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derivative filename/jpeg
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363-07030 to 363-07047.pdf
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Digital Object Identifier
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363-07030 to 363-07047
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Title
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Article about Communist usurpations of rural governments
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Description
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Original title: "NLF", Keever's title: For the 'Shadow' Government, 'Communists Even Organize Little Children into Guards'", Article draft about how Communist forces set up government authorities in villages and rural areas, for the Christian Science Monitor
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AI Usage Disclosure
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Draft transcripts were automatically generated via Google Document AI and are currently under review. Please report significant errors to Archives & Special Collections at archives@unl.edu.
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Transcript
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Saigon, Vietnam
June 5, 1967
NLF-page l
SAIGON--The Vietnamese village elder stroked his straggly,
grey beard and told the occhilling story of how the "shadow"
government of the Viet Cong seizes power in the embattled
countryside.
"Even within three weeks--and without troops--the Viet Cong
can seize control of a village and occreate a new society," began
the elder who had recently escaped from a Communist-controlled
village situated near American troop cantonments. "Even with only
armed secret cells of men still working in the underground they
can organize the population into associations and seize control
without even the government village/cchief knowing it. So how
can we expect American troops to know it--or stop-stop it?"
(More)
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- Page 2
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NLF-page 2
The nervous villager continued, "The Communists even use
women as ifh fighters. To go from village to village, the people
must have a Viet Cong paper; even the Catholic priests must have
one. And who does the population have to present their papers to?
The children. The Communists even organize the little children
as guards to checc check the papers. Even the little children
spied on where the people go and whom they talked to and reported
everything to the Communists."
Explaining how the Communists organize a village, the
old man said,
"First they have cells of a few men. Then they
try to organize associations. They have associations for the youth,
for the women, for the old people, for the peasants. So everyone
becomes a member of at least one association. The Viet Cong work
hard with the young peope people, especull especially the ten
or eleven year old children.
(More)
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NLF-page 3
"The Communists never let the people have any free time--
they always keep the minds busy. Work during the day; study in t
the night. Sometimes the people study from eight in the evening
until four in the mo4 morning. They study Marxism-Leninism.
Through terrorism and propaganda, once they get hold of the
people, then they use the second theme of social injustice to
denounce poverty. Then a tenant turns against his landowner and
a servant against his master and the poor against the rich. All
former bonds of the past are broken.
(More)
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NLF--page 4
"The most effective weapon of the Viet Cong is to sow
suspicion among the people, so everyone distrusts everyone else.
This is subversion. Even people in the same family distrust
each other. They use the Buddhists to spy on the Buddhists and
the Catholics to sp spy on the Catholics. They use the new
Catholic converts to go to confessional--not to confess genuinely
but to know more about the thinking of the priest--then even the
Catholic priest does not know which one is a true Catholic and
which one is a false Catholic. It was a Catholic, a new
convert,
who assassinated a Catholic priest in my village.
(More)
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- Page 5
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NLF--page 5
He concid concluded:
"And so, even the Catholic priests
can never thrust their Catholic flock again. The situation is
like a bowl of rice filled with ants--one can not separate the
ants from the rice. Maybe the only way is to destroy both the
rice and the ants."
Militarily, it is said, Vietnam is a war without a frontline;
but, as a corollary, politically, the frontline is everywhere.
"The frontline is in the heart of every Vietnamese," one intellectual
explained recently. "Each Vietnamese has a crisis of conscience--
should he support the anti-Communist Americans or should he
support his own people, the Vietnamese, even if they are Communist?
This is the question each Vietnamese is asking himself."
(More)
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NLF--page 6
South Vietnam, the battlefield of opposing Communist and
anti-Communist armies, is also a country of two governments--the
American-supported Saigon regime and the Communist-dominated
it is
"shadow" government. Throughout much of the countryside,
the Red-run "shadow"
government that functions in reality. A/ 1
lawyer named Nguyen Huu Tho is the Communist \ chiefs. The 40-some
provinces of South Vietnam have in reality two province chiefs, one
representing the Saigon government; one кax representing the
National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFLSVN)-comm
commonly called the Viet Cong.
This sh "shadow"
9
ES
government
operations its own schools,
erects bridges and hamlet defences, collects more taxes than the
Saigon regime,
Operations first-aid wards, broadcasts regularly
from a clandestine radio station and has organized its own press
agency.
(More)
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NLF--page 7
Even in the government con controlled sections of the country,
N/
including the prospering cities, the vietic Cong are
know to
have infiltrated almost every fabric of life--the Vietnamese
government, police, armed forces, the schools and universities,
the religious, medical and civic organizations including even
the Boy and Girls
Scouts.
If the Communists choose not
to use armed terroristic attacks, then they resort to political
warfare, which breaks down into legal, illegal and semi-legal
aspects.
The story of Communist political subversive warfare in South
Vietnam began in 1954, when the Geneva Agreements were signed,
ending the Freney French Indo-China War and dividing the country
at the seventeenth parallel until a national referendum could be
held in 1956 to determine the reunification of the country.
(More)
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NLF--page 8
From 1954 to mid-1956, the open policy of the Viet Cong
was to abide by the Geneva agreements in an attempt to take over
LEGAL,
the South through peaceful means.
But,
when the late President
Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold the national referendum, the
Communists continued their political struggle, but shifted
from legal to subversive tactics. They infiltrated the national
police, not to on convert it openly, but to gather intelligence
data. Communist cells in the villages became secret societies;
the Communist Party apparatus went underground. By 1957, the
Communists shifted to illegal political activities and intensified
their political terrorism by killing anti-Communist village chiefs
and police officials.
(More)
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NLF--page 9
Then, an important North Vietnamese Communist Party leader
named Le Duan submitted a long report on the situation in his
native South and concluded that the Communists could not reverse
the anti-Communist trend by political action alone, and advocated
armed military struggle. It took two more years for the Communist
Party to ratify his recommendations.
In early 1960, North Vietnamese
President Ho Chi Minh made a trip to Peking and Moscow and presumably
asked approval and support f by the the other two major parties.
After his return, the General Assembly of the party legalized
the previous resolution to support the guerrillas in the South.
This meant that Ho Chi Minh had received the green light from
Peking and/or Moscow.
(More)
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- Page 10
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NLF-page 10
Shortly after the famed Moscow-Peking trip, Communist troops
in the South had chewed up a Vietnamese government battalion in
Tayninh province--still considered to be the Communist military
command headquarters.
Several months later, on December 20th,
in the swampy Plain of Reeds southwest of Saigon, a provisional
congress was held to decide about the creation of the National
Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The top leadership
was appointed. Lawyer Nguyen Huu Tho was named chairman--a
figurehead position. Five vice-chairmen were named, along with
the powerful secretary-general, professor Nguyen Van Hieu,
known internally and internationally as a Communist Party member.
(More)
1960,
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NLF- page 11
During this provional provisional congress,
the history of South Vietnam, and later America,
which soon changed
the important
Communist leaders of the South approved a ten-point program from
which they have never yet veered. This program included:
overthrowing of the American "imperialists" and the "dictatorial"
regime of Ngo Dinh Diem (he was topped three years later);
producing "a broad and progressive democracy," abolishing the
"economic monopoly of the United States and its henchmen,"
"carrying out land rent reduction and advancing tw toward land
reform,"
"eleiminating the enslaving and depraved United States-style
culture," "abolishing the system of American military advisors
and eliminating foreign bases in Vietnam, carrying out a foreign
policy of peace and neutrality, advancing toward peaceful re
reunification of the Fatherland."
(More)
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NLF- page 12
After the initial 1960 provisional conference,
six
the
advancement of the NFLSVN pivoted around five other significant
turning points. They are:
1. On January 15, 1961, the official formation of the
Liberation Army, often called the Viet Cong troops.
2. On January 1, 1962, the founding of the Peoque
People's Revolutionary Party (Communist) in South Vietnam, thus
creating a separate identif identify from the North Vietnamese
Lao Dong (Communist) Party.
3.
From February 16-March 13, 1962, the first official,
as distinct from provisional, congress of the Liberation Front.
4. In 1962, the Viet Cong set up a "unified" command,
pulling together and strengtheing their scattered guerrilla
organization under one general headquarters.
5. In 1964, the first combat units from North Vietnam--
as distinct from individual cadre infiltration--were introduced
int9 into South Vietnam.
6. In early 1967, the North Vietnamese Army assumed command
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NLF- page 13
When the NFLSVN was founded in 1960, the infa initiating
(Communist)
force of the creation was the Lao Dong 'Party of North Vietnam,
probably under the personal direction of hannann the powerful,
pro-Peking leader Le Duan. Official statutes of the Communist
Party, dated in 1961 and stamped with the Lao Dong seal, outlin3d
outlined the requirements for Party membership in South Vietnam.
This valuable document, captured by Vietnamese government $91
soldiers, also specified that commanders of the Liberation Army
(or the Viet Cong) down to the rank of company commander must
be members of the Communist Party--at that time the Lao Dong Party
of the North.
But,
within each unit of the Liberation Army, the
military commander would always be sukurdinham of subordinate
4
political rank to the political commissar who was an ine integral
part of each unit.
(More)
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NLF-page 14
By the spring of 1962, however, the Lao Dong Party in
North Vietnam, according to the most informed sources in Saigon,
created a Southern-style Communist Party in South Vietnam, which
became known as the Rexainthaman People's Revolutionary Party.
While the North Vietnamese leaders took great pains to effect
a separate identity between the Northern and the Southern elements
of the Communist Party, the best sources in Saigon believe they
are simply parts of the same whole, that direct links exist
between them, and that the People's Revolutionary Party is not
only an extension of, but also a creation of, the North Vietnamese
Lao Dong Party.
Likewise, the National Front for the Liberation of South
Vietnam is organized in the identical manner as other orthodox
Communist front organizations,
with subsidiary, or satellite,
groupings screening the secret, underground Communist Party heart
of the structural fre framework.
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NLF- page 15
Horizontally, the structure of the NFLSVN has four main
components, of unequal importance and numbers. They are:
Associations (peasants, youth, women, workers etc.); political
Political Parties (Radical Socialist, Democrat and the Communist
People's Revolutionary Party); the People's Revolutionary Party
Youth League (comparable to the Lao Dong Youth in North Vietnam
and the Komsomol in Soviet Union for adolescents of 15 to 25
years of age) and the Liberation Army.
(More)
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NLF- page 16
Vertically, the pyramid-shaped structure of the Front
operates at five levels: the Gene Central Committee, of which
the seven-man Presidium is the key element; the nine inter-zones;
40
the provinces (more than )%B
the villages (about 2,500).
the districts (more than 250);
Paralleling the organization of
the Front at every echelon is the Communist People's Revolutionary
Party, which has secret, covert agents and cadre unknown to
mthe Front or to other Party members.
Orders from the top
and recommendations from the bottom flow in two-way traffic
as is standard Communist operation.
(More)
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NLF- page 17
The Communist Party organization not only parallels that of
the Front, organization,
but also that of the Liberation Army,
The Party is in a constant process of inter-acting and dominating
the decision-making processes of both the Front and the Army up
and down the command ladder.
The Communist People's Revolutionary Party thus dominates
both the Front and the Liberation Army in terms of leadership,
but not necessarily in terms of numbers. The Communist Party,
while it views the Front as a coalition of non-Communists,
and
created
continues to dominate the non-Communist rank-and-file within
the Army,
communist
the two non-Communist political parties and the
And
associations of youth, peasants, women. Informed sources say
the Communist Party cadre have not only created these satellite
organizations, but have also infit infiltrated their members
into them, sometimes unknown even to other covert Communist
Party members.
(More)
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NLF- page 18
It seems certain at this time that the Front is unwilling
to join any coalition government that the American-backed Saigon
regime may establish, since themfrom it claims to be and insists
upon being considered the only true representative of the South
Vietnamese people. However, legally, the Front is only a
It
front and has yet chosen to become or claim the status of an
official government which would legally replace that of the
Saigon regime.
-30-
(Note to Editors: The Front is often called the National Liberation
Front for South Vietnam. But Vietnamese sources indicate a more
accurate translation is the one I've used in the article: The
National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The nuances
seem to make some difference to the Vietnamese).
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Date
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1967, Jun. 5
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Subject
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Vietnam War, 1961-1975; Mặt trận dân tộc giải phóng miền nam Việt Nam; Vietnam (Republic)--Politics and government; Civilians in war; Villages--Vietnam; Local government
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Location
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Saigon, South Vietnam
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Coordinates
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10.8231; 106.6311
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Size
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20 x 26 cm
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Container
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B7, F5
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Format
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dispatches
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Collection Number
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MS 363
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Collection Title
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Beverly Deepe Keever, Journalism Papers
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Creator
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Collector
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Keever, Beverly Deepe
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Copyright Information
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These images are for educational use only. To inquire about usage or publication, please contact Archives & Special Collections.
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Publisher
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Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
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Language
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English
