Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

As we have seen, French expenditure of $7 billion and about 100,000 lives during an eight-year struggle ended at Geneva in 1954. The Geneva agreements opened the way to a succession of troubles in Laos by recognizing the Leftist Pathet Lao as the government of two provinces, and recommending that it be admitted to a coalition government after a proved cease-fire and free elections. The most vital clause provided that all foreign military forces, except a French training group, be withdrawn from Laos. An International Control Commission representing India, Poland, and Canada was to supervise these provisions.

These agreements settled nothing. The elections of December 1955 brought the premiership to Prince Souvanna Phouma; he was a neutralist and brother of Souphannouvong, a Communist fellow traveler and founder of Pathet Lao. The two brothers brought Pathet Lao into the government, but it did not give up its military bases in the two provinces it dominated. The withdrawal of other military forces greatly increased the potential power of Pathet Lao. When the latter showed increased strength in subsequent elections in May 1958, the anti-Communist group combined in August to oust Souvanna Phouma and put in as premier the pro-Western Phoui Sananikone. This government in turn was ejected and replaced by a Right-wing military junta led by General Phoumi Nosavan in January 1960; but within seven months a new coup, this time from the Left, and led by Kong Le, changed the regime and brought Souvanna Phouma back to office. Four months later, in December 1960, Nosavan once again replaced Phouma by military force. The Communist countries refused to recognize this change, continued to recognize Souvanna Phouma, and increased their supplies to the guerrilla Pathet Lao by Soviet airlift. In March 1961, England and France, acting through the SEATO conference in Bangkok, vetoed any direct American or SEATO intervention in Laos.

At the suggestion of Soviet Russia, the Geneva Conference was reassembled in 1962 and drew up two complicated agreements whose chief consequence was to revive the agreements of 1954 within a more neutralized frame: coalition government, elimination of all foreign military forces, neutrality, and a reactivation of the International Control Commission. The resulting troika coalition of Leftists, Neutrals, and Rightists served to paralyze the country, while the Pathet Lao guerrillas, using Communist North Vietnam as a base, threatened to secure control of the whole country. This effort broke out into open warfare in the Plaine des Jarres in April 1963. The growing success of these attacks over the next few years greatly agitated Washington, where officials generally felt that the fall of Laos, because of its central position, might well lead to a succession of Communist take-overs, in Cambodia, South Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma, leaving India wide open to a Red Chinese intrusion directly across these collaborating areas into the Indian plains. Some substance was lent to this fear from the fact that Red China spent the years 1955-1958 constructing a number of military roads that linked Sinkiang to Tibet, with offshoots southward toward the Malay Peninsula. This fear became intensified in 1962-1964 as a consequence of the Communist take-over in Burma, the American fiascoes in Vietnam, and the direct Chinese attack on India.

The strange thing about Burma was that the increase in Communist power was brought about by the army, which was increasingly dissatisfied by the ineffectual and corrupt government of the democratic U Nu. The latter, who was personally sincere, idealistic, and honest, represented the Burmese desire for peace, democracy, and unity from World War II on. By October 1958, however, his subordinates in the government had paralyzed the government with bickering and corruption. When the ruling Anti-Fascist Party split, U Nu judged it impossible to carry out the approaching elections, and yielded control of the country to a caretaker military government that promised to restore unity, honesty, and adequate administration, and supervise the elections.

By February 1960, the military leaders judged their task to be achieved, and held the new elections. U Nu’s section of the Anti-Fascist Party won a sweeping victory, and he returned to office. The restored premier made valiant efforts to establish national unity, to raise the level of public spirit and cooperation, and to placate the various groups that divided the country, but was no more successful in restraining partisan conflict and corruption in 1960-1962 than he had been in the period before October 1958. Accordingly, in March 1962, another military coup, led by General Ne Win, ousted U Nu, suspended the constitution, and ruled through a junta of seventeen officers. Soon an effort was made to merge all political groups into a single national political party with a socialist program. The Communists were treated with increasing leniency, while leaders of democratic groups continued to languish in prison. Students and other dissident groups were violently suppressed, and civil liberties were generally curtailed. Suddenly, in February 1963, a completely socialist regime was established by the nationalization of most property rights under increasing Communist influence.

Although Burma has sought to hold a neutralist course in foreign affairs, it has been drifting toward the Red Chinese camp. Late in 1960 a protracted frontier dispute between the two nations was ended by an agreement that was generally favorable to Burma, and a few months later, in 1961, the two countries signed an economic agreement that brought Burma a loan of $84 million and technical cooperation from China. Like everything in Burma, this was implemented in a lackadaisical fashion, and the Burmese economic situation has deteriorated steadily since World War II. Part of this has been due to increased difficulty in marketing Burma’s chief exports, rice and lumber, but the chief problem has been the steady increase in population, which has reduced the per capita income by about a third, although national income as a whole has increased about a seventh since independence was won in 1948.

While Burma on the western edge of the Malay Peninsula thus drifted toward Communism, Vietnam on the eastern edge moved in the same direction with violent struggles. The Geneva agreement of 1954 had recognized the Communist government of North Vietnam, dividing the country at the 17th parallel, but this imaginary line across jungle terrain could not keep discontent or Communist guerrillas out of South Vietnam so long as the American-supported southern government carried on its tasks with corruption, favoritism, and arbitrary despotism. These growing characteristics of the Vietnam government centered around the antics of the Diem family. The nominal leader of the family was President Ngo Dinh Diem, although the fanatical spirit of it was his brother’s wife, Madame Nhu. The brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was the actual power in the government, residing in the palace, and heading up a semisecret political organization that controlled all military and civil appointments. Madame Nhu’s father, Tran Van Chuong, who resigned from his post as Vietnam Ambassador to the United States as a protest against the arbitrary nature of the Diem family government, summed up his daughter’s career as “a very sad case of power madness.” The same authority spoke of President Diem as “a devoted Roman Catholic with the mind of a medieval inquisitor.” On the Diem family team were three other brothers, including the Catholic Archbishop of Vietnam, the country’s ambassador in London, and the political boss of central Vietnam, who had his own police force.

The Diem family tyranny came to grief from its inability to keep in touch with reality and to establish some sensible conception of what was important. While the country was in its relentless struggle with the Vietcong Communist guerrillas who lurked in jungle areas, striking without warning at peasant villages that submitted to the established government or did not cooperate with the rebels, the Diem family was engaged in such pointless tasks as crushing Saigon high school agitations by secret police raids or efforts to persecute the overwhelming Buddhist majority and to extend favors to the Roman Catholics who were less than 10 percent of the population.