By John Pilger
Socialistworker.org
Wednesday, Dec 8, 2010
THE RAIN sheeted
down, time washed away. I looked down from the rooftop in Saigon where,
more than a generation ago, in the wake of the longest war of modern
times, I had watched silent, sullen streets awash.
The foreigners
were gone, at last. Through the mist, like little phantoms, four
children ran into view, their arms outstretched. They circled and weaved
and dived; and one of them fell down, feigning death. They were
bombers.
This was not
unusual, for there is no place like Vietnam. Within my lifetime, Ho Chi
Minh's nationalists had fought and expelled the French, whose tree-lined
boulevards, pink-washed villas and scaled-down replica of the Paris
Opera, were façades for plunder and cruelty; then the Japanese, with
whom the French colonists collaborated; then the British, who sought to
reinstall the French; then the Americans, with whom Ho had repeatedly
tried to forge an alliance against China; then Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge,
which attacked from the West; and finally the Chinese, who, with a
vengeful nod from Washington, came down from the north. All of them were
seen off at immeasurable cost.
I walked down into
the rain and followed the children through a labyrinth to the Young
Flower School, an orphanage. A teacher hurriedly assembled a small
choir, and I was greeted with a burst of singing. "What are the words of
the song?" I asked Tran, whose father was a GI. He looked gravely at
the floor, as 9-year-olds do, before reciting words that left my
interpreter shaking her head. "Planes come no more," she repeated, "do
not weep for those just born...the human being is evergreen."
The year was 1978.
Vietnam was then being punished for seeing off the last American
helicopter gunship, the war's creation; the last B-52 with its ladders
of bombs silhouetted against the flash of their carnage; the last C-130s
that had dumped, the U.S. Senate was told, "a quantity of toxic
chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population," destroying
much of the ecosystem and causing a 'fetal catastrophe"; the last of a
psychosis that made village after village a murder scene.
And when it was
all over on May Day 1975, Hollywood began its long celebration of the
invaders as victims, the standard purgative, while revenge was policy.
Vietnam was classified as "Category Z" in Washington, which imposed the
draconian Trading with the Enemy Act from the First World War. This
ensured that even Oxfam America was barred from sending humanitarian
aid.
Allies pitched in.
One of Margaret Thatcher's first acts on coming to power in 1979 was to
persuade the European Community to halt its regular shipments of food
and milk to Vietnamese children. According to the World Health
Organization, a third of all infants under five so deteriorated
following the milk ban that the majority of them were stunted or likely
to be. Almost none of this was news in the west.
Austerity, grief
at the millions dead or missing, and an incredulity that the war was no
more became the rhythms of life in a forgotten country. The "democracy"
the Americans had invented and life-supported in the south, which once
accounted for half of Amnesty's worldwide toll of tortured political
prisoners, had collapsed almost overnight. The roads out of Saigon
became vistas of abandoned boots and uniforms. "When I heard that it was
over," said Thieu Thi Tao Madeleine, "my heart flies."
Still wearing the
black of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which the Americans called
the Vietcong, she walked with a limp and winced as she smiled. The
"Madeleine" was added by her French teachers at the Lycee in Saigon
which she and her sister Thieu Thi Tan Danielle had attended in the
1960s. Aged 16 and 13, "Mado" and "Dany" were recruited by the NLF to
blow up the Saigon regime's national intelligence headquarters, where
torture was conducted under tutelage of the CIA.
On the eve of
their mission, they were betrayed and seized as they cycled home from
school. When Mado refused to hand over NLF names, she was strung upside
down and electrocuted, her head held in a bucket of water. They were
then "disappeared" to Con Son Island, where they were shackled in "tiger
cages": cells so small they could not stand; quick lime and excreta
were thrown on them from above.
At the age of 16,
Dany etched their defiance on the wall: "Notre bonjour a nos chers at
cheres caramades." The words are still there.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE OTHER day, I
returned to Vietnam, whose agony I reported for almost a decade. A poem
was waiting in my room in the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Typed in
English, it was a "heartfelt prayer" for "the stones [of life] getting
soft," and ended with, "I'm still living, struggling...please phone."
It was Mado,
though I prefer her Vietnamese name, Tao. We had lost touch; I knew of
her work at the Institute of Ecology, her marriage to another NLF
soldier, and the birth of a son against all the odds of the damage done
to her in the tiger cages.
Through the throng
of tourists and businessmen in the Caravelle lobby navigated diminutive
Dany, now 57. Tao was waiting in a taxi outside. Five years ago, Tao
suffered a stroke and lost the use of her voice and much of her body,
but these have now returned, and although she needs to take your arm,
she is really no different from when she told me her heart "flies." We
drove past the sentinels of the new Vietnam, the hotels and apartment
blocks under construction, then turned into a lane where wood smoke
rose, and children peered and frogs leapt in the beam of our headlights.
The walls of Tao's
home are a proud montage of struggle and painful gain: she and Dany at
the Lycee Marie Curie; the collected exhortations of Ho; the letters of
comrades long gone. It all seemed, at first, like flowers preserved
between the pages of a forgotten book.
But no: these here
the very icons and inspirations of resistance that new generations must
recreate all over again, for while battlegrounds change, the enemy does
not. "Each time we are invaded," she said, "we fight them off. At the
same time we fight to keep our soul. Isn't that the lesson of Vietnam
and of history?"
I was once told a
poignant story by a Frenchman who was in Hanoi during the Christmas 1972
bombing. "I took shelter in the museum of history," he said, "and
there, working by candlelight, with the B-52s overhead, were young men
and women earnestly trying to copy as many bronzes and sculptures as
they could. They told me, 'Even if the originals are destroyed,
something will remain, and our roots will be protected.'"
History, not
ideology, is a living presence in Vietnam. Here, the experience of
history forged a communal ingenuity and patience to the extreme human
limits. The NLF leadership in the south was an alliance of Catholics,
liberals, Buddhists and communists, and most of those who fought in the
northern army were peasant nationalists. With its structures and
disciplines, communism was the means by which Vietnam's protracted wars
of independence were fought and won.
This is
appreciated by Vietnamese today who idly refer to "the communist period"
as if the party was no longer in power. What matters here is Vietnam.
Visit the museums in Hanoi, and it is clear that the word Ho Chi Minh
never stopped using was "independence": "the right you never surrender."
In retirement, President Dwight Eisenhower wrote that had his
administration not delayed (sabotaged) the national elections agreed at
the United Nations conference on Indochina in Geneva in 1954, "possibly
80 percent of the population would have voted for Ho."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I THOUGHT about
this on the journey back from Tao's. More than 20 years of war would not
have happened. As many as 3 million people would have lived. No babies
would have been deformed by Agent Orange. No feet would have been blown
off by the cluster bombs that were tested here.
On the overnight
train to Danang, I could tell the bomb craters that joined together,
leaving not even Pompeiis of war, except perhaps on a distant rise the
gravestones of the anti-aircraft militia. They were often young women
like Mado and Dany. In Hanoi, I took a taxi to Kham Thiem Street, which I
first saw in 1975, laid to waste by B-52s, which had struck every third
house. A block of flats where 283 people died is now a monument of a
mother and child. There are fresh flowers; the traffic thunders by.
Sitting in a café
with these unnecessary ghosts, I read that Britain's military chief,
Gen. Sir David Richards, had called for NATO "to plan for a 30- or
40-year role" in Afghanistan. NATO is said to spend $50 million for
every Taliban guerrilla it kills, and cluster bombs are still a
favorite. The general expressed his care for the Afghan people. The
French and Americans also said they cared for the "gooks" they killed in
industrial quantities.
When I was last in
Vietnam 15 years ago, making a film, my only brush with officialdom was
the Ministry of Culture's concern that the footage I had shot at My
Lai, where hundreds of mostly women and children were slaughtered, might
offend the Americans. In Saigon, the War Crimes Museum has been renamed
the War Remnants Museum. Outside, tourists are offered pirated copies
of the Lonely Planet guide, with its tendentious devotion to an American
sense of "Nam."
Perhaps the
Vietnamese can afford to be generous, but the reason, I think, runs
deeper. Since Dai Thang, "the great victory," the policy has been to end
a seemingly endless state of siege.
Color and energy
have arrived like breaking waves; Hanoi, with its mist-covered lakes and
boulevards once pocked with air-raid shelters, is now a gracious,
confident, youthful city. There is the kind of freedom that ignores,
navigates and circumvents the old Stalinist strictures. The newspapers
take officials to task and damn corruption, but then, occasionally,
there is the bleakest of headlines: "Alleged agitator to face trial." Cu
Huy Ha Vu, 53, has been charged with "illegal actions against the
state." Such is an ill-defined line you dare not cross.
Bill Clinton came
to lunch at my hotel in Hanoi. He runs an AIDS charity that does work in
Vietnam. In 1995, as the first modern-era American president to visit
Vietnam, he "normalized relations." That meant Vietnam was allowed to
join the World Trade Organization and qualify for World Bank loans
provided it embraced the "free market," destroyed its free public
services and paid off the bad debts of the defunct Saigon regime: money
which had helped bankroll the American war.
The reparations
agreed to by President Richard Nixon in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords
were ignored. Normalization also meant that foreign investors were
offered tax-free "economic processing zones" with "competitively priced"
(cheap) labor.
The Vietnamese
were finally being granted membership in the "international community"
as long as they created a society based on inequity and exploited labor,
and abandoned the health service that was the envy of the developing
world, with its pioneering work in pediatrics and primary care, along
with a free education system that produced one of the world's highest
literacy rates.
Today, ordinary
people pay for health care and schools, and the elite send their
children to expensive schools in Hanoi's "international city" and poach
scholarships at American universities.
Whereas farmers in
difficulty could once depend on rural credit from the state (interest
was unknown), they must now go to private lenders, the usurers who once
plagued the peasantry.
And the government
has welcomed back the Monsanto company and its genetically modified
seeds. Monsanto was one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange, which gave
Vietnam its chemical Hiroshima. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court
rejected an appeal by lawyers acting for more than 3 million Vietnamese
deformed by Agent Orange. One of the justices, Clarence Thomas, worked
as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN HIS seminal
Anatomy of a War, the historian Gabriel Kolko says that the party of Ho
Chi Minh enjoyed "success as a social movement based largely on its
response to peasant desires." He now says that its surrender to the
"free market" is a betrayal.
His disillusion is
understandable, but the need to internationalize a war-ruined country
was desperate, along with building a counterweight to China, the ancient
foe. Unlike China, and despite the new Gucci emporiums in the center of
Hanoi and Saigon, the Vietnamese have not yet gone all the way with the
brutalities of "tiger" or crony capitalism.
Since 1985, the
rate of malnutrition among children has almost halved. And tens of
thousands of those who fled in boats have quietly returned without "a
single case of victimization," according to the EU official who led the
assistance program in 1995. In many parts of the country, forests are
rising again and the sound of birds and the rustle of wildlife are heard
again, thanks to a re-greening program initiated during the war by
Professor Vo Quy of Vietnam National University in Hanoi.
For me, keeping at
bay the forces that pour trillions into corrupt banks and wars while
destroying the means of civilized life is Vietnam's last great battle.
That the party elite respects, perhaps fears, a people who, through the
generations, have devoted themselves to throwing off oppressors is
evident in the state's often ambivalent responses to unauthorized
strikes against ruthless foreign employers. "Are we in a Gorbachev
phase?" said a journalist. "Or maybe the party and the people are
watching each other for now. Remember always, Vietnam is different."
On my last day in
Saigon, I walked along Dong Hoi, no longer a street of hustlers and
beggars, bar girls and shambling GIs looking for something in the cause
of nothing. Then, I would stroll past the Hotel Royale and look up at
the corner balcony on the first floor and see a stocky Welshman, his
camera resting on his arm. A greeting in Welsh might drift down, or his
take-off of an insane colonel we both knew.
Today, the balcony
and the Royale are gone, and Philip Jones Griffiths died two years ago.
He was perhaps the most gifted and humane photographer of any war.
Single-handed, he tried to stop a "search and destroy" operation that
would kill a huddled group of women and children, eliciting from an
American artillery offer the memorable response: "What civilians?"
One of his finest
photographs is a Goya-like picture of a captured NLF soldier, terribly
wounded and surrounded by the large boots of his captors, yet undefeated
in his humanity. Such is Vietnam.
First published at JohnPilger.com [2].
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Columnist: John Pilger
John Pilger is a
renowned investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker who was called
"the most outstanding journalist in the world today" by the Guardian.
He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Freedom Next
Time: Resisting the Empire [3], a collection of investigations into the
effects of war crimes and globalization. His books and films are
featured at JohnPilger.com [4].
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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[1] http://socialistworker.org/department/Opinion/John-Pilger
[2] http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/vietnam-the-last-battle-john-pilger-reports-from-saigon
[3]
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