Five years after coming to power, President Ngo Dinh proposed the Diem Resolution in 1959, which was intended to end the success of the guerrilla rebels in South Vietnam. At the time, the rebel activists were all communists and were trying to form ties with Ho Chi Minh’s Communist North Vietnamese government. It is not so. Guerrilla efforts in the South established a broad base. Some were indeed communists, but many were also anti-Diemists. That it was a Catholic day, that it was supported by foreigners, and that it truly assumed the figure of a father, and that its authority was undoubtedly followed. Despite the efforts of American advisers who claimed to have an idea of how to properly treat the South Vietnamese government, Diem often sent these men home without a chance for consideration. To the Vietnamese, Diem carried the seal of American approval, although the US hardly told anyone what Diem had done under his power.
He denounced Buddhism and did not understand the Buddhist way of life of his South Vietnamese people. The villagers wanted to be left alone and excluded from outside encroachment. Ignoring traditional desire, Day uprooted South Vietnamese villagers from their homelands and ancestral graves, leaving them alone within the tightly-secured, central area that was the promise. This Program is called Agroville and will eventually become a Strategic Village Program – strategic for location, security and community within the new village.
The relocation program, started in 1959, was intended to fight the war against communism. In fact, the new and impious towns drove those who were considered under the protection of the government into the arms of clandestine rebels. The group within these new lanes of the Strategic Hamlet program actually provided their new counterinsurgency propaganda, and thus also countered the intentions of the counterinsurgency efforts of the US Government and the regime.
Viet Cong insurgent forces forced President Ngo Dinh Diem to request the relocation of the dispersed South Vietnamese population. Southern Vietnam, unlike the regions of northern and central Vietnam, is more agricultural in its nature and proudly easier. Countless villages were identified, and many were so cut off from government security that the Guerrillas could tax the villagers, launch anti-government propaganda, and count these areas as re-enforcement stations for their new base.
In 1959, the CIA declared that within South Vietnam, the Viet Cong maintained practical control over several regions. Previous government disruptions within the traditionally xenophobic countryside had aggravated the rebel forces. Unfortunately, Diem neglected to do so. South Vietnam’s attempts at insurrection before 1959 were not viewed as sincere, since the problem was simply that any opposition to Saigon could be easily crushed. Unfortunately, the horse is a different color. The South Vietnamese guerrillas were driven into such a state of resistance that the cadres “represented an almost spiritual problem, one that absorbed the whole being.” The villagers were slaughtered by them every day, and the guerrillas turned to the supporters of the peasants.
Diem and his brother Agroville pushed the program to combat this phenomenon. Villagers were relocated to safe places and grouped into new societies, each complete with new hospitals, schools, and other institutions. The barbed wire and snares of the body of the fool would be the symbols of the clipped government, as the peasants worked to build a new and better society. Diems’ goal was to offer what he considered an expensive alternative to communist rule.
“… This year I propose to organize the most populated areas in the fields, where the conditions are favorable for communication and health and where the minimum facilities exist for the consolidation of isolated and destitute farmers in the desert. These areas will be the seats. not only to improve the life of the rural population, but also the units they will constitute an economy that will play an important role in the future development of the entire country.
The program began with good intentions. The Duc Hue region, near Cambodia, was the first place to undergo a massive transformation process. This region was a strategic barrier between Vietnam and Southern (Buddhist) Cambodia to prevent infiltration, as it would bring great benefits to the people through social reforms. People who were once 500-600 or more meters away, and who did not know the government, had collapsed together in proximity and under government officials who did not know them. However, in the beginning, “thousands of families settled in the countryside. The government provided funds to build hospitals, schools, and the like, and also lent money to families to start farming in a new area.”[5]
Joseph J. Zasloff, a study partner in the development of Agroville 1960-63, indicates that Diem concealed that purpose as a counter-insurgency effort. Zasloff cites provincial leaders as Day deploys tight security against the Viet Congr. Now, Diem was roaming around the villagers to achieve his own goals. The villagers were not named as real priorities, even though their lives were trying to divert the government from the evil purpose of the community. By the end of the day, the villagers were surrounded like animals in quarantine, and so security was considered the number one priority, since social reforms did not provide any significant anti-communists.[7]
In Tan Luoc, for example, the Day of the Shaped Villagers take on the idea of renewal with intensity. To build the new infrastructure, the peasants worked hard. The peasants did not want to pay a day for their work, because they really believed that these reforms were good for the government. For Diem was fulfilling the tradition of oppression on that people. Zasloff mentions that in addition to the French pig, Corvee was forced to work. So say the French, hated for their arrogance and ignorance.
After this failure, Diem Agrovilles decided that it was useful, but a re-evaluation of the assets is required. The lessons he learned as he sought to recover from the program, the next step in this trial-and-error situation, became bitterly resentful of Hamlet’s strategic program, launched in February 1962. The day 3,225 villages were put together, while only 1,500 happened. [9] Why the discrepancy? Either the nobles of the provinces gave false numbers to the government, or perhaps Diem felt the need to make his plan look much stronger than it was.
Strategic Hamlet development saved most of Agroville’s villages while increasing fortifications. Many villagers were once again moved from the Southern Regions because the Viet Cong insurgents were heavily fortified. The country has been left again, the peasants have been transferred far from the graves of their ancestors together in a few concentration camps.[10] At this time, “the government declared its intention to deploy more effectively Army and Civil Guard units to protect strategic villages.[11 ]
This military proposition also clearly helped the Viet Cong propaganda drive that they previously called the villages of Agroville purely military bases.[12] With the plan to add more troops with tighter security and even more insidious traps, what kind of community are these government-hating villagers now forced to live in? The letter of threat to the provincial leader called the common “…big prisons and hells on earth.” The letter accused the government of “causing a bloody slaughter between the brothers…” and further launched an unpaid labor plan.[13]
The farmers were again denied wages for their labor. Curfews, visibly failing development of land crises, movements of the authorities, and “group convening in mass institutions” of villagers to do nothing or subdue and faithfully drink, or join the anti-Die feeling, which is snatched and from every village. with great ease, despite the vicious obstruction of the anti-communists put in place by the government [14]. These factors (the same program that wounded Agroville) helped the villagers to become young guerrilla recruits and provided the guerrillas with more ammo for their rumor mill. The peasants hated the government even more, and the Lantians were able to exhaust this error for everyone.
Influenced by the government, it was a way of life for the villagers of South Vietnam. If Diem had had anything to do with the traditions and culture of the society, he would have wanted to follow it, not just impose it on the proud deserts of South Vietnam. Instead of merely assuming that nationalism would justify free labor, Zasloff argues that “a minimum of food and transportation should be provided to the peasants.” [15] This allowed the VC even more to transfer Diemist’s ignorance to fortification and support. From the beginning the peasants despised every plan and foresaw empty promises;
“A movement of great discord was stirred up in the rural Caisans. Forced from their old homes surrounded by gardens, trees and rice, they left the graves of their ancestors, where they venerated their ancestors. The house was a barren site, without trees for shade against the tropical sun, checkered crisscross canals with square fields, in which there was only unwelcoming, uncultivated, grass and dirt foundations.
The communities of the village therefore marched, lest in any part their common proximity should prevail, [17] to support all opposition to the strategic hamlet and to the government of Diem. This shift from indifference to opposition only occurred when the South Vietnamese government unknowingly trampled the lives of every villager in the South who were repulsed by the new Agroville communities – and then even more so in the Strategic Hamlet program. The presence of government officials and soldiers brought to mind the memory of the French government. The guerrillas knew that this feeling was in the air and successfully exploited the error to the advantage of the rebellion.
The Guerrilla Strategic Program did not need a hamlet to gain the support of a fort. The terror of battle had always been quiet in the successful past. Guerrillas often used the terror of fighting to get what they wanted from the villagers, be it supplies or information, taxes or loyalty. Since these rebels were mostly South Vietnamese villagers, it was not difficult to attract support. They knew the minds of their fellow-villagers, and that the civility of the countrymen was nothing short of worship and worship. On the day the villagers wanted to reform a new society, they also wanted to contribute free and unpaid work. The plan was that the development program had already failed. They were not obliged to confirm themselves under the hot sun with any sincerity when they saw that they embraced “no positive value” [18].
Little did he know the day Corvee was fulfilling a long tradition of villagers. Families were closed and tightly held by foreign hands. Thus, the village of Sentinel needed only a slight push from the Guerilla forces to join the rebel-cause. To rebel against foreign rule was an attractive part of the Vietnamese tradition, since Diem figured as the only foreign enemy of existence before Ho Chi Minh was a communist. Ho was a national hero to many Vietnamese.
The day he did not understand himself, he wanted to rule efficiently. He simplified the lives of thousands by dividing simple possessions between communists and anti-communists. It never occurred to him that the situation of re-location would only bring about enmity towards his government, which was trying to force isolated peasant farmers into a more crowded and oppressive way of life. Furthermore, how could the South Vietnamese government betray a guerrilla who was related?
The new exodus contained both rebellious and unscrupulous villagers, mingling more than ever before. That was certain; the government could at least imagine that among the circumstances of the hundred villagers they saw the enemy, but the police never crushed the rebellion. The Strategic Hamlet program and its predecessor were blundered from the start because of Diem’s ignorance of what was going on under his clumsy bureaucracy. The Viet Cong successfully maintained their anti-government propaganda with the help of Day of Failure.
Bibliography
Andrade, Dale Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War. Lexington, Massachusetts and Toronto: Lexington Books, 1990.
Hamilton, Donald W. The Art of Insurgency: American Military and Strategy Failure in Southeast Asia. Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishers, 1998.
Herrington, Stuart A. Silent Weapon: The Vietnam War on the Streets. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982.
Kutger, Joseph P. “Irregular Race in Transition.” Military matters 24, no. 3 (Autumn, 1960): 113-123.
Lomperis, Timothy J. The War of All – Lost and Won: Americas Intervention in Viet Nam‘ S Twin Competition. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984
Luong, Hy V. Revolution in the Village. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1992.
Questor, George H. “The Guerrilla Problem in Retrospect.” Military matters 39, no. 4 (Dec. 1975): 192-196.
Genus, Jeffrey. The Long War Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1972.
Trullinger, James Walker, Jr. Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam. New York and London: Longman Inc., 1980.
Zasloff, Joseph J. “Rural Migration in South Viet Nam: The Agroville Program.” Pacific Affairs 35, n. 4 (Winter, 1962-1963): 327-340.
[1] Race, Jeffrey. The Long War Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1972. VI. [2] Hamilton, Donald W. The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy and Strategy Failure in Southeast Asia. Connecticut and London, 1998. 130-31. [3]Zasloff, Joseph J. “Rural Migration in South Viet Nam: The Agroville Program.” Pacific Affairs 35, n. 4 (Winter, 1962-1963): 327-340. 327. Dire quote Day, July 7, 1959. [4] Genus, Jeffrey. The Long War Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1972. 53-4Genus, quote 54
[6] Zasloff, 338 [7] Zasloff, 329 [8] Zasloff, 334. [9] Lompers, Timothei J. The War All Lost-and Won: Americas Intervention in Viet Nam The twin struggle. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984. LIX. [10] Trullinger, James Walker, Jr. Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam. New York and London: Longman, Inc., 1980. 73. [11] Zasloff, 340 [12] NAME 173^. [13] Zasloff, 337. VC letter to the leader of Tan Luoc village. [14] Genus 190-1. [15] Zasloff 334-35. [16] Zasloff 336. [17] Hamilton, 138. [18] Genus, 1912