Campaign of Brutality

More than a decade of large-scale fighting in Southeast Asia has left many Americans with the impression that the war-weary South Vietnamese, if given a free choice, would gladly exchange a military dictatorship in Saigon for a Communist regime if they could get peace in the bargain. To hear some antiwar activists tell it, Hanoi's forces are benevolent friends of the South Vietnamese population. Well, not quite. The fact is that the North Vietnamese have sometimes been shockingly brutal in their treatment of South Vietnamese who happened to be under their control.

During the 1968 Tet offensive, for instance, the Communists executed more than 3,000 South Vietnamese in the former capital of Hue. Even though the brutality has been on a smaller scale during this year's Easter offensive, the Communists have murdered at least 200 people and imprisoned 6,000 in the Communist-controlled portion of Binh Dinh province. Allied intelligence officials believe that the number executed will surpass 500 before the whole of the province has been retaken by the South Vietnamese.

For the most part, the victims were local officials whom the enemy wanted to eliminate either because they were especially effective in their jobs, or because they were so unpopular that the Viet Cong could win favor by killing them. The primary motive for the show trials and the brutalities, reports TIME Correspondent Rudolph Rauch, "appears to have been to wreck whatever allegiance the government might have built up, and there are few more effective ways of mitigating allegiance than to bury four dozen loyal men alive" --as happened in the town of Bong Son. Some examples:

> In Hoai Nhon district, 300 townspeople were herded together in front of a village school and designated a "people's court." They were invited to denounce the crimes of a man named Phung Sao, who had been in charge of the town's military affairs under the Saigon government. A few villagers accused Sao of using his position to assassinate a number of revolutionary cadres. The "president" of the court declared, "The people have decided that Sao will be executed for crimes against the people." In less than an hour, Sao's bullet-ridden body was turned over to his widow, who had been obliged to watch both the trial and the execution.

>In the middle of a Binh Dinh tea plantation, a Viet Cong court declared that 20 defendants owed a "blood debt to the people." The result: at a midnight gathering in the local sports stadium, three of the prisoners were shot to death by a Viet Cong platoon leader. The other 17 were given prison sentences ranging from two to five years.

> In Vinh Phung hamlet, 42 policemen were reportedly executed in a mass ceremony; another was beheaded, and his body was hung from a tree beside a police station. A hamlet chief was disemboweled in Kontum.

The Communists in Binh Dinh apparently set up a complete administrative machine when they took over. Each Liberation Front cadre was in charge of a special "branch," such as military proselytizing; about 160 young men of draft age were sent to reinforce V.C. units near Kontum. The Communists also put just about everybody to work. In many districts, each adult was obliged to contribute about 20 kilos of rice to the Communists, and each landowner was taxed another 20 kilos for each 360-sq.-meter parcel he owned. In addition, each family was made to contribute two extra kilos of rice. The surtax went to support local V.C. elements.

The five-month-old Easter offensive is not yet over, but officials in Saigon are already talking about the "next phase" in the war. It will be characterized, many believe, by heightened Communist political activity--including more murders of government functionaries. Such murders committed in wartime do not necessarily imply a bloodbath if the Communists should eventually come to power in Saigon --which is what many in the Nixon Administration fear and predict. But they certainly indicate that the Communists' brutal efforts to destroy the effectiveness of the Saigon government at the local level will continue for the time being. "I'm betting," says one U.S. intelligence official in Saigon, "that we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the next two months. I think Binh Dinh will be repeated."

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