Catholic Exodus

Deliberately or not, the militant Buddhists and the Communists complement each other in South Viet Nam. Caught by both forces are the country's 1.6 million Roman Catholics, who until the overthrow of Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem were generally considered to be enjoying a favored position. They are favored no longer.

In recent months, 20,000 Catholic peasants have descended from the mountainous central region to the coastal city of Quinhon, where most of them now huddle in eleven makeshift camps --5,000 live in the gardens of the local cathedral. Many fled because their villages were overrun by the Viet Cong, others because they feared it was about to happen. For quite a few it was a second exodus: they first moved when the Reds took over North Viet Nam ten years ago. North or South, Catholics are treated more harshly by the Reds than are Buddhists. There are, of course, many Buddhists staunchly fighting the Viet Cong--both Premier Tran Van Huong and Military Chief Nguyen Khanh are Buddhists--but the Catholics as a group have always seemed to be tougher antiCommunists.

Double Jeopardy. In several villages where the Viet Cong demanded anti-government demonstrations, Buddhists complied, but Catholics had to be forced to join at gunpoint. One refugee reported that the guerrillas shot 40 men simply because they were Catholics. Guerrillas frequently harvest a Catholic family's rice crop as "taxes," while Buddhists get off more easily. Some Catholics have been executed for not meeting their prescribed quotas of pungee sticks.*

To make matters worse, the Buddhists keep harping on real or fancied persecution under the French and Diem, are waging a campaign of anti-Catholic vengeance in the central provinces. Since Diem's murder, Buddhist gangs have burned Catholic huts. More than once, authorities of Buddhist villages, aware that a neighboring Catholic village was under Viet Cong attack, have delayed fatally in calling troops for help. Many Catholic village administrators have been driven out not by the Communists but by Buddhists--after which the Reds took over without firing a shot. Thanks partly to Buddhist help, the Viet Cong have seized two-thirds of the "new life hamlets" (the new name given Diem's old "strategic hamlets") along the central coast.

Moved to Fight. In some villages, the entire Catholic population will pull up stakes, while their Buddhist neighbors stay behind. But Red roadblocks make getting out difficult for the refugees. Families often have to break up in order to slip away individually, usually by roundabout paths or jungle streams. In Quinhon. where the refugees are arriving at the rate of 300 a day, the homeless receive food from Catholic chari ties and medical care from American Franciscan sisters--though disease is inevitable in the fetid shantytowns.

Apart from humanitarian concern, U.S. advisers worry that the flight may weaken further the central region's crumbling resistance to the Reds. Most of the Catholic D.P.s ultimately want to reach Saigon, where Father Hoang Quynh, unofficial leader of the North Vietnamese Catholic exile community, is trying to resettle the latest refugees from Communism. More than 2,000 have been transported to the capital by Vietnamese navy ship, and Quynh hopes to found new refugee villages in government-held sectors of the Mekong delta. There is a move afoot among Quinhon's male refugees to organize Catholic self-defense corps and fight alongside government militiamen. In fact, Catholic volunteer units have reoccupied four Red-captured villages.

* Needle-sharp bamboo spikes, dipped in dung to infect the tips, with which the Viet Cong sow government trails.

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