of Saigon and brought an ignominious end to the Republic of South Viet Nam. For Hanoi, those euphoric days of victory held hope that the long years of sacrifice would finally be repaid with peace and prosperity. A U.S.-built network of roads, ports and communications facilities remained largely intact throughout the South and a united Viet Nam, blessed with two rice-rich river deltas, abundant coal and fertile fishing grounds seemed ready to emerge from the ashes of civil war.

That dream of economic strength has never materialized. Viet Nam today is a somber country where austere militarism remains a way of life. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss and Photographer Dirck Halstead, who both covered the Viet Nam War, recently spent 17 days in Viet Nam to assess what has gone wrong--and what is going right. De Voss 's report:

In some deceptive ways Saigon seems not to have changed. The nostalgic visitor can still order a Grand Marnier Souffle in a good French restaurant or go to the Rex Hotel on Saturday night and dance with a lissome girl in a pastel ao dai. But such moments are illusory. The Marxist regime of the North makes its presence felt down to the naming of streets and buildings. The elegant Caravelle Hotel is now the Independence. The city's raffish main street, Tu Do (Freedom) has been renamed Dong Khoi (General Uprising), commemorating the Communist takeover of 1975.

Gone is the excess of the war years, when American G.I.s crammed Saigon's bars for instant companionship with girls who sipped "Saigon Tea" as packs of Vietnamese motorcycle cowboys roared through the streets. Now the signs of hard times are everywhere. Once well-to-do matrons slip into Tu Do's antique shops to sell family porcelains and ivory for cash. Beggars haunt the streets by day. At night, scores of vagrants sleep on the steps of the old National Assembly.

Outside the former capital, evidence of the ten-year war remains starkly apparent across the Vietnamese landscape. Sixty miles north of Saigon in An Loc, now called Binh Long, the twisted debris of Jeeps and armored cars lies rusting in the sun. Bunkers have collapsed. Abandoned shell casings and brittle gas masks litter the barren ground. No other town in the South suffered so severely during the war. In the spring of 1972, when it was encircled by the Viet Cong, at least 1,000 artillery and rocket rounds fell on An Loc every day. Today only a handful of buildings has been restored.

Apart from such physical damage, some of the saddest human legacies of the war are the re-education camps, where Saigon's military men, bureaucrats, suspect lawyers and doctors have been incarcerated to be "rehabilitated" into right-thinking citizens. Officials admit to having 20,000 in the camps, but one informed foreigner in Saigon insists that more than 200,000 are still confined.

After the fall of Saigon the victorious General Vo Nguyen Giap's advice to his men was to "uphold the spirit of socialist labor, and together with the rest of the people zealously take part in economic reconstruction." The soldiers never got the chance. The promised demobilization of Hanoi's forces has yet to take place. As a result of Viet Nam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, more than 200,000 troops are tied down in that country. Another 50,000 have become an apparently permanent occupying force in Laos. Those expeditionary forces are merely the most obvious evidence of a pervading reality about Viet Nam today: expansionist adventures are costly. A nation whose gross national product is only 3% of America's is maintaining an army of 1 million--a force one-third larger than the U.S. Army.

The Vietnamese clearly believe military strength is a necessity. In their view, Viet Nam is an island of Communist revolution surrounded by suspicion. On three sides are the 248 million people of the non-Communist Southeast Asian nations. To the north are Viet Nam's historic foes--1 billion Chinese. Reason enough, some observers think, for Viet Nam to want to weld together an Indochinese federation with a docile Cambodia and Laos under the leadership of Hanoi. Others believe that Viet Nam is simply Moscow's stand-in in the Southeast Asian geopolitical rivalry with Peking. But a more likely explanation is that the men who govern Viet Nam know of no other way except the exercise of military might to secure their country's safety. Says Colonel Tran Cong Man, editor in chief of Hanoi's army newspaper: "For 30 years people had one job--that was fighting."

Viet Nam has recently made a new diplomatic effort to gain full acceptance among its non-Communist neighbors. More particularly, it has sought recognition for its surrogate in Cambodia, the 17-month-old regime of Heng Samrin. Earlier this month, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach launched the latest round of this campaign with a tour of Southeast Asian capitals. The mission produced mixed results. In Malaysia, for example, Prime Minister Datuk Hussein Onn hinted at a willingness to compromise on Cambodia. In Thailand, talks broke down when Thach angrily rejected Bangkok's demand for a neutral Cambodian government free of both Chinese and Soviet influence.

Viet Nam's enduring militarism can also serve as a convenient alibi for the country's economic morass. Since reunification in 1975, the rate of inflation in Hanoi has gone up 100%. In Saigon, the annual inflation rate is a staggering 350%; unemployment is 20%. A combination of bad weather and bureaucratic bungling has left Viet Nam with a succession of crop failures and a 2 million-ton annual shortfall of food. Compared with 1976, last year's paper production was down by 16% and textiles by 10%.

Damages left by the war--and by Peking's invasion last year--are contributing factors to the country's economic woes. Another cause is the exodus of ethnic Chinese tradesmen and skilled workers, precipitated by a 1978 decree abolishing capitalist trade in the South. But Hanoi itself has virtually admitted that poor economic planning is the real reason for most of the failures.

The party's Central Committee has issued a series of belated reforms designed to add some free-market elements to Viet Nam's stifled economy. According to the new directives, announced last autumn, anyone who can set up a profitable enterprise should be allowed to do so, peasants should not be forced into collectives and initiative should be rewarded even on state cooperatives and in factories.

The new freedoms have been embraced enthusiastically. Hanoi vendors squat on the curbs during the evening selling a variety of goods, ranging from tiny bananas to disco shoes. In Haiphong, the 400 employees of a machine workshop are moonlighting with zeal. Every afternoon when the state work is finished, the metal scraps are gathered and turned into spare parts for gasoline stoves or into metal strips to bind wooden crates. So far the extra work has added between 30% and 40% to the average laborer's monthly pay.

Only aid from the nations of the Communist economic pact (COMECON), notably the Soviet Union, keeps Viet Nam's economic crisis from sliding into debacle. Moscow, which has 8,000 advisers scattered through the country, is currently pouring $2.5 million a day into military and civilian aid projects, including a $1.8 billion hydroelectric and irrigation complex in Ha Son Binh (formerly Hoa Binh) province, a thermal power station, and completion of the Thang Long Bridge outside Hanoi, left unfinished by the Chinese withdrawal in 1978.

South Viet Nam is now administered by battle-tough Viet Cong veterans. A 54-year-old lieutenant colonel, for example, was chosen to head Saigon's City Department of Social Service and administer $2.26 million a year. In Song Be province, Vu Xuan Thu, once a Viet Cong guerrilla leader, is deputy director of land clearing and New Economic Zones, a job that involves the destinies of 150,000 farmers. Thu claims to have killed 27 Americans during the war, but he admits that such heroics do not help him now. "In the army all I had to do was fight," he says. "This job is more difficult."

In spite of the economic difficulties, the country's Communist rulers can be proud of some achievements in the defeated South. They created jobs for a million people who were left unemployed at the end of the war. Thousands of prostitutes and drug addicts have been reformed. The public school enrollment has doubled. Finally, full citizenship has been restored to 400,000 of the soldiers who were once loyal to Nguyen Van Thieu.

While the regime admits that much remains to be done, its propaganda attributes most of the country's present troubles to "networks of subversion maintained by Washington and Peking." Charged Foreign Minister Thach in an interview with TIME: "The U.S. still has agents in Ho Chi Minh City." The 57-year-old career diplomat warned Washington not to use its new friendship with Peking against Viet Nam "if you want stability in this region."

Despite the repeated charges leveled at Washington and Peking, the most serious threat to Viet Nam's stability probably comes from its own imperial ambitions. It may be a properly ironic punishment that Viet Nam finds itself bogged down in Cambodia fighting a war against grimly determined guerrillas. Indeed the economically strapped Vietnamese are by no means finished with their Indochinese adventure. They are too tenacious for that. But even a fierce and hardy nation can be asked to endure too much, too long, in a fight that this time it may not win. qed

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