A Stake in Stability

For a change, South Viet Nam's Buddhist leaders mostly remained indoors last week, quietly minding their pagodas and their own business. Such are the vagaries of Vietnamese politics that the Buddhists, having forced the Ky government to accede to their demands for national elections by September, now found themselves with a greater stake than just about anyone in keeping Ky around so that he can keep his promises. They also discovered that the unrest that they had unleashed was far harder to calm than it had been to foment.

Grudging Response. The one Buddhist leader who remained visible was Thich Tri Quang, who left the sudden quiet of Saigon and traveled north to his home territory, where riot and uneasiness still simmer. The five northernmost provinces that comprise the I Corp are, in fact, still largely in open rebellion against the Saigon government and completely removed from its control. Pleading for moderation, Tri Quang tried to calm the northern cries for Ky's immediate ouster. Speaking in Hue, he said bluntly: "Your demands do not meet the general consensus, so you must curb them. That is the first start of a democracy." Next day, addressing a crowd of 10,000, including 2,000 soldiers, at the Dieu Da Pagoda, the fiery-eyed monk argued that "what we want is a democratic structure. We are making a revolution, not a coup d'etat."

Tri Quang repeated this theme in village after village in the I Corps, but the response was grudging. Though he asked for markets and schools to be reopened in Hue, all he got was a reluctant promise from the rebels to forgo any antigovernment demonstrations for the time being. Even so, there was trouble. In the pleasant mountain resort of Dalat, students kidnaped the commander of the local Vietnamese garrison and held him for 24 hours. He came out fighting mad, and the result was a clash between his troops and some 1,000 demonstrators, in which one soldier was stoned to death and two youths were shot and killed.

"Thanks, Yankees." Back in Saigon, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and the other generals of the ruling Directory were also notably quiet, making no speeches and rarely appearing in public. Their only visible act last week was the dismissal of the head of the national police, an appointee of ousted Buddhist I Corps Commander Nguyen Chanh Thi, who was replaced by one of Ky's loyal Air Force colonels. The Directory's caution was probably well-advised. Coup rumors were even thicker than usual, and Viet Nam's Catholics showed signs that they may pick up the troublemaking where the Buddhists left off.

Worried that only the Buddhists would profit from the forthcoming elections--and that Catholics would lose their influence in any new government--Catholic action groups readied their own protest marches, at week's end gathered in a Saigon park, 10,000 strong, for an orderly demonstration. The Catholics had earlier denounced Ky for failing to restore order in the I Corps, formed "assassin squads" in every parish to take care of any Communists who try to run for office in the election. In Saigon, in something of a switch, Catholics brandished warmly pro-American signs: "We are grateful for the contribution of Allied forces," and "Thanks, Yankees."

Those sentiments were hardly shared by six U.S. pacifists who showed up in Saigon last week, led by a retired Protestant minister, the Rev. A. J. Muste, 81. After several days of touring Saigon and talking with what they called "like-minded Vietnamese," the pacifists --four men and two women--came to Saigon's City Hall to hold a press conference. As they spoke, they were pelted with eggs and tomatoes by some 100 Vietnamese students, predominantly Catholic. When Minister Muste insisted that "we want to be friends with both sides," an angered student yelled back: "There are only two positions! You are our friends or Viet Cong friends!" The group had planned to stage a protest march in downtown Saigon the next day. Instead, their one-week tourist permits (customary for U.S. citizens visiting Viet Nam) having expired, they were shunted aboard a Pan Am jet to Hong Kong by South Vietnamese police, who nimbly kept the pacifists out of range of a farewell committee of students laden with plastic market bags of eggs and fruit.

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