My wife, Nguyen thi Ngoc, and her family lived on Le Van Sy, a long straight road that runs from Tan Son Nhat airport to the centre of Saigon. Shortly before the end her brother, an air force lieutenant based at Phan Rang, 200 miles north-east, telephoned to say that their lives were about to get much harder. She must abandon her studies and seek work. A few days later he was dead, killed when his base was shelled by the approaching North Vietnamese army. It would be some weeks before their distraught father, trapped in Kontum in the central highlands, which had already fallen, learnt that his son was dead.
In normal times, Le Van Sy bustled with activity: shops, markets, a steady stream of traffic, mostly Honda motorbikes. In the final days, however, the traffic consisted mainly of refugees from the fighting in the surrounding countryside. A few doors down, one of the helicopters that had been commuting between the US embassy and the airport crash-landed on the roof of a neighbour’s house and remained there, silhouetted against the skyline. A symbol of the coming collapse.
On the last day an eerie calm descended. The shops were shuttered, the markets empty, the traffic reduced to a trickle. Then, from the direction of the airport, the rumble of tanks. One, on the lookout for snipers, put a shell clean through the upper floor of Ngoc’s house. The building shook to its foundations as the family cowered on the ground floor, fearing it was about to collapse.
The house was tall and thin, like a bird cage, crammed with relatives who had fled the central highlands, altogether maybe 30 people. By lying flat on the floor and peering under the shutters, they could gauge what was happening in the street outside from the feet of passers-by. At first, they could see the boots of the Southern army. Then a pause, a sudden quiet. Then feet in rubber sandals, made from old car tyres. The bo doi, the army of North Vietnam, had arrived. That was the moment the occupants of 260 Le Van Sy knew that the war was over.
Saigon changed hands with remarkable ease. Fears of street-to-street fighting proved unfounded. Instead, the Southern army simply melted away. In a scene that would be televised around the world, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace where the cabinet of the old regime was waiting to surrender.
In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.
The newcomers and the citizens of Saigon eyed each other warily. First impressions were surprisingly upbeat. The occupying army was well-organised and highly disciplined. Looting and disorder were kept to a minimum. Long-lost relatives who had “regrouped” in the north reappeared, reuniting families who had been divided for more than 30 years. Before long idealistic groups of young people were volunteering their services, cleaning the streets, sweeping away the detritus of the old regime.
Once liberation euphoria had worn off, however, a new reality began to dawn. The new authorities had brought with them a vast, paranoid security apparatus which operated on the basis that all foreigners were spies and anyone who had ever had contact with foreigners, Americans especially, was a potential spy. Soldiers, policemen, politicians and officials of the old regime were ordered to report for re-education. The lower ranks were given to believe that this would only be for a few days, but many were held for years. Some never returned, dying of malaria and dysentery in remote labour camps.
Mr Quang, Ngoc’s teacher of English, a kindly man who had worked as an administrator for the local police, disappeared for six years, returning with one arm paralysed from a stroke only to find that his wife had abandoned him. He ended up sleeping on the pavement in Saigon and eventually fled the country by boat. One of her schoolteachers, a member of the former ruling party, disappeared for 10 years. Families who had lost their breadwinner struggled to survive.
Loudspeakers appeared on every street corner blasting out patriotic music from dawn to dusk, interspersed with propaganda — claims of ever rising production, increased output per hectare and so on, belied by the fact that every day the economic situation was getting worse.
Technocrats in positions of responsibility were initially encouraged to remain in post and to train less experienced northern cadres. Little did they know they were training their replacements. A US-trained senior air traffic controller, dispatched to Hanoi to teach his opposite numbers, found himself redundant after a couple of years. He ended up running a soup stall where, ironically, his less experienced former colleagues came to consult him about problems at work.
In Dalat, a former French hill station, the manager of the Palace Hotel, where Ngoc and I spent our honeymoon, was dismissed and replaced by a Soviet trained apparatchik. Unsurprisingly the quality of the service nosedived. Everywhere the story was the same.
In Kontum, the town in the central highlands where Ngoc and her eight siblings were brought up and where her father had created a successful coffee plantation, the representatives of the new order were even more narrow-minded than those in Saigon. Anyone providing employment was deemed an exploiter. Le Ngoc Thanh, a former Viet Minh soldier in the war against the French and the best man at our wedding, was the owner of a thriving transport business. He was allowed to keep only one of his trucks on condition that he drove it himself.
One of Ngoc’s uncles, who had built up a successful tailoring business, was ordered to hand over all but one of his sewing machines and his entire stock of textiles. Overnight he was ruined. In years to come, former businessmen were invited to reclaim their assets, but the change came too late for Ngoc’s uncle. He died of TB. Money that should have been spent on medicine was being used to keep the family afloat.
Ngoc’s father had been determined to hang on to his plantation. It was his life’s work and he had long dreamt that it would provide security for his family in retirement. For several years he struggled to keep it going, but his efforts were in vain. Like all farmers he was obliged to sell most of his produce to the state at artificially low prices. Supplies of fertiliser and spare parts for his equipment dried up. His coffee bushes became less productive with age and he could not afford to replace them.
Eventually, under pressure from Ngoc’s mother, he sold the plantation for about £2,000 and the family went back to making pastries for a living as they had done as refugees from the French war many years earlier.
Corruption became endemic. Any halfway successful business was at risk from predatory tax collectors. Even the simplest transactions required “presents” for officials. Official salaries were so low that it was virtually impossible for an honest public servant to survive. Transactions that had once been simple now became complex.
There seemed to be no end in sight. Runaway inflation and a series of devaluations wiped out savings. People who were once prosperous faced ruin. Seeing no prospects for themselves or their children, those with skills marketable in the outside world began to look for a way out. Many left legally, sponsored by relatives in America or Europe; others took to the boats, selling whatever they possessed in order to finance the journey.
Preparations were made in great secrecy. Friends and neighbours vanished overnight without a word to anyone. A vast underground network of smugglers developed. The risks were high. Detection meant imprisonment. Many of the boats were unseaworthy and disappeared in the Gulf of Thailand. Others were attacked by pirates. Unknown thousands perished, among them two of Mr Thanh’s much-loved children.
In fairness, this catastrophe was by no means entirely self-inflicted. The southern regime was an entirely artificial construct, completely dependent on American aid that ceased overnight when the regime fell. Just about everything — oil, fertiliser, food — had been imported. By the end the Saigon regime was even importing rice. “We were a ginger ale economy that liked to drink champagne,” remarked an acquaintance who used to be prime minister.
In the outside world, goodwill towards the new regime soon dissipated as waves of refugees fled to neighbouring countries. The US government behaved badly from the outset, imposing economic sanctions, blocking Vietnam’s admission to the UN and imposing a trade embargo that lasted almost 20 years. Today the US is one of Vietnam’s main trading partners, although lately it has threatened to impose a 46 per cent tariff rate — as if pounding the country to smithereens was not enough.
As the 1970s wore on, Ho Chi Minh’s dream of building a country “ten times more beautiful” was foundering in the face of a litany of new disasters — floods, typhoons and new wars with China and Cambodia. Cambodia, like Vietnam, was now under new management — the Khmer Rouge, led by a shadowy elite, who were in the process of starving and murdering perhaps a third of the population, sending thousands of refugees fleeing into Vietnam and Thailand.
Before long a border war developed with the Khmer Rouge, who had long dreamt of recreating the ancient Khmer empire, launching raids deep into Vietnam, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of farmers and their families. Initially, the government played down this conflict with a supposedly “brother” state, hoping territorial disputes could be settled by negotiation. By late 1978 they lost patience and invaded, within a few days overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime and setting up what was, for all practical purposes, a puppet government.
Why, I asked Vietnam’s foreign minister, Mr Thach, didn’t you appeal to the UN when you were attacked by the Khmer Rouge, instead of invading? “We do not have such a high regard for the UN as you do,” he said.
“How so?”
His reply was devastating. “Because during the last 40 years we have been invaded by four of the five permanent members of the security council.”
By the mid-1980s, word began to reach the old men in Hanoi that all was not well. With the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, their allies in Russia and eastern Europe began to discover market forces and even a degree of free speech. Vietnam, too, began to develop its own tentative version of glasnost and perestroika. Gradually, the party began to relax its grip on the economy. Younger technocrats started to replace Soviet-trained apparatchiks.
The Vietnamese are natural entrepreneurs. Once the dead hand of the state was lifted a hundred flowers began to bloom. There was an outbreak of market forces that not even Mrs Thatcher would recognise, although opportunities for corruption have also multiplied. Some of it on an epic scale. In April last year Truong My Lan, a female property developer, was sentenced to death after being convicted of defrauding one of the country’s largest banks of a staggering $12bn. Successive anti-corruption campaigns have brought down two presidents and two deputy prime ministers, but the problems persist. Long delayed and much needed metro systems in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have been mired in allegations of corruption.
The other big cloud on the horizon is relations with China. The Chinese have territorial disputes with just about all their neighbours, not least Vietnam where they lay claim to vast swaths of what the Vietnamese call the East Sea. Vietnamese fishermen are regularly harassed and sometimes arrested by Chinese naval gun boats. The Vietnamese government does its best to play down such incidents. The last thing anyone wants is another war with China.
Like China, Vietnam remains a one-party state and, although there is a degree of free speech, the suggestion that any party other than the communists is capable of ruling can still get you into trouble. As in other Asian countries, there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, but for most people living standards have risen dramatically and there is now a burgeoning middle class. Among them my wife’s relatives.
Some years ago, when I visited Hanoi with a parliamentary delegation, the British ambassador remarked, “After a terrible history, this is the happiest time anyone can remember.”
“What about democracy?” demanded one of the Tories.
To which the ambassador replied: “Vietnamese have a very low expectation of government. They just want the government to get off their back. Which it is beginning to do.” There is still some way to go.
Chris Mullin first reported from Vietnam as a journalist more than 50 years ago and has been a frequent visitor since. He was the MP for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010
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