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<h1 id="reader-title">Vietnam Will Win: Unity and the Minorities</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/wilfred-burchett/"
rel="nofollow">Wilfred Burchett</a> - March 7, 2018<br>
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<p>In their approach to the complicated question of South
Vietnam’s racial minorities and religious groups, it is
not surprising that NLF and U.S. policies should be
diametrically opposite. To the classic “divide and rule”
U.S. policies used by all colonialists, the NLF has
replied with a “unite and resist” program. This led them
to solve problems of racial and religious difference for
the first time in the history of the South Vietnamese
people. First they were solved within the NLF
leadership, where the leading racial minority groups,
religions and sects were strongly represented within the
Central Committee, then within Front administrative and
mass organizations and finally by policies of racial and
religious equality put into effect throughout the
NLF-controlled areas. These policies became an object
lesson and a powerful source of attraction for the
Saigon-controlled areas.</p>
<p>Among third world nations with mixed populations, as in
many Latin American countries and in South Vietnam, in
particular, the ethnic minorities occupy the strategic
highlands areas, the natural guerrilla bases used in the
first stages of most armed revolutions. The success of
the NLF in smoothing out racial and religious
contradictions thus was of extremely vital importance.</p>
<p>Former Vietminh cadres have told me that not enough
attention was paid to this question during the
anti-French resistance war and as a remit many
difficulties arose in some of the minority
areas-especially the highly strategic Central Highlands
which run like a spinal column down the whole length of
South Vietnam’s frontiers with Laos and most of the
frontier with Cambodia up to the approaches to the
Mekong Delta. In some areas, at that time, the Vietminh
fell into traps set by France’s “divide and rule”
tactics.</p>
<p>Winning over the tribal minorities is a long-range
task, complicated by the fact that most of them had no
written language, many of their spoken languages were
extremely difficult to learn and – for very good
historical reasons – they deeply mistrusted the <em>Kinh
</em>or ‘Viet’ ethnic majority from the plains. But
during the first resistance, Ho Chi Minh sent
volunteers, mostly youths whose families had been wiped
out by the French, up into the highlands area to
integrate themselves with the tribal peoples, ready to
devote themselves to the long and complicated task of
winning their confidence. It meant adopting their
customs, wearing their hair long, filing down their
teeth in some cases, eating rotted raw meat, learning
the languages and above all studying their conditions
and problems. This was done from 1946-47 on and it
yielded some important results during the first
resistance war. But the time was too short to produce
really effective results. Those cadres with whom I have
spoken have all insisted on the very long, patient
nature of such work.</p>
<p>Tran Dinh Minh, who at 14 years of age had responded to
Ho Chi Minh’s appeal for volunteers to live and work
with the tribes people and who had been with them for 14
years at the time I met him in late 1963, said: “Once
you have gained their confidence, it is forever… They
have a highly developed sense of secrecy, discretion and
loyalty rare to find among other peoples. They never
breathe a word of what a trusted cadre tells them… Even
under the most ferocious torture they will never betray
a secret or the whereabouts of a cadre.”</p>
<p>It was typical of the farseeing conceptions of
Vietnamese revolutionaries that people like Tran Dinh
Minh were sent to study the terrain and to sow seeds
which could only yield harvest 15 or 20 years later.
This investment of cadres was not approached only from
the viewpoint of tribal support for the first resistance
or in expectation of a second resistance war. It was
seen as essential pioneer survey work to get to the root
of tribal problems and aspirations, preliminary to
bringing their living standards up to those of the <em>Kinh
</em>people, with the least possible disruption of
tribal customs. It was the start of a process to bring
them public health and education, starting with the
working out of written scripts for their languages, and
developing into a battle against illiteracy. However, it
is also true that the tribes people occupy the most
strategic areas of South Vietnam, the most suitable for
revolutionary bases and the most important to keep out
of the hands of any enemy. An invader who could firmly
occupy the Central Highlands and convert them into a
safe base area, could dominate South Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos and the southern parts of North Vietnam. The French
and later the Americans understood this very well.</p>
<p>After cadres like Tran Dinh Minh and others had
established confidence by exemplary tribal behavior and
outstanding work in the <em>ray </em>(the
slash-and-burn hillside patches where the tribes people
grow their corn and glutinous rice); and after they had
gained sufficient mastery of the language to understand
tribal history and problems which often lay buried deep
in people’s hearts, to be prodded out after years of
patient searching, only then could they begin quietly
working to settle inter tribal quarrels, then intergroup
quarrels and finally to try to do away with the deep
mistrust the tribes people had for the Vietnamese in the
plains. (Throughout history they had known the latter
only as tax collectors and the police and troops who
came in their wake.)</p>
<p>US-Diem repression<a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a>
in areas where the work of the cadres had been weak
revived the old tribal-Vietnamese animosities, but where
the work had been done well, it brought confirmation of
the fact that the minorities and Vietnamese alike
suffered from the same enemy.</p>
<p>In Phu Yen Province, for instance, where the Banar and
Rhade peoples predominate, “Vietcong suspects” were
rounded up and taken off to be concentrated in
“strategic hamlets” around Xuan Phuoc village in the
highlands and the tribes people from Xuan Phuoc were
rounded up and concentrated in the lowlands. The tribes
people realized that although the oppressors were
Vietnamese, there were also Vietnamese who were
oppressed like themselves and who had been dragged away
from their homes and ancestral villages as they were
dragged from their beloved forests and mountains, both
of them beaten and cursed. As things developed,
militants among the Vietnamese peasants in the lowlands
did their best to ease the lot of the tribes people in
their concentration camp village, at first procuring
some clothing, then gradually organizing mutual help to
stage an uprising. At Xuan Phuoc, the cadres found
little difficulty in setting up contacts between the
“Vietcong suspects” and tribes people in the area.</p>
<p>U.S.-Diem policy was deliberately to foment hatred
between the Vietnamese and the tribes people to the
highest degree, and this was done on a huge scale by
setting up “agricultural colonies” of conscripted
Vietnamese laborers on the richest of the tribal lands,
bulldozing out of existence the forests on which the
existence of the tribes people depended, carving out
coffee and rubber plantations and condemning the tribes
people to living death in concentration camp villages in
the plains which were intolerably stifling and humid for
them.</p>
<p>With the formation of the NLF and its program for an
autonomous zone for the tribes people, similar to the
two such autonomous zones in North Vietnam where ethnic
minorities completely run their own affairs, the work of
uniting the tribespeople themselves and uniting them
with the <em>Kinh </em>was given an important new
stimulus. Intertribal solidarity meetings were organized
at which generation-long feuds were settled merely by
talking things out and arriving at the inevitable
conclusion that it was the French colonialists and their
puppet Bao Dai who had fostered inter tribal quarrels in
their own interests, and that now it was the U.S.
imperialists and their puppet Ngo Dinh Diem who were up
to the same old tricks.</p>
<p>American policy aimed to divide the tribespeople from
the Vietnamese people and from the Saigon government as
well, in order to put them under direct U.S. control.
The Americans knew that the NLF promise of autonomy for
the tribespeople was extremely popular, so they sent in
agents also promising “autonomy” – under American
sponsorship. U.S. attempts to dominate the tribes
people, incidentally, were a source of great contention
between “strong man” Nguyen Khanh and General Harkins
during the period that Khanh was in and out of power in
Saigon. The CIA had ambitious schemes for setting up
Special Forces commando groups composed of tribes
people, wiping out those of military age who refused to
be conscripted and herding the rest of the population
into concentration camps in the plains. U.S. strategists
wanted the Central Highlands for themselves; they wanted
the “montagnards,” as they called the tribes people, in
military formations under U.S. command to be used as
instruments of U.S. policy, entirely bypassing Saigon, a
double cross which even generals Thieu and Ky were not
prepared to accept. The task of the commando units,
which the CIA hoped to establish all over the Central
Highlands, was not only to wrest the area out of Saigon
control, but to suppress the tribes people themselves by
selectively arming one group to suppress another.</p>
<p>This long-range American plan, initiated before an
American Command was set up in Saigon in February 1962,
was described in part in the testimony of Donald Duncan<a
href="#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a> at the second
session of the International War Crimes Tribunal.</p>
<p>“The primary job of Special Forces up to the summer of
1964,” testified Duncan, “was the implementation of the
CIDG [Civilian Irregular Defense Groups] program. This
was started back in 1961 as a means of organizing ethnic
groups within Vietnam, such as various montagnard
tribes, and eventually it came to include the Hoa Hao
and Cao Dai and some people of Cambodian extraction
within Vietnam. The main purpose of this was, starting
with the montagnards, to neutralize their struggle
against the Saigon regime. There have always been
problems between the montagnards and the ethnic
Vietnamese and the Saigon government.</p>
<p>“Hopefully, the idea was to build them into
self-defense units for village self-defense. It had the
added advantage – I happened to read this in an official
report – of being one way of circumventing the Geneva
Agreements of 1954, which prohibited the establishment
of new military bases within the southern zone of
Vietnam. So by calling these things village self-defense
units, or self-defense units, they in fact circumvented
that provision of the agreement…”</p>
<p>Duncan had access to many top secret policy documents
of the Special Forces. The report to which he was
referring must have been drawn up years earlier, because
by mid-1956 the U.S. government had already officially
supported Diem’s repudiation of the Geneva Agreements.
Certainly by the end of 1961, when the first U.S.
helicopter crews started arriving, there were no longer
any scruples about openly establishing “new military
bases” in South Vietnam. Washington’s schemes to convert
the Central Highlands into their main strategic base in
Southeast Asia were possibly worked out immediately
after the Geneva Agreements were signed.</p>
<p>“Of course,” continued Duncan, “the camps they set up
are not in the village. They are invariably set up next
to the village, isolated from it by minefields, punji
stakes, barbed wire, etc. In fact, in many areas the
villagers are not allowed into the camp for security
reasons, meaning they don’t trust the people in the
village they’re defending. And in many cases the strike
force, the combat group of the civilian community
defense effort, was not even from the village itself. In
other words they were imported from other areas of the
country…” And had Duncan been still better informed, he
would have known they were not even from the tribal
groups they were supposed to be “defending.” As to the
CIA role, Duncan testified:</p>
<p>“Originally it was, and it remained so up until 1964, a
CIA program. The CIA having come up with the idea, of
course, did not have the field personnel to conduct the
program in the field. Special Forces were made available
to the CIA for the purpose of running it in the field.
All the funds, the money for the Program, came from CIA
sources, directly or indirectly. Another purpose of the
CIDG program was to try to set up intelligence nets
throughout the countryside emanating from these camps.
Again the funds, the money for the agents, came from CIA
sources…”</p>
<p>Referring to a main camp at Ben Sar Pa, just west of
Ban Mé Thuot in one of the most strategically important
areas of the Central Highlands, Duncan testified: “Of
course the reason for the location of this camp, which
was in a montagnard area, was that they wanted those
people at least pacified, to stop them from harassing
the government or stop the government from harassing
them. You may recall that this is a camp which went out
of existence in 1964. It was one of the camps where the
montagnards’ revolt took place against the South
Vietnamese government. The camp was destroyed by South
Vietnamese Rangers, a company attached to Project
Delta…”<a href="#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a></p>
<p>From the parts of Duncan’s testimony cited, three facts
emerge: that there was a long-standing U.S. interest in
using the montagnards; that montagnard units from one
region were supposed to repress tribes people in another
region; that South Vietnamese troops from the same
Special Forces program were used to suppress the
montagnards. It is difficult to find a clearer
illustration of “divide and rule.”</p>
<p>The montagnard uprising at Ban Mé Thuot took place on
September 20, 1964, when some 2,000 of 4,000 conscript
trainees revolted and took over the whole base. Seizing
six U.S. instructors including the base commander,
Colonel Freund, as hostages, they invaded Ban Mé Thuot.
After taking the radio station, they broadcast demands
for autonomy and threatened to execute the Americans if
any attempt was made to suppress them. Their demands
were partly motivated by the NLF program of an
autonomous zone, partly by FULRO<a href="#_edn4"
name="_ednref4">[4]</a> (discussed in detail below).
This was the biggest insurrection of the ethnic
minorities, but it failed.</p>
<p>While Ranger battalions moved into the area, Freund
bought time. The leaders of the revolt (one of whom
later related the events to me) were told by Freund that
“your trouble comes from the Vietnamese in Saigon, not
from us. We are very decent people and the thing to do
is to put yourselves entirely under us. If Khanh [then
in power in Saigon] doesn’t pay you properly, feed you
properly – we will. You just send a petition to our
ambassador in Saigon that you want to be directly under
the United States. We will look after you. Your idea for
autonomy is very good We’ll help you get it. We don’t
like these Saigon Vietnamese any more than you do. What
you do to them doesn’t worry us…” The remit was that the
Vietnamese instructors were all killed, the Americans
spared and Freund succeeded in turning the revolt into a
temporary U.S. advantage by planting the idea of
removing the montagnards from all vestiges of Saigon
control.</p>
<p>Some of the insurgents made a break for their villages;
about 47, including my informant, took off with the arms
they had seized, to join the NLF; another group joined
up with FULRO and others remained to be rounded up by
the Rangers and herded into other camps. Freund and the
other Americans went unscathed and for a time American
efforts were intensified to gain control of the Central
Highlands from the NLF and Saigon, especially by trying
to capture the FULRO organization which, the revolt
revealed, had strong support among certain of the
montagnards, especially those whom the French had
previously used against the Vietnamese and especially
against the Vietminh.</p>
<p>Although FULRO did represent certain aspirations of the
montagnards<a href="#_edn5" name="_ednref5">[5]</a> and
reflected something of the situation in the Central
Highlands, it was doomed to fail because it was also an
expression of the “divide and rule” policy as it was
totally and blindly anti-Vietnamese. Among its
supporters and behind-the-scenes advisers were some
Frenchmen with sentimental attachments to the tribes
people and who were probably genuinely outraged by the
U.S.-Diem extermination policy. But they also encouraged
the total anti- Vietnamese line of the FULRO leaders
which meant rejecting any cooperation with the NLF,
which was lumped together with the Diem regime as
“Vietnamese” and thus to be shunned.</p>
<p>Elements among the FULRO leadership completely
swallowed the line of the local CIA agents that the
Americans would be their most loyal allies and generous
supporters in their struggle against Vietnamese of any
kind, the Saigon regime, the “Vietcong” or anything in
between.</p>
<p>At the Phnom Penh Conference of the Peoples of
Indochina in Cambodia in March 1965, FULRO leaders
joined in the general condemnation of “U.S. imperialism”
and pledged support for common action by the peoples of
Indochina, but they went back to the Central Highlands
to accept U.S. support for their struggle against
Vietnamese of all categories. The results were
predictable.</p>
<p>When Washington found a new “strong man” in the shape
of Air Marshall Nguyen Cao Ky and the latter squarely
asked whether Washington was supporting a South Vietnam
which included the Central Highlands and the
montagnards, or was supporting the montagnards against
the rest of the country, there was no choice. Washington
officially abandoned the montagnards and the promise of
autonomy given to the FULRO leaders.</p>
<p>Officers and men of FULRO units who turned up fully
armed to present themselves for duty at American
“Special Forces” units found themselves received by
Ranger battalions of the Saigon government, disarmed,
herded behind barbed wire and eventually forced to act
as coolies and arms and baggage carriers for the Saigon
troops.</p>
<p>At the beginning of August 1965, there was another
revolt at Ban Mé Thuot in which Special Forces camp
conscripts also took part. Two hundred of the latter
made off with their arms and were hunted down by
American planes and helicopter-borne troops. In December
of the same year, there was still another revolt which
ended with four FULRO leaders being publicly executed at
Pleiku. This marked the total abandonment of American
support for the tribes people, as such. But it did not
end their recruiting of montagnards into special
mercenary units, entirely under U.S. control and
considered completely expendable.<a href="#_edn6"
name="_ednref6">[6]</a></p>
<p>The Buddhist revolt in Hué-Da Nang in the summer of
1966, like the FULRO movement, was bound to fail – in
spite of support for the Buddhists on the part of Saigon
army units in the northern provinces – for the same
fundamental reasons. They were revolts in isolation,
outside the “unite and resist” conception of the NLF.
(Details of the Buddhist-Army revolt, being much more
widely known than that of the montagnards, are discussed
here only briefly.) Neither the Struggle Movement
Committee set up by the Buddhist hierarchy in Saigon in
April 1966 nor the Buddhist Revolutionary Struggle
Committee set up in Da Nang about the same time was
capable of giving real organized leadership. The FULRO
movement was capable of inspiring regional sentiments,
just as the Buddhist revolt inspired national
sentiments, but both revolts were carried out in
isolation from the far broader national movement which
the NLF represented.</p>
<p>At the time that Saigon troops were closing in on Da
Nang and Hué, during the most critical moment of the
Buddhist revolt, the NLF broadcast appeals over their
Liberation Radio, on May 19 and 20, 1966, offering
united action in the common cause. However, the Buddhist
hierarchy, with Thich Tri Quang as their spokesman,
refused. The movement was crushed, and hundreds of
people, including officers and men of the Saigon army
who had rallied to the Buddhist cause, lost their lives
uselessly.</p>
<p>This was the final proof for many rank-and-file
Buddhist supporters that only the NLF had the necessary
organization and militant spirit to carry the fight
through to the end. The same sort of conclusions were
drawn also by those tribes people from the Central
Highlands who had been misled by FULRO promises of quick
and easy victories, with the United States as an ally.</p>
<p>CIA agents in the Central Highlands – and they included
a certain number clad as missionaries – had grasped that
once the confidence of the montagnards was gained, they
were completely loyal. But the CIA had ignored the
converse, that betrayal of that confidence was repaid by
total hostility. In fact, the Americans had never fully
won the confidence of the tribes people, as the frequent
revolts inside the Special Forces camps demonstrated.
And once the U.S. betrayal was clear for everyone to
see, then montagnard loyalties were lost for
generations. The killing of half a dozen U.S.
missionaries at Ban Mé Thuot during the 1968 Lunar New
Year revolt was symbolic of this.</p>
<p>Once the FULRO movement was bought over, crushed and
discarded by the Americans, tribal chiefs who until then
had remained aloof from the NLF started making contacts.
Patriotic elements within the armed forces in the
northern provinces who had supported, then become
disillusioned by the Buddhist leadership in the Hué-Da
Nang uprisings, also began to develop ties with the NLF.</p>
<p>For many youth among their ranks, the montagnard and
Buddhist revolts clarified the issues and revealed that
isolated uprisings in the end could never succeed and
the future was with those who advocated a unified
national resistance. The events of 1966 swept away
regional, separatist and sectarian illusions, and thus
the ground was prepared for the type of united struggle
expressed in the 1968 Lunar New Year offensive and the
people’s uprising which accompanied it.</p>
<p>On December 6 and 7, 1967, U.S. newspapers carried
headlines such as “Vietcong Massacre” or “Worst Atrocity
Of The War” with appropriate news stories to describe
the alleged killing of 121 “montagnard civilians” by NLF
forces and the burning down of their villages.<a
href="#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[7]</a></p>
<p>What had really happened? NLF forces in a surprise
attack on November 28 wiped out a battalion of the First
U.S. Infantry Division at Bu Dop, capital of Phuoc Long
Province, near the Cambodian border in a valley at the
southern limits of the Central Highlands. A second
battalion from the same division was sent to replace the
one put out of action. On the night of December 2-3, NLF
forces attacked a post held by Saigon forces at Dak Son,
about 9 miles north of Bu Dop, completely destroying it.
The post controlled two “strategic hamlets” in which
some 2,000 montagnards were concentrated.</p>
<p>As usual in such cases, as soon as the military control
post was eliminated, the montagnards tore down the
barbed wire and made off for their mountain villages,
setting fire to their barracks before they left. On
December 3, two companies of Civil Guards set out in
pursuit, shooting down any stragglers until the Civil
Guards encountered an NLF ambush and were annihilated to
the last man, 130 in all. The whole complex of military
posts in the Dac Son area was destroyed. Three days
later, NLF forces attacked the U.S. replacement
battalion about three miles north of Bu Dop, at the same
time making a mortar attack against a nearby Special
Forces camp and a U.S. command post on the local
airfield. The replacement battalion also was put out of
action and the NLF forces occupied the battlefield,
destroying two 105mm artillery pieces and six 106.7mm
mortars, and seizing large quantities of arms and
equipment. Of these actions from December 2 to 8, the
American press reported only the alleged “massacre.”
However, there was a real massacre by U.S. planes which
bombed and strafed some of the escapees in open country
before they could get back to their villages. About
1,000, mainly women and children, eventually crossed the
border into Cambodia. Later the Americans sent in
“missionary” agents to try to win them back.</p>
<p>If one compares the “Vietcong massacre” story with
another published less than a month later by <em>New
York Times</em> correspondent Bernard Weintraub, then
matters appear in their true perspective. Datelined
January 2 from Thanh An (about 15 miles southwest of
Pleiku), Weintraub’s story is headlined “Showcase Camp
for Refugees is Beset by Problems,” and because of its
revealing nature it is quoted at length. Weintraub wrote
as follows:<a href="#_edn8" name="_ednref8">[8]</a></p>
<p>“Three or four times a week, the helicopters bounce
onto the grassy landing pad of the montagnard
resettlement camp here and the visitors climb out –
American Senators and Representatives, retired generals,
columnists, television personalities and movie stars.</p>
<p>“The camp, a showcase project, is on the itinerary of
most visitors. They receive a 10 minute briefing and
trudge past the rows of tin-roofed homes where the
smiling tribesmen wave and eagerly pose for pictures.</p>
<p>“Beneath the apparently untroubled mood of the camp,
however, there are growing problems that are worrying
American officials, who say privately that the
resettlement project is in trouble.</p>
<p>“In the last six months more than 700 tribesmen have
fled the camp, 11 hamlet chiefs have been kidnapped,
Vietcong propaganda has steadily increased, the
Vietnamese rangers guarding the camp have angered the
montagnards and dissatisfied the American advisers….</p>
<p>” ‘They were oppressed by the V.C. in their villages,’
said Maj. Patrick H. Foster, the assistant civic action
officer of the Fourth Division’…they made a request to
be protected.’</p>
<p>“Other American officers say that a major reason for
the move was to create free artillery and air-strike
zones in the villages and that the montagnards were
stunned as the soldiers moved into their villages and
packed them aboard Chinook helicopters for the
relocation site.</p>
<p>” ‘I’ve never seen such fright in my life,’ said one
American officer, who recalled that the tribesmen
carried chickens, pigs and packs of clothing as they
climbed aboard the helicopters…</p>
<p>” ‘The V.C. have no trouble whatsoever coming in here
or going out,’ said one American official.”</p>
<p>I once asked Rechom Brieu of the Jarai ethnic minority,
a member of the NLF’s Central Committee and secretary
general of the General Movement for Autonomy of the Tay
Nguyen,<a href="#_edn9" name="_ednref9">[9]</a> why the
Americans employed Vietnamese troops to guard the
“strategic hamlets” where the tribes people were
detained, in view of the latter’s traditional hostility
toward Saigon troops and U.S. efforts to win over the
montagnards.</p>
<p>“At first they wanted the tribes people to ‘defend’
themselves,” replied Rechom Brieu, a stocky, dark,
smiling man. “They distributed over 10,000 weapons in
the Kontum-Pleiku-Ban Mé Thuot areas alone, and told
them to use them only against the ‘Vietcong.’ They were
good weapons, better than those given to the Vietnamese
puppet troops in the area. This was to impress our
people that the Americans considered the tribes people
superior to the Vietnamese, and that they would look
after them better than Saigon. But the tribes people
handed over plenty of these weapons to us; sometimes
they came themselves with their weapons, sometimes they
just gave them to us; in some cases they lent them and
we handed them back temporarily when we knew the
Americans were going to make an inspection. The
Americans tried to buy the young men as soldiers. If
they were conscripted into the Saigon Army, they got
only 1,500 piastres a month, while the Americans offered
5,000 a month to join units which would be under their
direct control some fell for this, partly because of the
money, partly to avoid serving with the Saigon troops.
But when they met our forces they did their best to
avoid contact; if they had to fire they would fire
wildly. The Americans started taking the weapons back,
arresting – and even executing – some who could not
account for theirs. But they soon stopped that when a
few American advisers disappeared; ‘probably eaten by
tigers,’ our people would say.</p>
<p>“So they brought in Saigon troops to guard the camps.
This was to stop our people from breaking out and going
back to the villages, but also to poison relations
between the tribes people and Vietnamese. Within the
camps they mixed up ethnic groupings, favoring one,
discriminating against another. But it did not work.
Everyone in the camps saw they were oppressed by a
single enemy, the Americans who forced them out of the
forest and bombed their villages. The Vietnamese were
only puppets. Our people knew there were ‘other’
Vietnamese by this time, those of the NLF. Conditions in
the camps forged a new type of solidarity born of common
suffering. Our cadres infiltrated to organize resistance
and struggle for better living conditions within, the
camps themselves. Our policy of ‘unite to resist’ proved
stronger at every level than the enemy’s ‘divide and
rule.’</p>
<p>“In our villages in the liberated areas, we did
everything to get people to unite in work and struggle.
Compared to the controlled areas and camps, it’s really
the difference between night and day. Our men can go
hunting when they want to; grow their rice where they
want to. They can sing and bang their gongs – strictly
forbidden in the controlled areas because the Americans
think they may be signaling – and live a really free
life. Public health, education and economic affairs are
developing at a level and tempo we never dreamed of a
few years ago. In the controlled areas, there is no
hunting, my cultivation is impossible because the <em>rays
</em>are far from the villages and people are allowed to
move only in daylight hours in areas close to the houses
– there is nothing but forced labor, conscription,
taxes, theft, prostitution and corruption. That is why
all the tribes people look toward the liberated areas
and our autonomy movement, in which all tribal groupings
are represented, united now as a single family.”</p>
<p>At that time (August, 1966), Rechom Brieu estimated the
population of the liberated zones in the Central
Highlands at about 600,000 or two-thirds of all the
tribes people, with their own administration and elected
headmen and other officials elected at village, district
and provincial level. (In the Saigon-controlled areas,
all officials were nominally appointed by Saigon – but
actually by the U.S. advisers at provincial and district
level.) NLF units then operating in the area were formed
almost entirely of the ethnic minorities functioning at
company level in separate tribal groups under their own
officers, but integrated at battalion and regimental
level. A few units were officered by Vietnamese cadres
like Tran Dinh Minh, who had identified themselves with
the tribes people for 15 or more years.</p>
<p>During the 1968 Lunar New Year offensive and nationwide
uprising, the tribes people also rose up throughout the
Central Highlands area to destroy the detested stockades
and camps, taking off in tens of thousands back to their
forests and highlands. At the same time their armed
units swept into Pleiku, Ban Mé Thuot, Kontum and Dalat,
striking the most highly guarded enemy sanctuaries,
engaging American and Saigon troops in fierce
hand-to-hand combat, destroying key military
installations, seizing and distributing vast stocks of
arms, sweeping out the U.S.-Saigon administrators and
executing individual Americans and police chiefs who
were singled out because of their especially
bloodthirsty activities.</p>
<p>The Têt uprisings in the Central Highlands as elsewhere
represented an unprecedented triumph for the long,
painful step-by-step development of ‘unite to resist”
policies, initiated by the revolutionaries more than 20
years earlier.</p>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p><a href="#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> See Chapter
11, <em>Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War</em>.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> Donald Duncan
was a highly decorated Special Forces sergeant who had
served as an instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special
Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had
served as an operations and intelligence specialist with
the Special Forces in South Vietnam from March 1964 to
September 1965 and briefed such officials as General
Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador Lodge, General Westmoreland
and even Defense Secretary McNamara on Special Forces
activities.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> Project Delta
was a Special Forces intelligence-gathering operation,
“a special unit” explained Duncan, “because we could no
longer depend on Vietnamese intelligence sources for any
accurate information.” Duncan was associated with
Project Delta because, as he said, “my specific job in
Vietnam was gathering intelligence.”</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> <em>Front Uni
pour La Libération de La Race Opprimée</em> (United
Front for the Liberation of the Oppressed Race).</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[5]</a> Among the
five-point demands formulated at the time of the Ban Mé
Thuot revolt was one that “solutions must be found for
the resettlement villages which have infringed upon the
land of the peoples of the Central Highlands and for the
highland villages which are surrounded by military camps
and as a result do not have enough land to make a
living…”</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[6]</a> The betrayal
and physical liquidation of the FULRO movement is partly
described in literary form, the names of leading
personalities thinly disguised, in <em>Les Petits
Soleils</em> by Erwan Bergot, Editions France Empire,
Paris, 1966.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[7]</a> Editor’s note:
<em>The New York Times</em>, Dec. 7, 1967, reported that
the number killed “was more than 100,” in the first
paragraph of its story, “Civilian Toll Big in Vietcong
Raid.” However, in the third paragraph, quoted here in
full, it was stated in the <em>Time</em>‘s non bylined
account:</p>
<p>“A first report said that 300 civilians had been
killed. This figure was lowered later to about 20. Then
the United States Embassy announced that 47 civilians
had been killed and 40 to 50 hospitalized for burns.”
Disregarding the discrepancy between the two
paragraphs, the <em>Times</em> continued its story,
saying in the fourth paragraph that the number was more
than 100. Then in the seventh paragraph a “spokesman”
for the U.S. Embassy is cited as saying that 49
montagnard Revolutionary Development workers had been in
the hamlet which had been raided and 47 of the 49 were
“missing.” “Revolutionary Development” workers are
CIA-trained agents, a fact not mentioned by the <em>Times</em>.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref8" name="_edn8">[8]</a> <em>New York
Times</em>, January 3, 1968, page 4.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref9" name="_edn9">[9]</a> Tay Nguyen,
literally “Western Plateaux,” is the Vietnamese term for
what in French is known as the “Hauts Plateaux ” and in
English the “Central Highlands.”</p>
<p><strong>NEXT: Chapter 12 – Self-Defense</strong></p>
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