Protected Village

INDOCHINA

The only part of north Indo-China which the French still hold securely is a 6,000-square-mile tract of swampy land at the mouth of the Red River. Somewhere inside the French defenses, there are 40,000 Communist guerrillas. Again & again the French have thrown back concerted guerrilla action, but they have not been able to prevent a more insidious form of Communist attack: the blackmailing of peasant communities.

Of the 4,400 villages in the area, only one in five is completely under Viet Nam control. Many tiny villages live in terror of the Communists, pay them tribute in rice and young recruits. How to cut off these villages from Communist influence is a problem which has long occupied northern Viet Nam Governor Nguyen Huu Tri. After long study he settled on a scheme successfully adopted by the British in Malaya--resettlement of peasants in protected villages. Fruitlessly he tried to talk the French military command into a three-part plan to 1) regroup scattered villages into strong farmers' communities; 2) transform communal militias into truly popular forces; 3) harass the Communists whenever they attempt to infiltrate one of the new resettlement villages. Busy fighting, with no money to spare, the French shook their heads. Said a French civil servant: "The French would never dare to undertake such a tricky enterprise."

Governor Tri took his plan to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and last month got a grant of 7,000,000 piastres ($340,000) to give it a try. Said MSA Director Frederic P. Bartlett: "It's a calculated risk, a useful experiment of French, Vietnamese and American cooperation."

For his first protected settlement, Governor Tri chose Dong Quan, 55 miles south of Hanoi. A 300-acre patch of land surrounded by waterways, in the midst of thickly populated ricelands, Dong Quan is ideally located for defense as well as for village commerce. Within six months, 1,000 Viet Nam peasant families (about 10,000 people) will be brought in from 25 surrounding villages. The farmers will still work their old fields by day, but at night they will sleep in the town under protection of a strong Viet Nam militia. The plans for Dong Quan include a Christian church, a Buddhist temple, a rice granary, cooperatives, a hospital, schools, markets, a sports field, river quays, a business and handicrafts district. As the first spade of earth was turned at Dong Quan, the Communists attacked. Said untroubled Governor Tri last week: "It proves that this project hurts them."

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