Cabinet Crisis

While he was preoccupied with preparations for the Manila Conference and playing host to U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky last week found himself faced with a major Cabinet crisis.

Its roots seemed all too petty for a nation at war. Ky, who was born near Hanoi and became one of the 800,000 North Vietnamese anti-Communists who emigrated to the south when the nation was divided in 1954, has given uprooted northerners most of the top positions in his government. The birthplace of Cabinet ministers makes little difference to most Vietnamese, but the southerners in the regime resent the powers and patronage that the northerners enjoy. The feud came to a head in the Health Ministry, where Deputy Minister Nguyen Tan Loc, a native of the south's Mekong River Delta, decided to right the balance.

While his northern boss was out of town, Loc fired northern doctors from comfortable Saigon jobs, transferred them to clinics in the interior and gave their places to his southern friends. He did not get away with it. On the orders of National Police Commander General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a northerner, Loc was arrested, and the battle was on. Infuriated at such highhanded treatment, the southern Cabinet ministers demanded that Ky fire his police chief. Ky refused, but attempted to mollify the southerners by accepting the resignation of Health Minister Nguyen Ba Kha. In response, seven of the 26 members of Ky's Cabinet resigned--including able Finance Minister Au Truong Thanh, who was in the middle of a government mission to Washington and had to cable his resignation.

Ky moved quickly. With tears in his eyes, he made a passionate appeal to the dissenters not to destroy government unity on the eve of the Manila Conference, got them to agree to pocket their resignations for the time being. But the crisis was merely postponed. The southerners have put a price on their continued collaboration with Ky: an end to "northern domination," and the dismissal of General Loan, whose tough tactics, they insist, give the regime "the image of a police state."

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