A Hollow First Anniversary

We brought peace to Viet Nam, something we haven't had and didn't have for over twelve years.

--Richard Nixon, October 1973

The peace that President Nixon boasted about is one year old this week. In South Viet Nam, however, no special observance of the anniversary is planned. Instead, fighting will probably continue as it has every day since the signing of the cease-fire agreement. During the past year, nearly 13,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 2,150 civilians have been killed. According to Saigon, 44,850 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers also have died. The Vietnamese fatalities since the cease-fire exceed the total number of Americans killed in the course of the war (45,941). "What we have here," observed one of South Viet Nam's top military officers, "is simply a lesser degree of war. We're tired. We'd like to relax. But the question is whether we can afford to relax, and so far the answer is no."

What worries South Viet Nam's generals is the 30,000 additional troops Hanoi has sent South in the past year, bringing its total to some 170,000 -- more than at any other time in the war. To support these forces, Hanoi has commit ted 700 heavy artillery pieces and 300 tracked vehicles, including T-54 and T-55 heavy tanks; it has built a network of strategically important roads running from the Demilitarized Zone in the North to within 100 miles of Saigon. It also has refurbished twelve former U.S. airfields and set up SA-2 missile sites around the former U.S. Marine airfield at Khe Sanh. Though Saigon's forces have acquitted themselves well in com bat in the past year, they have not been able to prevent the Communists from destroying bridges, blockading key arteries, attacking outposts and terrorizing local officials. Hanoi's forces have come close to cutting South Viet Nam in half at the Central Highlands, and have threatened the precious rice harvest in the Mekong Delta. Saigon reports an average of 80 enemy incidents a day.

Powerless Commission. Even though the Communists now appear to have enough materiel stockpiled to sus tain major fighting for at least twelve months, Western intelligence experts do not expect them to launch a serious offensive in the near future. Nonetheless, Western analysts have a notably poor record deciphering Communist intentions; they failed to predict the massive offensives of Tet 1968 and Easter 1972. The frequency of the cease-fire viola tions convinces South Vietnamese lead ers that Hanoi has not abandoned its aim to take over the entire South.

From the start of the ceasefire, the four-nation International Commission of Control and Supervision has been powerless to halt the hostilities. The Canadian members of the ices were so frustrated by the commission's impotence that they quit last August. Upon leaving Saigon, Canada's chief delegate, Michel Gauvin, remarked: "We were sent to observe a peace and came to watch a war." Since then the commission's other members, Poland, Hungary, Indonesia and Iran (which replaced Canada), have displayed no enthusiasm for looking too closely at anything.

The cease-fire agreement also called for the creation of a National Council of Reconciliation and Concord (composed of representatives of the Saigon government, the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government, and "neutrals") that would be the forerunner of a coalition government in Saigon. But attempts at reconciliation quickly degenerated into hopeless name-calling, and the council was never formed.

Though some top U.S. officials in Saigon still describe South Viet Nam as a "free society," South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu in the past year has gathered most of the reins of power into his hands. He so manipulated last August's Senate elections that a pro-Thieu majority was chosen. This gave him control of both the Senate and the National Assembly, and so Thieu had no trouble changing the constitution to eliminate its two-term limit, enabling him to run in October 1975 for a third five-year term. His intimidation of political opponents and the press will probably guarantee victory.

The economy, however, could be Thieu's undoing. One year ago there was heady talk about implementing a massive economic reconstruction program in both North and South Viet Nam, financed mostly by the U.S. So far, America has taken no serious steps toward aiding Hanoi, and has even been reluctant to help Saigon. For 1974, the U.S. AID mission requested $475 million for South Viet Nam; Congress appropriated only $320 million. Without a great deal more assistance from the U.S., the Thieu government probably will have to limit and reduce the availability of consumer goods by restricting imports and increasing taxes even more than it has in the past year. This will anger South Viet Nam's populace and could spell trouble for the regime. As it is, the country already suffers from galloping inflation that last year sent prices soaring 65%, doubling the cost of rice and tripling that of sugar. For the second consecutive year the living standard fell by more than 5%.

A Western intelligence analyst in Saigon has warned that the Communists may use the economic malaise to alienate the South Vietnamese from their government. Thieu's monopolization of power could make him vulnerable to this Communist tactic because, as former Ambassador Robert Komer (head of the pacification program in South Viet Nam from 1967 to 1968) has observed: 'Thieu is progressively isolating himself from the mainstream of Vietnamese politics by running things by cronyism."

The failure of the cease-fire has led many South Vietnamese, including high military officers, to charge that the primary aim of the Paris accords was not to end the war but to create an umbrella under which the U.S. could extricate itself from Viet Nam. While that judgment may be too cynical, the fact is that only about 5,000 U.S. Government employees and Department of Defense contractors remain in Viet Nam; U.S. casualties in the past year totaled only one. However, one American was captured during Saigon's recent naval battle with the Chinese (see following story).

For the South Vietnamese, however, the future is likely to be as grim as the past. Last week former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird glumly predicted: 'The war in Southeast Asia will go on for perhaps another 20 years. It has gone on for 30 years already."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.