Vietnam's apartheid policy
Richard West
The strangest thing that I witnessed during a recent trip through the US was a demonstration by Vietnamese political ex- iles outside the Los Angeles City Hall, to mark the eighth anniversary of the fall of Saigon to the communists. Los Angeles Ci- ty Hall was the kind of place where, five or ten years earlier, trendy Americans Would be burning their draft cards and chanting Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh, in protest against the war with the Vietnamese communists. Those of us with a lingering, even morbid fascination with Vietnam, find that country becoming even more sad. Even those of us who did not hope for a communist victory, who preferred the old Saigon regime with all its faults, have been surprised by the nastiness of the communist regune. The people who once were Presented to us by the Left as enemies of the militaristic and 'racist' United States have Proved ever since to be themselves warlike and cruel to those of another race. The Vietnamese have already fought a war apinst communist China and threaten to fight ianother. When I went back to Viet- nam n 1980 I saw the most vicious, hate-
filled poster of Chinese and American politicians. In the central bank of Saigon, a fine glass-domed relic of French imperial days, the walls were decorated with photographs of the bloated or charred bodies of dead Chinese soldiers.
The Vietnamese army has also invaded the two neighbouring countries of In- dochina, deposing the King of Laos and sending once more into exile the great Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. The huge Vietnamese army in Cambodia is fighting a war against the guerrilla troops of Prince Sihanouk and the Cambodian com- munists, apparently using the same atrocious weapons that the United States once used against them, plus the new biological poison known as 'yellow rain'. The example of Vietnam is one more proof of the fact that socialist ideology, far from removing the motive for war, only en- courages war as a means of diverting popular wrath from its proper target, the Communist Party. China and Russia hate each other more than either hates the United States. The savage black despotisms in and around Ethiopia are at each other's throats, armed and encouraged by Soviet Russia. In Eastern Europe, the hatred bet- ween the different Soviet puppet states is worse than it was than under the Habsburgs. I once accompanied a com- munist boss of Hungary to the Romanian border, where he proceeded to unzip his flies and urinate at the opposite frontier post, screaming abuse the while.
Communist Vietnam also illustrates how quickly Marxist socialism takes on the characteristic vice of Hitler's national socialism. The expulsion of the 'boat people',.most of whom were Chinese, was a means of squeezing them out of ther sav- ings in gold; in part a symptom of war hysteria against communist China; in part an attempt to produce a scapegoat for the disgruntlement of the Vietnamese popula- tion. The anti-Chinese malice was blatant. On my first afternoon in communist Viet- nam I was taken down to the Chinatown of Cholon — which under the old regime was the brightest and cleanest part of Saigon — and there shown one of the Chinese temples built by immigrants from Canton. They had come — as they left — by boats, often in great peril. In gratitude for their safe ar- rival, this group of immigrants had put up a wooden carving of a boat over the door of the temple. Our Vietnamese guide pointed this out to us, laughing, while several Chinese on the temple steps shouted back at him. A few days later, at Vung Tau, we met a Norwegian oil engineer who had witnessed the massacre of a boat-load of Chinese men, women and children by the machine guns of the coastguard. Our guides did not seem in the least put out by this revelation of their atrocity.
There were some attempts in the West, including a truly contemptible article in the Guardian, to justify the kicking out of the Chinese because they were merchants and had made their money from prostitution, black marketeering and drugs — exactly the same arguments used for persecuting the Jews in Germany. Of course the Chinese in Vietnam had worked hard. Immigrants to a country do work hard. It also has to be said that the Chinese are unpopular in some of the East Asian countries that have not gone communist; in the Philippines, for exam- ple. But in Thailand, the Chinese have for centuries got on well with the Siamese, and have even married into the royal family. Bangkok is a largely Chinese city. Nor did Saigon in the old days really have much hostility between the Chinese and Viet- namese. I spent much of the last month before it fell to the communists in a back street of ChoIon where people of both races appeared to get on amicably. Nor were the Chinese involved any more than the Viet- namese in drugs, prostitution and black marketeering. In all the time I spent in Viet- nam under the old regime, the only serious grumbles I heard from the Chinese concern- ed what they said were unfair terms of military service.
There is now an even nastier twist to Viet- namese racial arrogance. They are expelling the children of mixed Vietnamese and American blood — some Eurasian, some Afro-Asian. During the frantic weeks before the fall of Saigon, the CIA or some similar agency put out the story that if the communists won they would cut the throats of all half-caste children. This story understandably terrified all the mothers of such children. I spent hours trying to per- suade one woman that communists, whatever their faults, do not persecute children. I wrote to that effect in the papers, also saying, as seemed to me true, that the Vietnamese did not dislike the metis, though sadly they did show hostility to the negroes ('same-same Cambodians', I remember hearing them called).
But on going back to Vietnam, three years ago, I was approached many times in the street by mothers of mixed blood children, imploring me for help in getting them out to America. Several of them said that these children were not allowed into school because of their 'imperialist' parent- hood. Now the Vietnamese are sending these children by hundreds to the United States, apparently with their mothers as well.
Of course this is good news for those expelled. Most people in South Vietnam would like the chance of escape to the United States. Nevertheless I find something rather disgusting about a country that seems to condemn children as worthless mongrels. Even the weirdest South African ideologue of apartheid would not be as cruel as that.
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