Protesting the corruption of the Thieu regime, several thousand Catholics marched through the northern city of Hue on Sunday, September 8. It was the first Catholic antigovernment demonstration to be held in the former imperial capital. Police attacked the demonstrators with tear gas and clubs, confiscating anticorruption banners and dispersing the march. Hundreds of demonstrators later regrouped in a Catholic church, where a document denouncing Thieu was read.
The document, “Bill of Indictment Number One,” was released in Saigon the following morning at a news conference in the lower house of parliament called by two Buddhist opposition deputies. They said police in Hue had fired 100 tear-gas grenades and clubbed demonstrators.
The September 10 Washington Post reported that the indictment charged Thieu with six specific acts of corruption:
“These include building houses and acquiring land with government money, halting an investigation of a fertilizer company run by his brother-in-law, profiting from the distribution of scarce rice in the northern part of the country and aiding drug smugglers.”
The author of the document was Father Tran Huu Thanh, chairman of the People’s Anticorruption Movement to Save the Country and Restore Peace. The movement came to public attention June 18, when 301 priests released a document denouncing corruption and injustice. Thieu prevented it from being widely reported by the press, but it was circulated to all Catholic parishes.
Another rally was organized in Hue September 15. Five thousand persons gathered in the square outside the city’s main Catholic church to protest government corruption and the action of the police in breaking up the rally the previous Sunday. This time the police stayed away from the meeting.
The movement also spread to Danang. South Vietnam’s second largest city. Tran Huu Thanh spoke to about 200 Catholics there September 17. They sent a letter to Thieu saying he would be reelected next year if he eliminated corruption, but if he did not, “the people would arise and launch a revolution.”
The campaign launched by the Catholics triggered protests from other sectors. Some Saigon newspapers, including a few never before noted for their criticism of the government, began reporting the anticorruption campaign. Thieu reacted quickly.
On September 20, he ordered the confiscation of three dailies that had just printed the full text of Thanh’s six-count indictment. Several hundred demonstrators immediately spilled into the streets. According to the September 21 New York Times, this was the first large-scale antigovernment eruption in Saigon since the signing of the Paris cease-fire agreements twenty months ago.
Defying the police who delivered the confiscation orders, printers and journalists, priests, Buddhist monks, news boys, and onlookers grabbed the papers and tried to distribute them. Rather than have them confiscated, they used them for a bonfire in the street.
Demonstrators marched from the printing shops of the newspapers Dai Dan Toc and Dien Tin to the offices of the third banned paper. Song Than.
“There, on the blocked-off main thoroughfare of Hong Thap Tu,” the New York Times reported, “opposition deputies shouted anti-Thieu slogans without the benefit of bullhorns as they stood under banners demanding ‘Down with newspaper confiscation! ‘“
The campaign against Thieu has also been supported by South Vietnam’s main veterans organization, James M. Markham reported in a September 14 dispatch to the New York Times:
“The Association of Disabled Veterans, which vigorously opposed Mr. Thieu’s one-man presidential race in 1971, declared its ‘strong support’ for ‘the common struggle for freedom of thought, freedom of the press and free democratic rights so that a just and durable peace can soon be restored in this country.’”
The important An Quang Buddhist faction has taken a step toward entering the antigovernment campaign as well. At a ceremony September 14 at the An Quang Pagoda -- a focus of opposition to the Saigon regime in the mid-1960s -- Senator Vu Van Mau announced the formation of an opposition grouping called the National Reconciliation Force (NRF).
The National Reconciliation Force was initially inspired by Catholic church leaders, and Buddhist backing for it had been cautious and slow, the September 20 Far Eastern Economic Review reported. On September 6, however, Thich Tri Thu, head of the Institute for Secular Affairs of the An Quang Buddhist church, threw the weight of the church behind the new organization. He sent letters to all provincial chapters, ordering the clergy and church followers to support the NRF.
The current wave of protests against the Thieu regime includes a broad range of opposition groups. Some leaders of the movement are probably reactionary, wanting a government able to “fight the Communists” more effectively.
In the past, most Catholic leaders have been anti-Communists and fervent supporters of Thieu. In fact, the main leader of the anticorruption movement, Tran Huu Thanh, spent many years teaching psychological warfare to South Vietnamese military officers.
The Far Eastern Economic Review reported that the Catholic leaders have noted the “increasing unwillingness of the US Congress to give aid, and fear that if corruption is not eradicated, aid will further decline. Catholic leaders think that it is in America’s interest to support the new movement and even suggest that they are in fact being watched with interest by the US.”
The September 17 Le Monde reported that a telegram protesting the police repression was sent to the U. S. ambassador by a representative of the Catholic archbishop of Hue. “The opposition,” Le Monde wrote, “thus showed what its real target was: it sees Mr. Thieu as being backed by the United States ambassador, Mr. Martin, who favors strong methods, and Mr. Kissinger, who has never condemned the pressures that his representative in South Vietnam has continually brought to bear on Congress in favor of President Thieu.”
The Provisional Revolutionary Government and North Vietnam have both commented on this aspect of the anti-Thieu campaign. At his weekly news conference September 14 in Saigon, PRG spokesman Colonel Vo Dong Giang spoke about the opposition at length and charged that Washington was getting ready for ‘horsechanging if necessary,” the September 15 New York Times reported.
‘“It is widely known that Mr. Thieu is getting more and more isolated right in his own ranks,’ the colonel said.”
U. S. Ambassador Martin ridiculed any suggestion that Washington might be backing the opposition movement and could be thinking about dropping Thieu. He called it an “excellent example of Communist propaganda.”
Radio Saigon predictably called the opposition campaign “a Communist maneuver to encourage the people to rise up and overthrow the government,” and said the Communists would like “to open a new political front.”
To drive this home, Thieu organized special political lectures for 1.5 million civil servants, soldiers, and members of other specialized groups, the September 18 Washington Post reported.
At the same time, Thieu has attempted to defuse the protests by initiating a “dialogue” between a delegation from the press and Information Minister Hoang Duc Nha, a cousin of Thieu’s in charge of the censorship and, if need be, the confiscation of South Vietnam’s newspapers.
Thieu has also ousted six of his forty-four province chiefs, including the commander of Hue, and has dismissed two generals and fourteen other officers for corruption.
Leaders of the current protests may only be aiming at some concessions. But the actions in favor of democratic rights and the breadth of the opposition to Thieu can have a deeper impact. As one Vietnamese Catholic quoted by the September 10 Christian Science Monitor put it: “If the leftwing priests talk about corruption, Thieu can always say that their criticism is exaggerated. But what does he say when the right-wing priests start talking about it?”
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1235.pdf#page=31&view=FitV,35