No Refuge

Wars are littered with figures: troops employed, dead and wounded, planes shot down, trucks shot up. But the most important figures, and often the most tragic, are not limited to the forces of combat. In South Viet Nam, no other statistic speaks with more forlorn eloquence than this: out of every eight civilians, one is now a refugee.

Vietnamese do not leave their homes easily. Outside the major cities, which have acquired both the cosmopolitan air and armed defense of the enlightened West, their huts are shrines to their ancestors, their land a heritage to be revered. Yet 1.8 million of South Viet Nam's 13 million peasants have given up their homes because of either Viet Cong terrorism or the military demands of the war. Last week, in a 120-sq.-mi. area along the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Viet Nams, 20,000 more Vietnamese were turned into fugitives from the war.

Death Strip. The latest victims were residents of 15 hamlets located just inside or just south of the DMZ. Their displacement was ordered by the Saigon government because Communist troops in ever-increasing numbers have been infiltrating the DMZ from the North. To stop the flow, Premier Nguyen Cao Ky ordered the area bulldozed flat and made into a "death strip" in which anything that moved would be machine-gunned, mortared or bombed to bits. To accommodate the displaced villagers, the government is hastily building its 336th refugee camp a few miles to the south in the Cua Valley--a makeshift settlement of 200 large tents, one for every 100 refugees.

First to leave their homes were 545 Catholics under the wing of their parish priest, Father Co, who brought with them a ramshackle altar graced by flower-filled vases fashioned out of empty beer cans. "We are happy to get away from the fighting," said Father Co, "but some are sad to leave, especially since now is the time of the rice harvest."

They will undoubtedly be sadder when they find out what is in store for them. The South Vietnamese government has never gone out of its way to be kind to refugees. In theory, they remain in such camps as Cua for no longer than two months, after which they are either allowed to return to their villages or moved to permanent resettlement villages to take up a normal life again. In practice, however, they are often left in temporary camps for three years or more, living on a bare subsistence diet handed out by the government and spending their interminable idle hours staring glumly into space. Says Vo Van Seo, a 50-year-old ex-farmer who has spent the past four months at a "model" refugee camp near Saigon: "There is no fighting here, no bombs. But the life is so miserable, and the future looks so bad."

Pilfered Rice. The responsibility of caring for all the refugees belongs to a commissariat consisting of 560 employees, headed by a 42-year-old physician named Nguyen Phuc Que. Que is an able and energetic man, and he is helped by Americans from the U.S. aid mission to South Viet Nam. He is constantly on the move ("You cannot solve this problem if you stay in Saigon"), constantly trying to improve the lot of the refugees. But he is fighting an uphill battle, for all government support to refugee camps must be channeled through provincial authorities, most of whom look upon refugee rehabilitation projects* only as so much extra work. Many officials are so corrupt that they pilfer the rice shipments to refugee camps, and some so actively resent the camps that they have actually sabotaged their water supplies.

Such activities do not exactly promote the cause of freedom among South Viet Nam's refugee population, which is currently growing at 500,000 a year. The U.S. spends $40 million a year to support the camps, and would contribute more if the money could be put to good use. But the Saigon government--apart from Nguyen Phuc Que and his overworked staff--pays little attention to the problem.

The Viet Cong, of course, are not so inattentive--especially since it is far easier to fan a fire than to build a house. Communist organizers are active in almost every camp, cultivating the discontent and in some cases employing terrorist tactics to demoralize pro-government loyalists. V.C. agents recently burned down 300 houses in a permanent resettlement village in Thua Thien province. In the Central Highlands province of Phu Bon, an entire V.C. company infiltrated a supposedly well-guarded refugee camp, set fire to 200 shacks occupied by anti-Communist Montagnard tribesmen, then slipped out again to watch the flames from afar.

*Not to be confused with the village pacification program, which last week was transferred from civilian control to the direct command of General William Westmoreland.

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