twenty years since Tet THE TET OFFENSIVE revolutionary insurrection ban population rising up to combine with the armed forces of the NLF and the North Vietnamese regular forces.
But its nature was widely misunderstood at the time. It was certainly not, as the US government claimed, the culmination of a long external offensive by North Vietnamese forces on the independent state of South Vietnam. No such state existed.
The Geneva conference had been held the month after the smashing defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. While the conference agreed to divide Vietnam into iwo parts along the 17° north latitude, it also provided for the holding of elections two years later for the purpose of reunifying the two Vietnams.
However South Vietnam, supported by the USA, refused to hold the elections, in its concern that the immense popularity of Ho would result in the reunification of the country under his leadership.
The political heritage of the aborted agreement was a vast network of Viet Minh cadres in the south of the country,
liberation forces into the renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
STEVE ROBERTS writes. radical buddhist groupings to form the
However, Tet was not simply a popular uprising against an unrepresentative and unpopular government in the south, as some liberal critics of the US government claimed. to back armed struggle in the south. At the third national congress of the Vietnam Workers Party a number of southern cadres were elected to leading positions, including Le Duan who was elected to the key position of general secretary of the party. Le Duan had been associated with the fight for an armed struggle line in the south since the collapse of the Geneva accord. Under his influence the number of regular North Vietnamese troops in the south in- tunnel'. creased in the 1960s to over 50,000.
However, this must be set against the awesome build up of us military power. In 1961 South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem asked President Kennedy for assistance against the growing offensive against his regime. American aid was at first limited to military equipment, supplies and military advisers (al-
In February 1968 stunned
Americans watched the tv
spectacle of American marines battling with National Liberation Front (NLF) forces in the garden of the US embassy in Saigon. By May, Lyndon Johnson had ordered a partial cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam and sat down to the first serious peace talks. Although another seven long years of war were to follow, the basis had been laid for the triumphant entrance of the years the number of 'advisers' had grown to 17,000).
The first air raids began carly in 1965 under the direction of Lyndon Johnson. By 1968 the tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was eighty times in excess of that dropped on Britain during the seIn 1959 the Hanoi leadership decided cond world war. The build-up of troops proceeded at a similar astronomical rate. By 1968 there were half a million US troops in Vietnam, supported by 50,000 South Korean, Australian and New Zealand troops, plus 600,000 South Vietnamese forces and hundreds of thousands of local levies and militias.
It was this vast military machine that commander-in-chief, the confidence to say that 'the light was at the end of the
particularly inappropriate.
were putting the finishing touches to the vast network of subterranean passages that would take thousands of NLF and North Vietnamese troops to within 200 metres of the outskirts of Saigon and other major cities without
The offensive began on 2 February.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
Artillery barrages began against US military posts, and hand to hand fight-ed into a total rout. ing began in the streets, as NLF troops, aided by hundreds of thousands of their troops and NLF fighters entered Saigon, urban supporters, began the insurrection. The US embassy in Saigon was occupied. By the end of the month over imperialist domination, first by the 70 major towns and cities had fallen to French and then by the Americans, was the NLF, including Hué, the capital of the central region. nion was electric, spurring on, and adding weight to the rapidly growing public course of expansionism aiming to doopposition to the war. Millions of Americans, including hundreds of thousands of students, participated in rallies and demonstrations against the continuation of the war. Burning of draft cards and the raiding of conscription records were becoming widespread.
In March, Johnson ordered an end to the bombing of approximately 90 per colonial imposition on the part of Vietcent of North Vietnamese territory, rejecting Westmoreland's request for 200,000 further combat troops. In May negotiations began in Paris about the possibilities of a peaceful resolution to the war.
Since that time, right wing historians have argued that Johnson made a fatal mistake. ' The Tet offensive was admittedly spectacular, they argue, but in reality it had been a massive failure for the liberation forces.
While it is true that NLF losses were heavy (some 30,000 by conservative estimate) these opinions are contraexample, Nguyen Van Loc, the South Vietnamese prime minister in 1967-68, judges that, 'We lost the battle for the south in 1968... By 1975 the communists only had to push in a few chosen areas to gain total victory'
The prospect of overwhelming military power smashing the communists and leading to a quick victory had been shattered forever. Now the Americans began seriously to negotiate an end to the war, while trying to determine the terms of the settlement through the policy of 'Vietnamisation'. However, the new policy had already been compromised by the huge intervention that had
In January 1973 a cease-fire in the whole of Vietnam came into effect. It provided for the withdrawal of all American troops within 60 days and the holding of new elections in the south. The Paris peace accords were characterised by Saigon as treason, by Washington as an honourable settlement, and by many on the left who should have known better as a sell-out. But within a year the fighting had resumed throughout the whole country. In March 1975, a partial SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 May/June 1988
On April 30, North Vietnamese promptly renaming it Ho Chi Minh City. Thus more than a century of over.
What of developments since? AccordThe effect on American public opi- ing to western writers, the newly unified Vietnam then began set out on a tory. minate neighbouring Laos, Cambodia and perhaps the whole of south-east Asia.
Superficially there seems to be evidence for such a charge. In 1977 a treaty was signed with the Lao peoples republic which has been characterised by many, including some on the left, as a neogime and captured Phnom Penh.
'the effect on American public
opinion was electric'
However, the thinking of the Hanoi leadership points in an opposite direc-
some 'neo-imperialist' grand
After the victories of 1975, the Vietnamese leadership had assumed that there would be a peaceful international context for the development of the country. They also assumed, perhaps naively, that a combination of Watergate, war guilt and international pressure would force heavy reparations from a US government. Under these conditions Vietnam could enjoy a respite from the horrors of war and devote itself to the tasks of internal construction and modernisation. only was the US not prepared to pay damages, it brought pressure on its western allies to block all aid to the bombravaged country. The only way forward for modernisation and industrialisation was a closer alliance with the Soviet
Until that time Hanoi had walked a tightrope, balancing between Peking and Moscow. But China could offer little in terms of the technology and economic aid of its rival. Unable to compete with Moscow on this level, China resorted to military coercion: cutting off aid and Communist Party (VCP) had declared devastation •
retreat of South Vietnamese troops turn- China 'the main enemy" of the Vietnamese revolution.
National security again became the main concern of the Vietnamese and relations with its near neighbours became entwined in big power diplomacy. The vision of a socialist federation of Indochina became tragically transformed into its parody: a war-exhausted country maintaining 200,000 occupying troops in its Kampuchean 'ally's' terri-
Retribution was swift. The month following the overthrow of Pol Pot, the Chinese leadership decided to 'teach Vietnam a lesson' and launched a powerful military thrust 60 miles across the Sino-Vietnamese border.
While the Chinese offensive largely unsuccesful in its objective of inflicting heavy damage on Vietnam, the combination of military pressures on the country has exacerbated the pattern of economic disasters which have afflicted the country since 1975.
In part these disasters have been due to climactic factors, failure of harvests and so on. But more importantly, the bureaucratic deformations which already existed in the North Vietnamese state have become grossly amplified in the wake of the revolutionary victory.
The sixth congress of the VOP meeting at the end of 1986 discussed some of these problems. Politbureau member Vo Chi Chong declared, 'our management is neither centralist in character nor democratic, but a conservatism that consists of prolonging bureaucratic centralism'.
The cure proposed was of the Gorbachev variety. The congress shook up the leadership, retiring the three most central figures: Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho. The press was given greater freedom, not only to go through officially sanctioned 'criti cisms', but to initiate disucssion.
The Soviet Union has urged along the The reality was very different. Not process with less than subtle warnings about the 'waste of aid' granted to Vietnam.
Despite this interlinking of the process of economic reform in the USSR and Vietnam, it would obviously be a mistake to adopt a facile comparison of the two. It is still not clear what economic course Vietnam will adopt to try and overcome its problems.
For our part while clearly recognising these gross bureaucratic deformations of the Vietnamese state, we should also understand the horrendous pressures that transformed the bright new future increasing military pressure on Viet- opened by the Tet offensive into a maelsnam's borders. By 1978, the